Baltimore Business Journal honors Loyola faculty member with Leaders in Diversity Award
Karsonya “Kaye” Wise Whitehead, Ph.D., professor of communication and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland, has been named a recipient of the Baltimore Business Journal’s 2021 Leaders in Diversity Award. Whitehead is also founding executive director of the Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice.
The Leaders in Diversity Awards and special publication celebrate nominated executives, entrepreneurs, administrators, and other local leaders who have championed diversity, equity, and inclusion in their workplace or around the region.
Awardees will be honored at a virtual awards event on Thursday, June 10, and profiled in a Baltimore Business Journal print edition on Friday, June 11.
“It is an honor and a privilege to have been selected for this prestigious award for my work to amplify Baltimore’s community voices through my research and scholarship, radio show, and the Karson Institute for Race, Peace & Social Justice,” said Whitehead. “Within each of these spaces, particularly within the Institute, my goal is to provide a space to explore and examine America’s most urgent questions on inequality, injustice, and racial inequity. These are the issues that we must focus on if we want to move forward as a nation and collectively dismantle the systems of oppression that are negatively impacting the lives and experiences of people of color in this country.”
Whitehead is a sought-after expert and scholar on the ways race, class, and gender coalesce in American classrooms, as well as in political and social environments. As the founding director of the Karson Institute, she leads COMloquium Series, monthly one-on-one conversations with a selected guest to discuss relevant and timely issues around racial, social, and healing justice. Recent guests have included Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; Leonard Pitts, Jr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist and the author of The Last Thing You Surrender; and Jamelle Bouie, New York Times columnist and CBS News political analyst, on American politics.
She is the host of the award-winning radio show, Today with Dr. Kaye on WEAA 88.9 FM, author of the bi-monthly column, “Dispatches from Baltimore” for the Afro newspaper, and the author of five books, including I Speak for the Unforgotten: Dispatches from Baltimore, which will be published in summer 2021.
“This is a great honor for Kaye and well deserved,” said Stephen Fowl, Ph.D., dean of Loyola College of Arts and Sciences. “Kaye’s leadership of the Karson Institute is having a significant impact well beyond the boundaries of Loyola. This award is just one of many indicators of that.”
For more information and a full list of the 2021 recipients, visit the BBJ website.