HIV is Racist

• In Event: Racial Mattering and Scientific (In)Sensibilities

Abstract

A popular slogan of AIDS social activism has been, “HIV doesn’t discriminate.” And yet, how else do we describe the distribution of disease and suffering in the world? If HIV doesn’t discriminate, then how is one to understand that in the US, nearly 50% of all people living with HIV, who have died from HIV, and are infected with HIV each year are black, or that the black peoples of Sub-Sharahan Africa and the Carribean remain the other epicenters of the global pandemic? It seems like HIV does discriminate, and that it’s an antiblack racist. In this paper, I use this seeming nonsense about a virus with racist motivation as a point of departure for thinking through the racist matrix through which HIV emerges as an object for thought and experience. While dominant, biomedical accounts of disease epidemic repeat racist tropes of risky behaviors and cultures to explain disease distribution, social epidemiology and other materialist health sciences argue for shifting attention to conditions of vulnerability and the social relations that structure those conditions. In this latter model, antiblack racism emerges as the ideological and institutional matrix through which black peoples come to bear the burden of illness and death. Where does this leave the concept of a virus, HIV? Bringing together Karen Barad’s injunction to attend to “things-in-phenomena” with psychoanalytical accounts of an object, I suggest that HIV is a materialization of antiblackness. While AIDS discourses are racist, so is HIV.

Author

• Adam M Geary, University of Arizona