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Contact: Charles Stephens, charlesfstephens [AT] gmail [DOT] com, 404-955-5536

HIV has never just been merely a question about race, no more than the oppression of black people is solely a matter of race. We cannot being to unpack and ultimately unravel the dizzying epidemic of HIV among black people until we also and simultaneously address issues of gender, class, and sexual identity, and how they all intersect with racism. Most critically, HIV in the black community is and always has been not only a matter of science, and a matter of public health, but also a matter of justice.

Nowhere is this more evident in the alarming increase of HIV among young black gay men, a group marginalized not only because of systematic racial discrimination, but also heterosexism and other issues.  Yes, black people are disproportionately impacted by HIV, but there has to be a consideration of how other oppressions collide with racism in the lives of black people to create different forms of vulnerability, and different degrees of vulnerability, with an already very vulnerable group.

Considering this: how we are to think about HIV in the black community? How can we remain vigilant in confronting an epidemic that is unambiguously but not monolithically black? How can we understand the racial specificity of HIV, while not pathologizing black communities? There are perhaps a few directions we can consider, to not so much as solve the crisis of HIV in black communities, but provide potential tools to get at better questions which will lead to better answers, and ultimately better approaches:

(1) Intersectionality: Neither black people nor the black community are a monolith. We have to understand not only how HIV operates in the black community, but in different black communities. How does HIV operate in black gay communities, working and middle class black communities, religious and secular black communities, communities of black men engaged in a particular form of masculinity opposed to black men engaged in another form of masculinity, in and across communities of transgender and gender queer black people, and in communities of different national origin, ethnic identity and/or immigration status? This also has to operate the level of policy. It is not enough to think about policy from a narrow identity-politics framework. Rather, we must understand how HIV policy impacts different communities of black people differently.

(2) Resilience: Statistics, and not very good ones, are so frequently used to talk about black people to represent not only the issues of black community, but the realities of black lives. They are so pervasive and so often coupled with the word “black,” that statistics themselves become less a matter of science and more a matter of empty symbolism. We must search not only for the problems, but also the protective factors. What is working? How can we identify and harness our most valuable community assets?  This is not to ignore or dilute the challenges black communities experience everyday; rather it is to identify the assets and strengths of our communities, and replicate them.

(3) Justice: Our HIV prevention efforts, have to be framed as a matter of social justice. One can not consider the individuals and communities most impacted by HIV, without any thought or consideration for how far too often, those same communities are vulnerable to a litany of other challenges. Economic distress, poor health outcomes, housing, substance and mental health disparities are not a collection of autonomous coincidences, they are a part of a larger picture of injustice. For example: if black people are disproportionately impacted by the criminal justice system, and disproportionately impacted by HIV, how can HIV criminalization be anything other than a form of sexual-racial profiling?

This Black AIDS Day we are insisting upon a Black AIDS Justice paradigm that considers both the similarities and diversity in black communities. We are also insisting upon the centrality of resilience in how we think about black communities and an unyielding and unwavering commitment to social justice politics and practice.

The HIV Prevention Justice Alliance (HIV PJA) is a coalition of more than 80 organizations and a network of 13,000 individuals working at the intersection of HIV/AIDS, human rights, and struggles for social, racial, gender, and economic justice. Since 2007, our network of thousands of activists, researchers, service providers, and change- makers is mobilizing in the fight for human rights and HIV prevention justice.

In 2012, the HIV PJA will work strategically and decisively toward transforming HIV prevention in the United States to address current needs and take advantage of emerging opportunities, recognizing the importance of a range of HIV prevention efforts from specific individual interventions to widespread structural changes.
 

You helped us develop this important and ambitious agenda... Now join us to ensure its success!

Download the Action Agenda: bit.ly/ActionAgenda
Join our Working Groups: http://bit.ly/HIV_PJA_WG

An introduction to our Action Agenda, and our thanks:

As you know, the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance (HIV PJA) is a network of organizations and individuals advocating for effective and just HIV prevention policies for the United States.

We grew out of the successful 2007 Prevention Justice Mobilization coordinated by the Community HIV/AIDS Mobilization Project (CHAMP), which united hundreds of groups across the country at the intersection of HIV/AIDS, human rights, and struggles for social, racial and economic justice.

During our first year in our new organizational home at AIDS Foundation of Chicago (due to CHAMP’s closure at the end of 2010), we grew beyond our primary role as a national HIV prevention communication network of over 13,000 people, toward becoming more of a people-centered movement to bring social justice to the forefront of the fight against HIV/AIDS in the United States.

We remain a lean operation as far as our budget, with only two part-time staff people, guided by a 16-member national steering committee that is majority people living with HIV and people of color. 

As with all our efforts, we created this Action Agenda though a multi-step and open process.

We invited  network members to contribute through online surveys, at in-person meetings and strategy sessions, through one-on-one conversations, on our webinars, and in different stages of the drafting of the document.

One of the strengths of our network is its diversity. You are an interesting and opinionated bunch, from all walks of life and in all areas of the struggle against HIV/AIDS in the United States. We know that not everyone in our network will agree with everything in this agenda. However, we hope that you will find something in here that reflects your experiences, beliefs and passions, even if all of it does not completely resonate with your priorities or work.

Most importantly, we hope that within the range of working groups, campaigns, strategies and ways to engage, you will find yourself taking the next steps to deepen your involvement as an HIV prevention justice activist in 2012 and beyond. This agenda is just the beginning – the real work is ahead of us as we move into action.

We thank all of you who took the time to contribute to this agenda, by talking with us on the phone or in person; in your online survey entries; participation in our conference calls, meetings and webinars; and/or your comments on our written drafts.

Thank you to our allies for your work and campaigns, many of which we look forward to supporting as part of this agenda in the coming year. 

And finally, a special thank you to AIDS Foundation of Chicago interns: Emily Hanak, Emily 2.0 Jastromb,  Kelly Nowicki and Rachel Farris for all their help this year on the HIV PJA and this Action Agenda.  

Yours in the Struggle:

The Staff and Steering Committee of the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance:

Dee Borrego, Gina Brown, BJ Cavnor, Hadiyah Charles, Julie Davids, Daxon Dixon Diallo, Che Gossett, Keith Green, Venton Jones, Kiesha McCurtis, Jim Merrell, Mark Peterson, Anistla Rugama, Waheedah Shabazz-El, Charles Stephens, Laura Thomas, Monique Tula and Robin T. Webb

Download the Action Agenda: bit.ly/ActionAgenda

Join our Working Groups:http://bit.ly/HIV_PJA_WG

and stay tuned: We will post  full-length versions of each area of our agenda to the website next week, in preparation for our upcoming Working Group planning calls

The Fighting Injustice to Reach Equality (FIRE) initiative of Center for American Progress recently released a report, Jumping Beyond the Broom: Why Black Gay and Trans Americans Need More Then Marriage Equality,  highlighting the social, economic and health disparities of black queer and transgender people as compared to the general American population, as well as both the white queer population and the heterosexual blaShareThis