AIDS/HIV Denial
Sooooo, next up on the skepdocket is AIDS/HIV Denialism, or, more popular, HIV/AIDS denial, or HAD. And that means we get to call the deniers HADers! Yay for fun with acronyms!
HAD can take a number of forms, like denying that AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) even exists, that HIV (the Human Immunodeficiency Virus) exists, denying that HIV causes AIDS, that HIV tests are reliable, and that antiretroviral medicines help AIDS patients. Really, this shit is all over the place.
First, AIDS doesn’t exist, wtf? For this bit of whackadoodle, the claim is that AIDS isn’t a disease or a syndrome, but a catch-all for a bunch of similar looking conditions. They say that what we call AIDS is just the result of malnutrition and recreational drug use taking its toll on the body, or even that it’s caused by the medicines used to treat AIDS. How would the antiretroviral drugs used to treat AIDS cause AIDS before the patient was taking the medicine? Don’t ask! We’re in denial territory, where reality isn’t real but money aplenty to be made!
So, yeah, AIDS does exist. It was first documented in the early 1980s when outbreaks of certain very rare conditions started cropping up. These diseases were only associated with severely compromised immune systems and these patients were adults without a history of immune disorders. The CDC organized a task force to investigate these outbreaks. At first the illness was referred to by several different names related to, for example, the various rare illnesses that occurred in the victims, or the common characteristics of the victims.
The press, of course, came up with an incredibly helpful method for referring to the disease that made things better for everyone and didn’t cause any problems at all: GRID, the Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.
And there we have one of the big reasons why HAD has been so popular for so long. People have come a long way in the last thirty years. In 1981, when they were still calling it GRID, gay folks weren’t simply fighting for their lives; gay marriage wasn’t even a distant dream. You could lose your job for being gay, your landlord could evict you, your family could (and probably would) disown you, you’d face hostility and discrimination in public, you’d very likely face violence in public, and when you did you wouldn’t dare call the police because they might well decide to go ahead and finish the job of beating the gay out of you.
So AIDS was associated strongly with the gay community from the very first, and the public for a long time assumed that having AIDS meant you were gay and that being gay meant you would get AIDS. And, of course, the fundagelicals leapt all over it, claiming AIDS was god’s punishment on the homosexuals.
To their credit, the CDC quickly realized that AIDS is not intrinsically related to being gay, and had coined the term AIDS by the summer of 1982, a year after the syndrome was discovered. The revelation that the epidemic wasn’t confined to the gay community didn’t calm people’s fears, obviously. It helped turn things into a different kind of panic, and birthed a lot of conspiracy theories, fear, and hatred directed at the gay community. As recently as 2013, televangelist and human skin factory Pat Robertson was claiming that gay people were using sharpened rings to cut people during handshakes so as to spread AIDS.
In 1982, that sort of thinking was everywhere, especially since the disease was spreading without apparent cause and popping up in major cities without showing up in intervening locations. Perhaps you’ve heard of “Patient Zero”? That actually comes from the epidemiological tracking as they tried to understand the disease, how it spread and developed, and how they could treat it. They asked for, and got, a surprising amount of information from infected gay men about their previous sexual partners. The coding for this information would identify partners by where they were from, and a person from out of town would be marked with an “O”.
And there was one particular out of towner… he was a flight attendant for an airline with a knack for picking men up in the cities he flew in and out of. And that’s one of the ways the disease spread so quickly, and why it showed up in major airport hubs first.
The Reagan White House didn’t help any of what was going on, not with treating the disease, nor quelling the public’s fears about this unknown plague, nor with the hatred being aimed at gay people. The White House Press Secretary spent a lot of time cracking jokes with the press corp at the gay community’s expense. It’s rather horrific.
Anyway, we now know that AIDS is caused by the HIV, and that HIV is a mutated form of a related virus, SIV, the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus. I ask you to imagine how much fun it was for the black community when it was discovered that a sexually transmitted disease had its origin in African chimpanzees. As one who was alive and marginally aware when that little tidbit was discovered, yes, people were incredibly racist about it. Just so you know, it comes from the habit of some poverty-stricken people of killing and eating chimpanzees, aka “bushmeat”.
At any rate, the disease spread out of Africa thanks to the Congo achieving independence in 1960. When Belgium left, they didn’t leave any experienced administrators behind and the international community reached out for help. A large number of Haitians answered the call and it appears some caught the disease at that time, taking it back to Haiti with them. This explains one of the CDC’s early attempted names for AIDS, the 4H disease: for Heroin users, Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, and Haitians, the four most common victims of the disease. We now know that the disease is transmitted by exchange of bodily fluids, such as during sex or blood transfusion.
The significant number of Haitians who helped the Congo transition to independence brought the illness back to Haiti with them in the mid 1960s. It then appears to have been transferred to the mainland US in the late 60s or early 70s, when it established a foothold. It of course takes time for the disease to progress to the point where the immune system has become so weak that other, opportunistic diseases can infect the patient, hence why AIDS didn’t start appearing until 1981.
So we’ve already got a lot of homophobia and a healthy current of racism, can we get any other bigotries in there? Of course we can! Anti Semitism! Plenty of conspiracy theories running around out there about the origins of AIDS being a Jewish plot to something something white people something something black people something something gay people.
But despite the various conspiracy theories and despite the wide variety of nonsense the denialists throw out there, the overwhelming majority of HAD came from homophobia, at least for a long time. HAD appears to have declined somewhat, becoming a weird culty thing powered not only by homophobia and a soupçon of racism, but also with a healthy fear of any large group of experts, like doctors and pharmacists and other… well, let’s be honest, that’s where some anti-semitism comes into the equation. Conspiracy theorists love to hate on the Jews.
But there’s a weird little strain of HAD that you might not see coming. It’s chiropractors. Now, I’ll be ranting in detail about chiropractic once we get to the Cs, but let’s leave it for now that the core of chiropractic is the belief that all illness, all illness, is caused by so-called subluxations, or malformations of the spinal column. These subluxations prevent God’s Energy from up in Heaven being transmitted to all your organs by the spinal column (Heaven’s above us, right? And the energy comes in through your head and goes to your body via the spine, because logic).
To be fair, some chiropractors mix the core chiropractic bullshit with other forms of complete bullshit, and some even try to practice something approaching medicine. However, the fact remains that chiropractic is built on a foundation of manure, and that it includes the belief that the Germ Theory of Disease is wrong, and that all doctors are either ignorant quacks or paid shills.
Your life has to be pretty goddamn sad if you’re on the same side as neonazis, the KKK, and Pat Robertson and you look like the weird one because “No no no, it’s not about the Jews, it’s just that your spine is kinda bendy so God’s Magic Energy is having trouble getting to your pancreas!”
I want to go ahead and throw a lot of shade at religion here, too. One highly effective method for preventing the spread of HIV is wearing condoms, and a large number of very well funded and very politically active churches are against condoms because baby Jesus is allergic to latex or some shit. The Catholic Church naturally bears a huge chunk of blame, because they’ve always been against any kind of birth control or family planning, thus making them just a little bit genocidal because people are dying by the millions from this shit in countries where the Catholic Church has massive influence.
However, the Proddies aren’t getting off scot-free. Being in favor of birth control and abortion used to be a protestant thing, a way of distinguishing yourself from the hated Kathalicks, but that changed with the birth of the so-called Moral Majority. In response to blacks and gays and Jews suddenly becoming “people”, the fundagelicals decided to freak the fuck out and launch a moral crusade. They wanted to get the Catholics on their side, so they adopted birth control and abortion as pet issues. Little did they know that those would rapidly consume most of their energy… and not get the Catholics on their side.
Still, they’re highly energized and well funded, and they like to evangelize and try to get laws passed. We’ve been seeing the fruits of their efforts here in the US, of course, but they also do this shit overseas. Uganda, for example, has passed a number of evangelical-backed anti-gay laws. The fundagelicals are pushing as hard as the Catholics to make birth control and abortion illegal wherever they can, and their disproportionate influence in the US government increases their power, because they then wield the twin cudgels of foreign aid and military intervention to push foreign governments in the direction they want.
Have I mentioned lately how much I hate religion? Because I really hate religion.
In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, the HIV infection rate stands at roughly 8.8 percent of the population, and that rate is increasing. Tens of millions of people are dying of an illness that does not need to spread.
That’s not strictly a consequence of HIV/AIDS Denialism, but HADers have good friends in the church and the Thuglican party. Hell, some of them are prominent members of both. And the fact that HAD is wrapped up in homophobia and racism just lets it get more deeply embedded, running under the surface.
The Three Pillars
The three pillars of white supremacy, as outlined by Andrea Smith, are slavery/capitalism (the interaction of white supremacy with Africa), genocide/colonialism (white supremacy in the Americas), and orientalism/war (white supremacy in Asia).
Before we continue, some controversy. Andrea Smith is, as best I can tell, fairly well respected as an activist for women generally and women of color in particular as well as an academic working on related topics. Unfortunately, she has maintained that she is Cherokee since at least 1991 (and said that her identification as such was part of the reason she was denied tenure at the University of Michigan in 2008). However, she has no connection with any tribe and a tribal genealogist has said that she hired him twice and he found no evidence of Cherokee ancestry either time.
Many Cherokee scholars and activists have criticized or condemned her for this, saying her actions hurt the Cherokee people and Native Americans more broadly. Her response has been to continue to claim Cherokee ancestry and identity, rejecting the need to be officially affiliated with a tribe.
So, yeah, on that front, Andrea Smith is a douche. On a side note, this offers the chance to reflect on Elizabeth Warren’s related claims and position. As I understand it, Warren once identified as a Native American on a form in law school, thanks to a long-standing family belief that one of her ancestors was Cherokee. That appears to be the only way in which her story is similar to Smith’s, because she never otherwise claimed Cherokee heritage, never identified as Cherokee, and never used it to advance her career. Instead, Harvard claimed it on her behalf to defend itself against accusations that it didn’t have professors of color.
When she went on to enter politics, Warren continued to not claim Cherokee ancestry, heritage, or identity. She didn’t run on it, didn’t include it in campaign materials or ads. It wasn’t until Trump started talking politics that, once again, other people dug it up to use it for their own purposes. She has continued to maintain, and a DNA test appears to support her, that she has native ancestry, but has never claimed tribal affiliation or identity.
Anyway, Smith’s three pillars. Smith edited an anthology published in 2006, “The Color of Violence: The INCITE! Anthology”. One of the articles was her own work, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing”. It’s a six page article that, implicitly and explicitly, criticizes the “oppression olympics” thinking that crops in activism and organizing. The article doesn’t mention intersectionality, but looking over it, seems to respond to and criticize it. I also see a lot of bell hooks in the article, though I confess I’ve not read hooks. In short, what I see here is like that surprisingly old criticism: there is much here that is good and original; however, what is original isn’t good and what is good isn’t original. (that criticism dates back at least to 1781!) So let’s look at what Smith says here (remember, it’s only a six page article, link in the thingy, so you can easily go read it yourself).
After her introduction criticizing “oppression olympics” for stymying organizing, Smith says that white supremacy rests on three pillars, three logics, three methods of interacting with non-white populations.
- slavery/capitalism
- genocide/colonialism
- orientalism/war
She then follows that with a discussion of the implications for organizing, talk about heteropatriarchy and US Empire, and her conclusion.
To start, I don’t disagree with her three categories. When Europeans exploded onto the rest of the world, they encountered different regions, with different human populations, with different cultures and technologies, and European actions against to those populations differed accordingly. However, and this critique may be unfair, their actions weren’t so easily disentangled as she seems to posit.
This critique may be unfair because this is a very brief article by Smith, not a full academic treatment. Capitalism can’t be easily linked only to slavery, genocide wasn’t limited to the Americas, Orientalism didn’t only manifest in war, and she seems to ignore Australia entirely.
White supremacy and, yes, heteropatriarchy, manifested themselves differently on the different continents not because they embodied different logics, but because the same logic (us = good, you = bad) was responding to different situations. White Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchal Imperialism (WhiSCHI) operated via near absolute genocide in the Americas and not in Asia nor Africa not because Europeans didn’t want to enslave and profit from Native American bodies, but because European diseases repeatedly decimated native populations, beginning and enabling that genocide. By contrast, African and Asian populations had resistances to those same diseases and Europeans simply couldn’t commit those genocides.
Likewise, WhiSCHI manifested differently in Asia than it did in Africa. Africa presented an entirely different landscape of diseases and crops that Europeans had difficulty penetrating, Asia had cultures, traditions and civilizations that Europeans recognized and respected. In Africa, Europeans kidnapped individuals into slavery because they had so much difficulty controlling the landscape and surviving the climate. In Asia, they dominated politically through warfare because the path of Asian civilization had led to hierarchies that could be exploited in that fashion, which path African civilizations hadn’t taken.
In all three cases, European imperialists transformed the native population into an exotic other to be dominated, exploited, and killed as necessary. They were to be brought into the existing hierarchy as less than Europeans, which led to the invention both of whiteness and the other races/racisms that WhiSCHI exploited. Capitalism encouraged this through profit motive, racism through emotional means. Genocide, war, and slavery were all tools through which the logic of WhiSCHI operated.
European invaders didn’t develop a different perspective on Native Americans completely independent from their attitudes toward Asians. Instead, they held a single viewpoint, that they and their civilization were the peak of all humanity, and that others were lesser beings there to be used. Africans and Native Americans thus became “unintelligent savages” who were “incapable of civilization”; Africans were distinguished from Native Americans as “violent brutes” to justify holding them violently in bondage, as a way to control them. By contrast, Native Americans were denigrated as being unforgivably weak so as to justify not holding them in bondage, and instead merely driving them to extinction and taking their land.
Asian civilization couldn’t be ignored, so it had to be worked around, and the result was that WhiSCHI developed orientalism, a confusing morass of conflicting beliefs that at once praise Asian people for the unignorable facts of their long history, their historical developments, their art, culture, and science, their basic humanity while at the same time rendering them inferior, barbarian, effeminate, weak, and deserving of European domination.
Australian natives were treated in their own way, another combination of the attacks on other peoples. They were enslaved and subjected to genocide. They were kidnapped, owned, murdered, raped, “re-educated”, had their lands stolen… Their experience was different from all the others, but built on the same foundation. Perhaps the fact that their situation contains elements of both African and American colonization, preventing them from fitting neatly into her three pillars, is why Smith excluded them from her analysis. Or perhaps, like many people, she just forgot them.
In any event, no, it’s not different logics, different pillars. It’s one logic; the fascist logic of hierarchy, of believing that some people are possessed of some “essence” that renders them superior, and that this applies not only to individuals, but to whole populations and “races”. So long as they were confined to Europe, European fascist hierarchism confined itself to identifying different European populations as superior or inferior, different European individuals. When, through historical accident, Europeans burst out and began attacking the rest of the world, that same fascist hierarchical thinking was applied, repeatedly and in different directions, to the rest of the world.
And I want to stress that that fascist hierarchical thinking is not and has never been limited to Europe. That form of thinking has always been part of humanity. Wherever humans had the good luck to discover writing and wherever we have the good luck for that writing to survive to the present, we discover the same variations in human thought. All humans and all human populations have fascist tendencies, with some feeling more strongly than others the emotions that drive toward fascism.
Had historical and geographical accident driving things differently, a Chinese global empire would have exercised the same logic, intersectional thinking would instead be operating to undermine Han Supremacist Capitalist Heteropatriarchal Imperialism. Perhaps the Queen of Sheba would have implemented a heteromatriarchy.
Like I said, I’m seeing a lot in this article that owes a great deal to intersectional thinking and perhaps bell hooks. I’m not excessively impressed by Smith’s analysis, and I have to roll my eyes at her apparently complete lack of self-awareness in writing about white people appropriating native identity during the section on genocide and native erasure. She builds on marxist critique, on intersectional critique, on the work of actual women of color, but doesn’t appear to add anything new.
On the other hand, maybe my perspective is too limited, too distant, too ill-informed. I could easily be biased in that I’m an outsider who really only knows about the best, strongest, most useful portions of critical race theory, of intersectionality that are filtering out to the broader population. Smith’s article is more than a decade old, and I have the advantage of not being down in the weeds with the real intellectuals. I could easily be treating Smith unfairly.
Anywho, links in the thingy; lemme know what you think about Smith and about my reading of her work.
Links
- HIV/AIDS Denialism at the Skeptic's Online Dictionary
- HIV/AIDS Denialism at Wikipedia
- Andrea Smith's article, Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing
- bell hooks at Wikipedia
- What is Orientalism and How is it also Racism? at Jenn Fang's Reappropriate blog.
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