Mass Incarceration and the Black AIDS Epidemic

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I situated the US AIDS epidemic within the social conditions of the black urban ghetto. The populations produced as vulnerable to mass HIV transmission were those captured within the forms of social exclusion, abandonment, and violence marked by the policed boundaries of the ghetto—paradigmatically blacks, but also Latinos—along with those located adjacent to it, especially the newly emergent gay male communities. I argued that the black ghettos of the United States have functioned as the conditions of emergence for the nation’s AIDS epidemic, as well as for its historical dispersion. What distinguishes a materialist analysis of epidemic from other social analyses, however, is the analytical priority of relations over conditions. The social analysis of epidemic, in fields like social epidemiology, ground disease and epidemic in social conditions like poverty or other forms of environmental assault. Social epidemiologists of the AIDS epidemic like Stillwaggon, for instance, assert that AIDS is a disease of poverty, grounded especially in the biosocial conditions of impoverishment, including but not limited to compromised immune functioning before exposure to HIV. But as argued by Marxist, public-health social scientist Evan Stark:

At best, the association of epidemics with poverty is static. At worst, it is misleading. In capitalist societies, where poverty is constructed to preserve the private appropriation of labor’s social surplus, the condition of the poor, including their health, is a dynamic product of their relation to wealth, not a function of poverty itself. ¹