This World AIDS Day, the African American Policy Forum, together with the Williams Institute at UCLA will bring leading thinkers and advocates from the HIV/AIDS community—both within the United States and beyond—to discuss the perilous intersection of criminalization and HIV. AAPF’s Senior Research Fellow Kevin Minofu will moderate the conversation;  he will be joined by Nathan Cisneros from the Williams Institute at UCLA, Senator Dallas Harris from Nevada, Eric Paulk from Georgia Equality, Diana Oliva from Gilead, Sibusisiwe Ndlela from Section 27 South Africa, Toni Newman from the Black AIDS Institute, and Michaela Clayton from the AIDS & Rights Alliance for Southern Africa.

As we reflect on 40 years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, in a world now struggling with a new pandemic and public health crisis fueled by racial and social disparities, this installment of Under the Blacklight will highlight both the urgent political imperatives and lay out organizing strategies to help to at last bring about a world where we treat HIV as a public health issue and not a crime.

Registration and more information here.

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Since it first emerged in the early 1980s, the HIV-AIDS pandemic has claimed an estimated death toll of more than 40 million. Advances in treatment have meant that a positive HIV diagnosis no longer automatically translates into a death sentence, but thanks to disparities in health care access around the globe, AIDS has claimed another estimated 680,000 lives, with nearly 20,000 HIV/AIDS related deaths in the United States alone. Transmission rates likewise remain high, with 1.5 million people contracting HIV virus last year.

Alongside this medical crisis is a sociopolitical one: World leaders have reached for draconian forms of carceral and criminal enforcement in a misguided effort to stigmatize and lock up people living with HIV. As is the general pattern with incarcerations fed by moral panics, these HIV crackdowns disproportionately harm Black, brown, LGBT and sex worker communities. And on their own terms, these efforts have been shown again and again to be policy failures, stigmatizing individual behavior and fueling secrecy— i.e., the very conditions that permitted the HIV/AIDS pandemic to take broad hold in the first place.