This week's reading by Chavez brought to light some things about AIDS activism that I was not aware of. I had no idea that Haitians were considered on of the high risk groups of contracting AIDS on the "4-H Club", as it seems odd to place an entire country at a higher risk of contracting the disease (Chavez, 2). This piece did a good job at explaining the discrepancy in AIDS activism, specifically with the ACT UP organization. The author states that the reality of the organization was that it was mainly focused on white gay men, and working with government policy and medicine (4). Chavez really tries to explain that whether purposeful or not, this particular activist organization had a model that seemingly excluded a part of the community that was labeled as high risk for AIDS.
I remember reading about the unfair of Haitian immigrants by the US border patrol this summer. Border agents engaged in vastly unjust uses of force, and inappropriate language with the migrants as they attempted to enter safely into the country (Berg, 2022). Agents were accused of using whips and horses to corral the immigrants back across the Rio Grande, and although the use of whips was found not to be true, there was still an egregious use of force to intimidate and move the immigrants back into Mexico. I think that reading this about the treatment of Haitian people, and how unfair it was, doesn't surprise me unfortunately. It seems like there is a stronger bias from people or the government against immigrants from Haiti, I'm not sure if this stems from the government's actions in the 90s, or if it is because of some thinly veiled racist reason. This reading kind of opened my eyes to a bias that I did not know there was.
Chavez, Karma R. “ACT UP, Haitian Migrants, and Alternative Memories of HIV/AIDS.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 98, no. 1, 2012, pp. 63–68, https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2011.638659.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/08/patrol-agents-on-horseback-did-not-whip-migrants-but-used-forced-and-inappropriate-language-investigators-say-00044763
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