War, Crime, and HIV

War, Crime, and HIV: An Accounting on AIDS and Racism in the United States

Presented by the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society

In 2013, Michael Johnson was arrested in St. Charles, Missouri on charges he had knowingly infected or exposed multiple men to HIV. Less than a year later, Michael Brown was killed nearby in Ferguson, Missouri—a community also facing a crisis of HIV. For five years, Steven W. Thrasher, PhD, wrote about these two Missouri Michaels for BuzzFeed News and the Guardian. Considered together, both cases illuminate not just how the policing of Black bodies occurs in the St. Louis region, but how anti-Blackness and AIDS exist broadly in the United States. In American media and society, AIDS is often managed not as a public health matter, but through modes of war and policing which treat the illness as a threat to an imagined national body which is white and HIV-negative.