Defy Erasure, Defend Resistance, Disrupt Criminalization: The Positive Justice Project Partners Group National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Statement
Debra Fraser-Howze, founder of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS (NBLCA) – now known as Black Health – once stated that the inequitable distribution of resources in public health made it a matter of survival or death for Black people. She said this in 2002 and called the conditions that created this rampant racial discrimination “atrocious.” We do not take it lightly that she chose this term—atrocity—typically reserved for the most extreme of moral breaches: war crimes, mass violence, forced displacement, apartheid, slavery.
On February 7, 2026, the 27th commemoration of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day (NBHAAD), the Trump regime will continue its war of grievance and white supremacy, attempting to erase Black people not only from the HIV justice movement but from the very fabric and history of this nation. This erasure highlights the fundamental truth of our present and past—that Blackness is seen as inherently criminal and disposable.
In 1999, the Strategic Leadership Council, a coalition of community-based organizations including NBLCA and the Black AIDS Institute, founded NBHAAD. It accompanied a grassroots education campaign to call attention to the fact that HIV was a leading cause of death for Black men aged 24 to 44 in the United States. That same year, state-sanctioned racism and violence against Black people living with HIV also soared to new, cruel heights. Nushawn Williams, a Black man living with HIV, was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment after a nationally publicized criminal prosecution seething with anti-Blackness and stigma. Today, he is still in state custody, detained indefinitely in a New York shadow prison largely because of his HIV status and the state’s racist arguments painting him as a monster.
Neglect for Black life and unwillingness to disrupt the underlying conditions that create inequality have been foundational to the HIV response. In the early years of the epidemic, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) inaccurately labeled high-risk groups for AIDS as the “Four H’s”: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians. This characterization, steeped in stigma, homophobia, and racism, made Blackness a racialized disease category. It framed Black people and LGBTQ+ people as inherently high risk rather than condemning the systemic failures and inequalities that made these communities vulnerable to HIV in the first place.
These health inequities continue today as Black people, who make up roughly 14% of the U.S. population, account for nearly 40% of all new HIV diagnoses. In the South, Black people represent more than half of all new HIV diagnoses. One in three Black queer men will likely be diagnosed in their lifetime. This last year, we’ve seen cuts in HIV funding and chaos targeting the general infrastructure of healthcare that will disproportionately impact Black people. Policy and fiscal decisions have dire material consequences. For example, the Florida Department of Health announced cuts to its AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) that will end life-sustaining HIV medication for at least 10,000 Floridians living with HIV. Inflicting harm on this scale is indeed an atrocity and a matter of life and death.
The under-resourcing of our communities’ access to preventive care and treatment opens the door to health status criminalization, housing instability, and illness while degrading our human dignity. It creates social death when Black and brown people are caged and hidden from the public, who regard them as disease vectors and criminals. It induces physical death when swaths of communities die from a manageable chronic condition. This is all part of the thinly-veiled anti-DEI charade, which is above all about erasing Black history, Black resilience, and Black resistance.
HIV-related criminal arrests and prosecutions are not trending downwards in many states, according to reports published by The Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. The attacks on life-saving harm reduction services and the dismantling of our public health system, state by state, program by program, will undoubtedly fuel even more criminalization. How many of our people must be disappeared, ostracized, incarcerated, or killed before it’s too late? This is not a sustainable or justifiable way to engineer social or political life.
The Positive Justice Project (PJP) is the first campaign formed to end HIV criminalization in the nation. As the PJP Partners Group, we will not stand idly while state violence on this scale continues. We demand that everyone in the HIV medical, social justice, and public health sectors, from funders to clinicians, intentionally name and disrupt the anti-Blackness and inequality at the heart of our HIV response. Continued failure to invest in, support, and center Black people living with HIV, in today’s lived political reality, is nothing less than a moral failure. And we do not have space for such failures in the fight for Black life.
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CHLP’s PJP Partners Group brings together advocates and organizations to share updates, resources, and strategies in the work to end HIV criminalization. This national organizing group serves as a platform for trusted and aligned partners to learn from and engage with their peers, and develop strategic advocacy responses to the needs on the ground, guided by members’ past experiences, skills, expertise, and analysis.
