Antiblack racism and the AIDS epidemic : state intimacies / Adam M. Geary.

Challenging the popular perception of HIV as a consequence of the 'perverse intimacies' of sex and drug use, Anti-Black Racism and the AIDS Epidemic: State Intimacies argues that black racial disparities in HIV rates reflect the organization of antiblack structural violence. Geary suggests that racism--more than race, ethnicity, or culture--is the main impetus behind these disparities. The state has structured the ways in which black Americans have been made vulnerable to HIV exposure and infection far beyond the capacity of any individual or community to mitigate or control. From structured impoverishment to racial segregation, and from mass incarceration to the political death meted out to former prisoners, the primary structuring factor that has determined risk of HIV infection has been state intimacy--or the violent intimacy of the racist state.