Jason Chernesky, "Jeopardized Lives: Urban Environmental Inequalities and the Root Causes of HIV/AIDS among American Families, 1950-1980"
Abstract: The HIV/AIDS pandemic disproportionately impacted children and families of color in the United States. The majority of pediatric AIDS cases in the U.S. were relegated to specific cities and/or areas of cities that experiences significant environmental change after the Second World War. These changes resulted from so-called urban renewal policies, racialized segregation, the general neglect of certain urban environments, and the loss of well-paid jobs. This imposed landscape of deprivation disproportionately impacted American families living in a number of cities, including the urban region that is the focus of this paper: the greater Newark-New-York_City area. The unintended consequences of these changes resulted in the emergence of an urban ecology where HIV could find a niche in the 1970s. Drawing on published public health studies, census data, social science research about intravenous drug use, scientific studies about the disease ecology of HIV/AIDS, and archival sources, this paper reveals and interrogates how some families in the United States were made more vulnerable to the AIDS pandemic's emergence and spread during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Here, the types of structural and economic inequalities that disproportionately placed some Americans at higher risk of exposure to harmful toxic waste or industrial effluence, also created the unequal exposure to HIV/AIDS. We will see, therefore, how HIV/AIDS became an environmental hazard for some families of color and not others.