AIDS and the Racialisation of Health

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By By Marina Mahathir

The first thing you learn when you start work on HIV/AIDS is that “the virus does not discriminate”. The virus does not know what race you are, only that you are a human being whose blood is a welcome home for it to reproduce.

I did not quite absorb this mantra until I went to my first International AIDS conference in 1994 in Yokohama. In session after session, people would stand up and openly declare themselves HIV-positive. And there I saw for myself how the virus truly does not discriminate. There were men, women, gay, straight, black, white, brown, yellow, old, young, developed world, developing world. Everybody it seems is vulnerable.

Back home this non-discrimination didn’t seem to manifest itself in quite the same way. Malays seemed over-represented in the statistics. Was there something about being Malay that made them more vulnerable to HIV? Does this mean that the Chinese, Indians and ‘others’ could rest easy?

When statistics are presented as mere numbers and racial categories, it masks valuable information. Yes, Malays have been infected in greater numbers. And yes it was something to do with being Malay. But it was not about being born Malay so much as what you are prone to do if you are Malay, rather than if you’re not. And sadly, you are more prone to taking drugs and injecting them.

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