ONLINE: Make HIV History: Black History Month; A National Conversation on the Intersection of Race and Health

media release: Make HIV History: Join Vivent Health for a National Virtual Gathering on Ending the HIV Epidemic

Note: The time has changed to 5 pm.

Why do African Americans make up a disproportionate number (43%) of new HIV diagnoses and experience lower viral suppression than other groups? Nationwide, why have Black people died at 1.5 times the rate of white people from COVID-19? Why do African American members of the LGBTQIA+ community face health disparities linked to societal stigma, discrimination and racism?

Join Angela Davis, social equity activist, who will discuss these topics and more with Michael Gifford, Vivent Health President and CEO, during this national conversation on the intersection of race and health.

ANGELA DAVIS, social equity activist and author: Through her activism and scholarship over many decades, Angela Davis has been deeply involved in movements for social justice around the world. Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.

Professor Davis’ teaching career has taken her to San Francisco State University, Mills College, and UC Berkeley. She also has taught at UCLA, Vassar, Syracuse University the Claremont Colleges, and Stanford University. Most recently she spent fifteen years at the University of California Santa Cruz where she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of History of Consciousness – an interdisciplinary Ph.D program – and of Feminist Studies.

Angela Davis is the author of ten books and has lectured throughout the United States as well as in Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, and South America. In recent years a persistent theme of her work has been the range of social problems associated with incarceration and the generalized criminalization of those communities that are most affected by poverty and racial discrimination. She draws upon her own experiences in the early seventies as a person who spent eighteen months in jail and on trial, after being placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List.” She also has conducted extensive research on numerous issues related to race, gender and imprisonment. Her recent books include Abolition Democracy and Are Prisons Obsolete? about the abolition of the prison industrial complex, a new edition of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and a collection of essays entitled The Meaning of Freedom. Her most recent book of essays, is called Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement.

Angela Davis is a founding member of Critical Resistance, a national organization dedicated to the dismantling of the prison industrial complex. Internationally, she is affiliated with Sisters Inside, an abolitionist organization based in Queensland, Australia that works in solidarity with women in prison.

Like many educators, Professor Davis is especially concerned with the general tendency to devote more resources and attention to the prison system than to educational institutions. Having helped to popularize the notion of a “prison industrial complex,” she now urges her audiences to think seriously about the future possibility of a world without prisons and to help forge a 21st century abolitionist movement.

MIKE GIFFORD, president and CEO, Vivent Health

Mike Gifford is the president and CEO of Vivent Health where he has been a leading force in the fight against AIDS across the country for more than 25 years. Under his leadership, Vivent Health is now one of the nation’s leading HIV prevention, care and treatment providers with locations in Colorado, Missouri, Texas and Wisconsin. Mike led the transformation of Vivent Health from social service agency into an interdisciplinary health system providing care for more than 10,000 people affected by HIV. Read more.

Moderated by: STEVEN W. THRASHER, PhD, journalist and professor

Steven holds the inaugural Daniel H. Renberg chair at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the first journalism professorship in the world created to focus on LGBTQ+ research. He is also a faculty member of Northwestern’s Institute of Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing. His writing has been widely published by the New York Times, Guardian, Nation, Scientific American, Atlantic, Journal of American History, BuzzFeed News, Esquire, New York magazine and in ten book anthologies.

Named Journalist of the Year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association in 2012, Dr. Thrasher was recently named one of the 100 most influential and impactful people of 2019 for his research on the criminalization of HIV/AIDS by Out magazine; and in 2020, he was awarded a $75,000 Creativity and Free Expression Grant from the Ford Foundation for his interdisciplinary research. He is currently finishing his first book The Viral Underclass: How Racism, Ableism and Capitalism Plague Humans on the Margins for Celadon Books and Macmillian Publishing. Twitter: @thrasherxy