The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics

by Cathy J. Cohen

Last year, more African Americans were reported with AIDS than any other racial or ethnic group. And while African Americans make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for more than 55 percent of all newly diagnosed HIV infections. These alarming developments have caused reactions ranging from profound grief to extreme anger in African-American communities, yet the organized political reaction has remained remarkably restrained.

The Boundaries of Blackness is the first full-scale exploration of the social, political, and cultural impact of AIDS on the African-American community. Informed by interviews with activists, ministers, public officials, and people with AIDS, Cathy Cohen unflinchingly brings to light how the epidemic fractured, rather than united, the black community. She traces how the disease separated blacks along different fault lines and analyzes the ensuing struggles and debates.

More broadly, Cohen analyzes how other cross-cutting issues—of class, gender, and sexuality—challenge accepted ideas of who belongs in the community. Such issues, she predicts, will increasingly occupy the political agendas of black organizations and institutions and can lead to either greater inclusiveness or further divisiveness.

The Boundaries of Blackness , by examining the response of a changing community to an issue laced with stigma, has much to teach us about oppression, resistance, and marginalization. It also offers valuable insight into how the politics of the African-American community—and other marginal groups—will evolve in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Race, Nonfiction, History, Theory, LGBT, Politics, Political Science

410 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 1999

Reviews

[Sarah Schulman]

A 1999 classic and foundational text. Works well with Kevin Mumford's latest book.

[i. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cohen argues that, “both within and outside of black communities, certain segments of the population are privileged with regard to the definition of political agendas” (11). Using HIV/AIDS as an analytic, Cohen examines how “consensus” issues in Black politics have now been replaced with issues that are rooted in crosscutting cleavages--in other words, issues in Black politics are less "consensus" and the problems of Black politics can be seen in the issues that impact communities marginalized within the Black community. Cohen uses a framework of marginalization that, “…steps beyond the traditional dichotomy of powerful and powerless to examine the multiple sites where power is located, paying special attention to indigenous power relationships…” (36) to examine various Black political responses to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In other words, Cohen is interested not only in the ways that dominant institutions exercise power and marginalize black communities, but she is interested in the interplay of power between black elite institutions and black non-elite institutions. While elite institutions produced HIV/AIDS as only a white gay men’s disease, Black elite institutions produced a binary of “innocent” and “non-innocent” victims of HIV/AIDS.

[Jenn Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an incredibly important book that details how the AIDS epidemic affected Black communities and shaped relationships between Black elites and queer people. A must-read for all Black Politics scholars and activists.

[Prof Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

great book by my dissertation chair that I continue to reference again and again