To be Black in this Skin: Anti-Black Racism and How Heterosexual Black Men Engage with HIV Vulnerability in Toronto

Toronto is home to Canada’s largest and fastest growing Black population and it is also the probable epicenter of the Black HIV epidemic in the nation. While the HIV response in Ontario recognizes African, Caribbean, and Black people as a “priority population,” HIV in Canada has historically been thought of as an epidemic among gay white men, thereby impacting the preconceptions of service providers and the manner by which services are targeted and administered today.

Based on 26 months of fieldwork in Toronto, this dissertation ethnographically explores how HIV-negative and HIV-positive heterosexual Black men navigate HIV-related stigma and anti-Black racism. Three key questions ground this project: 1) What does it mean to be straight, Black, and male in a world predicated on anti-Blackness?; 2) How do we philosophically conceptualize contradictory forms of resistance and agency in the lives of Black men—particularly those living with HIV?; and 3) How do enduring modalities of racial slavery structure how Black folks experience HIV?

In analyzing how Black subjects come into being or, more precisely, struggle to be realized, I critically reflect on the writings of Afro-pessimist and Afro-optimist thinkers. In doing so, I expand on the concept of fugitivity—the notion that Black life represents a ceaseless act of ontological disobedience (Moten 2008). Fugitivity is employed as a productive lens to understand straight Black men’s attitudes about their own vulnerability to HIV, and the different ways they engage with socially imposed forms of subjectivity. I conclude that although Black men’s sexual acts and choices exist within anti-Black systems predicated on their negation, they are not passive objects of racial oppression. Rather, I argue that when Black men engage with the limitations of Black life it can produce remarkable acts of creativity, vitality, and affirmation.

This dissertation contributes to a theory of Black subjectivity that upholds the idea of racial slavery as the basis of Black ontological production. My research seeks to expand anthropological discussions on Blackness and being, the anthropology of HIV, and broader social scientific inquiry on HIV critiquing responses that privilege behavioral change over structural determinants.