It’s in Us to Give

Omisoore Dryden

When a disease is aligned, even in part, with one of politically and socially constructed categories of race, it both defines and is defined by that category and inevitably reinforces its existence.

In this feature, Omisoore Dryden explains the blood narratives of racial segregation and gendered exclusion that were understood to fall within the parameters of “safe” blood and thus framed the early practices of blood donation in Canada. They constituted the social determinants, the very conditions, of safe blood and optimal health. Public health discourse has often framed the body as dangerous and problematic, as ever threatening to run out of control, to attract disease, and to pose imminent danger to the rest of society. And in response to this framing, numerous measures have been taken to confine people and to control their environments, movements and interactions.

HIV, AIDS, and the tainted blood crisis renewed the dominance of science in systems of social control, particularly in dictating appropriate behaviours, thus creating a connection between these behaviours and one’s true nature as a human being. HIV and AIDS has become a “natural classification” with Blackness. The contamination of the blood signalled a significant breach—one in which dangerous bodies (homosexual, Haitian, heroin users, and hemophiliacs—the 4 H) and their blood—infected the general public. HIV and AIDS marked an important time in blood donation in Canada.