This month (and next month) blogs will be hosted by Dr. OmiSoore Dryden, Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University and Lead, Black Health Education Collaborative <\/p>\n\n\n\n
OmiSoore Dryden<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This blog post grew from an invitation from Dr. Delia Douglas to speak about my book, Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation<\/em><\/strong>, in February 2026. I thank Dr. Douglas for the invitation, the conversation, and the thoughtful prompts that encouraged me to return to some of the questions that have shaped this work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Blood-donation systems do not simply identify pre-existing risk. They produce risk through practices of classification shaped by colonialism, racial science, white supremacy and sexual governance. Beginning from Black Studies and BlaQueer thought changes what can be known about donor eligibility, safety, science and belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have been thinking and writing about blood donation for more than twenty-five years, and one of the things this work has taught me is that blood is never only blood. Blood is biological; it circulates through our bodies and sustains life. But blood is also language. We speak of bloodlines, blood relatives, blood ties, bad blood, and pure blood because blood has long been made to tell us something about ancestry, kinship, inheritance, race, nation, purity, contamination and belonging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Those meanings are not incidental to the history of blood donation. They were shaped through colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, racial science, medicine, and the making of white nations. Colonialism produced race as part of an ordering of humanity that made conquest, enslavement, dispossession and extraction governable. The trans-Atlantic slave trade transformed political, economic, social, scientific and cultural life across the globe, including law, medicine, sexuality, kinship, citizenship and ideas about what it meant to be human. Anti-Blackness was produced through this colonial ordering rather than existing as a separate structure alongside it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the history I carry into my analysis of blood donation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Black is a modifier that changes everything.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Blood, Colonialism, And the Making of Risk<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Long before a needle enters a donor\u2019s arm, the blood system has already established which information about a person will matter. Donor questionnaires ask about sexual practices, travel, residence, medical histories and other experiences deemed relevant to blood safety. The significance of these questions lies not only in what they ask, but in the prior decisions that make certain behaviours, geographies and histories legible as risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The questionnaire does not discover risk. It claims to identify risk while participating in its production. Through the relationships it establishes among people, sexuality, behaviour, geography and disease, it produces the terms through which one person can be recognized as a safe donor while another person\u2019s blood is rendered suspect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The questionnaire does not discover risk. It participates in producing the terms through which risk becomes knowable.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham\u2019s account of race as a \u201cmetalanguage\u201d is useful here because race does more than describe populations; it organizes meaning (Higginbotham, 1992). It shapes how people, behaviours, places and differences become intelligible. Africa appearing within histories of donor screening therefore cannot be treated as neutral geography. The colonial production of Africa as primitive, diseased, sexually excessive and dangerous precedes contemporary epidemiological categories. When Africa enters donor screening through HIV, malaria, travel or residence, those questions enter a much longer history in which Africa and Blackness have been made especially available to narratives of disease and danger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Avery Gordon\u2019s description of \u201cendings that are not over\u201d helps explain why these histories remain present even when policies change (Gordon, 1997). A question can disappear from a questionnaire. A deferral can appear to be shortened. An identity-based restriction can appear to be replaced by behavioural screening. Such changes may alter who is formally eligible to donate without dismantling the assumptions and classificatory logics through which particular people, sexualities and geographies were constituted as risk in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The trans-Atlantic slave trade depended upon the production of supposed truths about Black people and Black people\u2019s bodies. Black people were represented as naturally suited to enslavement and forced labour, less susceptible to pain, sexually excessive, biologically different and outside the boundaries of full humanity. Medicine and science helped produce and authorize these claims. Their afterlives remain visible whenever institutions claim particular authority to tell the truth about Black people through our bodies while Black people have far less authority over the questions being asked, the categories being used, the meaning assigned to evidence and the decisions that follow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n History is therefore not background to the blood system. It is present in the categories through which people are made knowable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Black Changes The Story Of Progress<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mari Matsuda\u2019s injunction to \u201cask the other question\u201d has been an important methodological practice for me (Matsuda, 1991). It requires us to examine how relations of power are constituted through one another, including those that disappear when one form of oppression is treated as self-contained. When I encounter discourses of homophobia, I begin from the understanding that they are already structured through white supremacy, racial science and the colonial production of race. The question is how those histories organize what homophobia means, who is made legible through it and whose experiences come to stand for the injury.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That framing changes the familiar history of blood-donation activism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Restrictions affecting gay and bisexual men generated important activism and policy change. Yet \u201cgay men\u201d has never been a racially neutral category. Allan B\u00e9rub\u00e9\u2019s question about how gay stays white and what kind of white it stays remains incisive because whiteness is repeatedly positioned as the normative centre of political categories presented as universal (B\u00e9rub\u00e9, 2001). When blood-donation discrimination is narrated simply as something that happened to gay men, white gay men become the representative subjects of the injustice, while Black gay and bisexual men are displaced from the centre of the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Black gay and bisexual men have never entered the blood system through sexuality alone. Blackness carries histories of colonial medicine, racial science, HIV\/AIDS, Africa, malaria, infectious-disease surveillance, migration and the sexualization of Black people. Patricia Hill Collins\u2019s matrix of domination asks us to understand such relations of power as interlocking rather than additive (Collins, 1990). The colonial production of anti-Blackness was always gendered and sexualized; heteropatriarchy and homophobia are constituted through racial orders as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why I use anti-Black homophobia<\/em><\/strong>. I draw here on Himani Bannerji\u2019s formulation of \u201cracist sexism,\u201d developed in conversation with Pratibha Parmar\u2019s \u201csexist racism,\u201d to name relations of power that are mutually constituted rather than additive (Bannerji, 1995, p. 128). In the same way, anti-Black homophobia names what homophobia becomes when its subject is Black and how anti-Blackness itself is constituted through sexuality, gender, reproduction, and ideas about the human. Black does not simply describe the person experiencing homophobia. Black modifies the homophobia itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That also changes how I understand progress. Experiencing homophobia does not place white gay people outside the racial order, nor does it prevent gay politics from reproducing anti-Blackness. Cathy Cohen reminds us that shared experiences of marginalization do not erase differences in power and that identity-based political formations are not inherently solidaristic or transformative (Cohen, 1997). A movement can successfully challenge one form of exclusion while leaving the racial organization of its own politics largely intact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is why declarations of progress require scrutiny. Whose exclusion defined the problem? Whose experience became politically legible? Whose evidence carried authority? Whose inclusion came to signify that the injustice had been addressed? Progress for some can coexist with the continued displacement of Black queer people from the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being newly admitted into an institution tells us very little about transformation if the institution retains the power to determine the terms on which belonging is granted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be continued\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Works cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Bannerji, Himani. \u201cIn the Matter of \u2018X\u2019: Building \u2018Race\u2019 into Sexual Harassment.\u201d Thinking Through: Essays on Feminism, Marxism and Anti-Racism, Women\u2019s Press, 1995, pp. 121-158.<\/p>\n\n\n\n B\u00e9rub\u00e9, Allan. \u201cHow Gay Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays.\u201d The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness, edited by Birgit Brander Rasmussen, Eric Klinenberg, Irene J. Nexica, and Matt Wray, Duke UP, 2001, pp. 234-265.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cohen, Cathy J. \u201cPunks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?\u201d GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 3, no. 4, 1997, pp. 437-465.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Unwin Hyman, 1990.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dryden, OmiSoore H. Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation. Fernwood Publishing, 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. University of Minnesota Press, 1997.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. \u201cAfrican-American Women\u2019s History and the Metalanguage of Race.\u201d Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 17, no. 2, 1992, pp. 251-274.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Matsuda, Mari J. \u201cBeside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory out of Coalition.\u201d Stanford Law Review, vol. 43, no. 6, July 1991, pp. 1183-1192.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This month (and next month) blogs will be hosted by Dr. OmiSoore Dryden, Professor, School of Nursing, Faculty of Health, Dalhousie University and Lead, Black Health Education Collaborative OmiSoore Dryden This blog post grew from an invitation from Dr. Delia Douglas to speak about my book, Got Blood to Give: Anti-Black Homophobia in Blood Donation, … Continue reading “October 2026: Black is a modifier that changes everything”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29,21,22],"tags":[19,6,8,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":345,"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.radyfhs.umanitoba.ca\/anti-racism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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