H.I.V.’S Grip on the American South
BY SARAH STILLMAN
One night after midnight in 2012, Deon Haywood was sitting at home, in New Orleans, watching TV and having a drink, when she got a phone call. The owner of her office building was on the line.
“There’s been a fire,” he said.
Haywood ran out to her car and drove to North Jefferson Davis Parkway, to the stout gray building that housed Women with a Vision, a community nonprofit she runs, which does H.I.V.-prevention work and other forms of advocacy geared toward women of color. In Louisiana, the death rate from AIDS is nearly twice the national average. Women with a Vision, founded in 1991, survived Hurricane Katrina, and kept pursuing what public-health workers term “harm reduction” long after many AIDS-minded funders moved their money abroad. Haywood and her staff stashed condoms, sex-education materials, and other work supplies at their office, although it’s not where they spent most of their time—much of their real work takes place in the streets, through outreach and education. Now, as Haywood pulled up, it wasn’t clear how much of the office would be left.
What she found at the scene, still smoldering, had the potential markings of arson. The flames had skipped the steep gray staircase, and climbed their way along the walls of the outreach room, where, Haywood says, various reproductive-health models had been removed from a closet, stacked in a pile, and set ablaze. Police escorted Haywood through the still warm rooms, which appeared to have been ransacked. She felt dazed. The walls looked blistered and brown; a ceiling fan hung with only two of its five blades left, both drooping like a sad mustache. Haywood is still trying to make sense of the idea that someone could have set the fire deliberately. “You would target our outreach room?” she asked. “You would stack our breast models, our reproductive models, and burn them? You would pile up all of the posters that had to do with activism and women’s health, and burn them?”
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thus ensuring their ridiculous influence on the American political scene today. 
