Professor examines how microaggressions may impact black people who have HIV.
A project to investigate microaggressions against “black women living with HIV” has been funded by the National Institutes of Health with more than$ 3 million going forward.
The project” Monitoring Microaggressions and Adversities to Generate Interventions for Change ( MMAGIC ) for Black Women Living with HIV” aims to” show light on how microaggressions and other adversities ( i .e. re-occurring trauma and violence ) impact HIV viral suppression among [Black women living with HIV] as mediated by mental health symptoms anddiagnosis.
The NIH allocated$ 72, 588 to the job in 2024, but it has received a full of$ 3, 405, 724 since 2019, according to a Fix analysis of public information.
In the past month, job head Sannisha Dale, an associate professor at the University of Miami, and system established Gregory Greenwood have not responded to two emailed requests for comment.
The Fix inquired about the study’s possible biases in the self-reporting of microaggressions, as well as the story’s wider impact.
Dale also serves on the philosophy department’s variety committee.
In an email to The Fix, a Heritage Foundation researcher criticized the job.
No one penny of NIH financing should go toward studies that are so blatantly based on ideology rather than true scientific inquiry, according to David Ditch, a mature policy analyst.
He claimed that the$ 3 million budget “is great for a project that involves social research as opposed to medical research.” He is a former resources analyst for the U. S. Senate.
Because this is studying niche leftist ideological concerns ( microaggressions and intersectionality ) and doing so for a very small population ( less than 0.1 % of Americans are black women with HIV ), Ditch claimed that the project is not relevant to broader populations.
The NIH money has produced at least 18 papers thus far, focused on “intersectional shame” and “intersectional hardships”, among other related matters.
According to the original publication,” Black people experience microaggressions at the crossing of both race and gender that may vary from those experienced by a person of a different female and/or contest.”
Because of the regular and widespread character of microaggressions, the authors wrote,” Gendered cultural microaggressions may become associated with more melancholy for Black women living with HIV because of their delicate in expression.”
In a later release, the authors wrote that these women “bear the weight of the HIV illness, and efforts should be directed to lessen the stress by addressing structural inequities ( e. g., cover, revenue, and crime rates ), intersectional discrimination and stigma, and mental health, and strengthen HIV outcomes”.
The authors wrote that “human rights legislation is required to improve [Black women living with HIV] and reduce structural inequities, and political action is needed to increase the household income of those who are living with it.”
In a paper from 2022, titled” Monitoring Intersectional Stigma: A Key Strategy to Ending the HIV Epidemic in the United States”, the authors viewed” HIV prevention and treatment” using a” Black feminist critique”.
A team of researchers, led by Professor Dale, wrote:
Originating from a Black feminist critique of the consequences of treating race and gender as mutually exclusive categories, intersectionality is a theoretical framework that examines how intersecting and mutually interdependent forms of power and oppression ( e. g., racism, classism, cisgenderism, ableism ) drive health inequities.
They emphasized how crucial an intersectional approach is to monitoring the effects of interlocking systems of oppression, according to COVID- 19. The pandemic demonstrated the importance of intersectionality in order to “end the HIV epidemic” and ultimately to “demolish the very systems that perpetuate health inequalities.”
Federal science victim of ‘ ideological capture,’ analyst says
Ditch, the Heritage Foundation analyst, said public health agencies regularly give out money to “ideological” studies.
” Unfortunately, this grant is just one of countless examples of ideological capture in federal science agencies, who receive tens of billions in funding every year”, Ditch told The Fix. The public and the majority of Congress are unaware of how much harm these organizations cause to actual science by using tax dollars that the nation cannot afford given the nation’s$ 34.55 trillion debt.
Due to radical activists who claim the modern scientific method is rooted in” colonial” thinking, the National Science Foundation regularly awards grants to promote “indigenous knowledge” and “other ways of knowing.”
According to Ditch,” The NIH approved a grant because there is a gap in “gender affirmation” for minority children, which implies that the NIH believes more adults should be encouraging minority children to become transgender,”
” The CDC approved a grant for’ eradicating racism’ in HIV treatment in Oakland, CA. This was not based on evidence of bigotry ( Oakland’s population is 2/3rds minority ), but instead based on cross- racial differences in outcomes”, Ditch said.
” The federal government is waging ideological wagwagon from all federal agencies, driven by the notion that racism causes inequality.”
MORE: Academics receive$ 297 million in NIH funds to study racism and health
IMAGES: National Institutes of Health, DAPA Images
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