Draft:Antoine Johnson

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Background

Antione Johnson attended Oakland's Castlemont High School and is also a graduate of Sacramento State University. Johnson was also a PhD candidate at UCSF, University of California San Francisco. His love of music, specifically hip-hop, and the lack of information regarding HIV/AIDS eventually led him to research the epidemic for his PhD. He surveyed songs that addressed problems like police violence and the crack cocaine epidemic. Specifically, Johnson focused on researching HIV/AIDS among Black individuals within the Bay Area during the early days of the epidemic.

Teachings

After the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked a heightened awareness around institutionalized racism, Johnson and a couple of colleagues composed a syllabus called, "A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine," for people who are interested in learning more about the intersection of healthcare and Black History. It discusses COVID-19's impact on Black individuals and how it has explained America's long disparate treatment and long-term neglect of Black health concerns. The course maintains the goal of offering insight into historical legacies while concurrently helping lead the way for equitable health for every underrepresented population.

Important Contributions and Work

Johnson earned his Ph.D. in the History of Health Sciences from the University of California, San Francisco. His dissertation, "More than Pushing Pills: Black AIDS Activism in the Bay Area, 1981-1996," inspected ways in which Black organizers confronted HIV/AIDS and structural medical racism that opened their communities to infection. His research interests include anti-Black racism in medicine, the AIDS/HIV epidemic, twentieth-century American History, and hip-hop culture.

Ph.D.

The work of composing Johnson's PhD thesis was a long process. It took Johnson over a year to get information regarding a single chapter. Johnson's dissertation looks at HIV and AIDS among Black people in the Bay Area and ways racism contributes to disease susceptibility amongst the Black community. This is through specifically, state-sanctioned violence through underemployment, poverty housing insecurity, and inadequate health care. An approach highlighted within his dissertation is an intersectional lens showing the complexities of the illness and its social impacts. Johnson mentions how AIDS at the time of the epidemic, was seen as a gay white disease and spoke on how the media covered it that way and how politicians responded to it as well. An important chapter in the dissertation was on a sex worker organization called CAL-PEP, the California Prostitutes Education Project which was created in 1984. Johnson discussed how this organization highlighted Black women who were affected by the disease and how it differed from others including Black men and white men. He depicted how sex workers were being ostracized for carrying the disease, but not the customers who were mainly married white men. With this work, Johnson aimed at humanizing sex workers who are already perceived in a negative light.

REPAIR Project

Johnson was key in helping found the REPAIR project. The REPAIR Project is a three-year strategic initiative out of UCSF designed to address Anti-Black Racism and enhance Black, Indigenous, and People of Color's voices and presence in science, medicine, and healthcare. "REPAIR" is an acronym for REParations and Anti-Institutional Racism, which provides the empowering theme behind the project. The project recognizes long-standing racial inequities in health and healthcare institutions and understands they are a result of structural violence and systemic racism. Through the REPAIR Project, the initiative seeks to open conversation and promote efforts to fix and remove these problems. Their initiative starts the conversation with themes arising from the Black Lives Matter Movement and works outward to problems that are apart of larger institutional medical and healthcare structures, including race and cultures of incarceration and the implicit racial biases of scholarly practices of science, medical research, and clinical practice. Their strategic annual themes are as follows: Year One: Medical Reparations Year Two: Medical Abolition Year Three: Decolonizing the Health Sciences

Current Work

Johnson recently worked at Johns Hopkins University where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Johnson also accepted a tenure-track position in African American & African Studies at UC Davis, which started in the Fall of 2024.

Awards

Johnson was the 2023 Pressman-Burroughs Award recipient from the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM). This award honors Jack D. Pressman, Ph.D., a distinguished historian of medicine and Associate Professor of the History of the Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco at the time of his early and unexpected death in June of 1997. The award and stipend of $1,000 are given annually for tremendous work in the twentieth-century history of medicine or medical biomedical sciences, as demonstrated by the completion of a Ph.D. and a proposal to turn the dissertation into a publishable monograph. Johnson was also selected as one of only ten scholars inducted into the inaugural postdoctoral class of the Edward A. Bouchet Honor Society at Johns Hopkins University. The selection committee commented that Antoine exemplified "the five Bouchet qualities of scholarship, leadership, character, service, and advocacy for those traditionally underrepresented in the academy."