This week’s radical is Dázon Dixon Diallo, founder of SisterLove, a pioneering organization focusing on women’s sexual health and reproductive justice with a special focus on HIV advocacy for women.
We discuss Dázon’s roots in Peach County as the child of scientists, her early brushes with political activism, and how the HIV/AIDS pandemic—and how women were overlooked during the early days—has shaped her career.
Some Questions I ask:
- What are you currently working on? (0:56)
- What does being “a unique and proud product of the Deep South” mean for you? (7:12)
- Did your parents’ careers plant the seed for your work in reproductive justice? (19:07)
- What does it mean to be HIV-affected? (25:09)
- Did you feel called to the urgency of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when you founded SisterLove in 1989? (27:38)
- Is it true that heterosexual women are the fastest-growing demographic in HIV/AIDS cases, or is this because they hadn’t been properly counted? (44:50)
- Tell us about the expansion of SisterLove into South Africa (51:51)
In This Episode, You Will Learn:
- What people don’t realize about running a nonprofit (5:18)
- What it was like to be part of the first generation of integrated students (12:28)
- How Dázon’s parents nurtured a deep understanding of sexual health (14:55)
- Why the term “broken family” is outdated and incorrect (22:45)
- How losing her first job led Dázon to a career in women’s health (33:47)
- Why getting funding for black women’s health amidst the AIDS crisis was an uphill battle (36:26)
- Why women living with AIDS weren’t properly being diagnosed, and how Dázon fought to change that (42:31)
- Why medical research needs to spend more time dedicated to how infections affect people other than cis men (46:35)
Resources:
Follow Dázon on Twitter
Follow SisterLove on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram (oh, and TikTok)
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