Reflections of a Human Rights Educator

In my early days as an activist, I spent a lot of my time examining the problems in the world, and dreaming of ways to eradicate the pain and suffering of life on Earth. So many forces work against the elimination of oppression, and so few choices exist for those of us who want a safer, saner, and more peaceful planet. Thus, I chose to be a fighter, although my weapons were (and are) education, organizing, and mobilizing. But still, I had to fight. The fight was against the marginalization of women of color in the feminist health movement. The fight was against a new disease with deadly consequences, and a strange penchant for already reviled and disrespected "minorities." The fight was, and still is, against the fear and hatred of difference and change. I had to fight against something, because I believed it was the only way to contribute to the social change that we all so desperately need.

As a woman of African descent born in the southern United States, I am among the masses of people who experience some form of oppression on a daily basis. I am from and in the grassroots, where change is essential for moving beyond survival to thriving. Whether the issue is HIV, sexual vio-lence, gender discrimination, poverty, or lack of access, my own experience is inextricably intertwined with the struggle of millions of other souls throughout the world. Some of my struggle has resulted in the creation and development of an HIV/AIDS program for African-American women called SisterLove Women's AIDS Project.

When we formed SisterLove in 1989, we were on the cutting edge of the HIV/AIDS tide that was sweeping through the lives and families of women in our communities. We thought, then, that if we provided enough edu-cation, intervention, and support services to women at greatest risk for HIV, and for those living with HIV or AIDS, maybe the disease wouldn't hit our communities as hard as it was hitting gay men all over the United States. By 1992, when we became incorporated, we had heard lots of wom-en's stories of pain, fear, rejection, and immobilization. And it became clear that HIV needed to be articulated and addressed in the context of women's lives.

We had been dealing with women's lives in the context of HIV, and it was a flawed strategy. Holistically speaking, we were indirectly responding to a myriad of issues—substance abuse, violence, poverty, misogyny, internalized oppression, family neglect/abandonment . . . the list could go on and on—that were layered inside the iceberg, of which HIV was only the tip. We knew that HIV was the connecting point for a lot of these experiences, but getting folks, especially the mainstream feminist groups and the growing numbers of AIDS activists, to see the direct connection was diffi-cult and as labor intensive as helping folks understand HIV and its risks. We didn't have the tools or the language to pull these issues together.

In 1996, Loretta J. Ross founded the National Center for Human Rights Education (NCHRE), the first human rights education organization in the United States that focuses primarily on domestic human rights violations including civil, political, economic, social, cultural, developmental, environmental, and sexual rights. NCHRE's mission is to build a human rights movement in the United States by training community leaders and student activists to apply human rights standards to issues of injustice. Ms. Ross introduced these concepts to SisterLove staff and volunteers, and we found the framework within which the HIV/AIDS work we were already doing could be buoyed, strengthened, and articulated in a manner through which the humanity of those living with HIV/AIDS and those at risk could be defended, protected, respected, and valued.

SisterLove's introduction to human rights education was a revelation of sorts. What a simple notion: that if all of us working...