Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork with the South African National Blood Service, I examine the differing language ideologies and health communicative inequities that inform the stories people tell about race and blood donation, with attention to the friction between narrative truths and factual accuracy.

Paper long abstract:

A South African National Blood Service (SANBS) campaign #NoStereotypes aims to combat prejudices about who can donate blood: “Everyone has the right to be themselves and to be treated equally. It doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside, you have the gift to save someone with what’s on the inside.” Although one can donate blood regardless of race, a story persists in South Africa that the blood service “threw black people’s blood away” even after apartheid. As I learned through ethnographic fieldwork with SANBS, according to blood service officials, this is patently false. Until 2005, they did not ban black donors but rather used race as one risk management factor among many in how donations were used. It involved navigating difficult circumstances including the HIV epidemic, how this disproportionately affected black communities, and the urgency to maintain a safe, sustainable blood supply that did not put patients at risk of contracting transfusion transmitted infections. Race was subsequently eliminated as a risk management factor with the adoption of more sensitive testing. Why, then, did this narrative of discarding blood based on race take hold in the public imagination? While the narrative may be factually false, what kinds of social truths might it reveal? Within the context of South Africa’s national mythos of truth and reconciliation, I examine how these narratives about race and blood register tensions between different communicative models for understanding how narratives circulate and what is at stake in their circulation.