Sheryl Lee Ralph has spent decades using her platform to fight stigma and push for better HIV prevention — and she’s blunt: the crisis is not solved, and Black women are still at risk. 

Ralph spoke at the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s Academy Awards viewing party and said that HIV/AIDs remains a live public-health emergency in the U.S., particularly for women of color in the South and other under-resourced regions. 

“I’m here because, believe it or not, HIV and AIDS is not a dead issue in America right now,” Ralph said to Variety. “It is spreading. We are still seeing upticks across the South, especially in women of color, and it is something that needs to be paid attention to.”

Ralph’s activism stretches back decades. She founded the DIVA Foundation to center Black women in HIV prevention and has used television, film, and public appearances to bring attention to the gap between headlines and lived reality. Ralph argued that prevention can’t be reduced to a single pill or PSA; it must include routine testing, expanded access to PrEP, and health systems that treat women with dignity rather than shame. “So many women have no idea that PrEP is also for them. It’s not just for men,” she said. There is a lower PrEP uptake among Black women, even as heterosexual contact accounts for approximately 83% of new HIV cases among women.

When clinics are inaccessible or when conversations are stigmatized, prevention stalls, and the toll falls heaviest on Black women. 

National data shows that Black women continue to be disproportionately affected by HIV relative to their population share — a reality advocates say requires both targeted funding and the more humane, stigma-reducing narratives that Ralph promotes. Her combination of creative work and grassroots organizing makes this a strategic, long-term public-health intervention. 

From Medicaid coverage limits to clinic deserts, Black women face limited access to prevention and care. Ralph said those obstacles showcase who is visible in America’s health priorities. If HIV becomes “someone else’s problem,” she said, the real victims are the communities already pushed to the margins. Ralph wants prevention to be taught in places where people already trust each other: salons, churches, family kitchens, not only in sterile public-health settings.

Ralph’s argument is a challenge and a plan. Without targeted funding, culturally competent campaigns, and structural fixes to access, medical progress will widen racial and gendered health gaps. Her message to policymakers and the public is as plain as it is urgent: the crisis isn’t over for Black women until the resources and respect reach them.