The mid-1990s found the simultaneous advent of antiretroviral drugs with the capacity to keep those living with AIDS alive, and the development of rigorous new intellectual property rights laws under the WTO that restricted access to those drugs for the vast majority of those who needed them, including the millions living with AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa. Just last year, two million Africans died of preventable deaths from AIDS. My paper argues that the proactive restriction of AIDS drugs by pharmaceutical companies and governments to millions of poor individuals should be designated as genocide, and interrogates why it is acceptable to allow millions of Africans to die preventable deaths from AIDS each year. I specifically examine persistent representations of Africans as primitive and chaotic and the ways in which these representations have shaped subsequent government and transnational responses to the AIDS epidemic. Though there have been extensive contestations of these policies, resulting in areas of significant change, I argue that these regional and global campaigns for access have not substantively changed dominant discourses within high-level policy channels.