- PBS 'Frontline' documentary examines the devastating – yet largely preventable – impact of HIV and AIDS among African-Americans.
Black America's Disproportionate HIV Burden
Nel Davis’s story opens the gripping new PBS Frontline documentary "Endgame: AIDS in Black America," (written, directed, and produced by Renata Simon and airing Tuesday, July 10), an exhaustive examination of the disease in the African-American community. Black Americans such as Davis “face the most severe burden of HIV of all racial/ethnic groups in the United States,” according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Although blacks make up roughly 14 percent of the U.S. population, in 2009, they accounted for a disproportional 44 percent of new HIV infections, CDC data published in August 2011 shows. One in 16 black men today will be diagnosed with HIV at some point in their life. Two-thirds of new HIV cases in women are in black women. Among adolescents, blacks account for 70 percent of new cases.The numbers are indeed staggering — and even more so when you consider that HIV-AIDS is an almost entirely preventable disease.
Criminalization of Drug Offenses vs. Public Health
The devastating effect of HIV-AIDS in black America cannot be blamed on any one factor. Public health mistakes, cultural stigma and a lack of coordination by authorities have all combined to complicate matters.Going back to the early days of HIV-AIDS, at the beginning of the 1980s, the first five AIDS patients treated at UCLA Medical Center (the first hospital to identify the new disease) were white gay men. The sixth and seventh patients, however, were black. But the misconception quickly arose and spread that the new killer virus affected only white homosexual males — a critical error that 30 years later still thwarts attempts to control AIDS.
Even more devastating, however, was how the disease emerged, said Robert Fullilove, associate dean for community and minority affairs at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York. As the 1980s progressed, rising unemployment and despair in poor black communities fueled a booming drug problem, particularly injection drugs. As drug use increased, so did drug-related crime.
Under pressure to respond, authorities chose to criminalize drug use rather than address the underlying social issues. Among other things, President Ronald Reagan's federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 made it illegal to possess syringes. In Frontline's "Endgame," Fullilove points out how users shared needles to avoid arrest for possession of drug paraphernalia. HIV spread quickly among injection drug users, and then to their partners, and then to partners of those partners and beyond — in an ever-widening web of infection.
The harsh 1980s drug laws put an unprecedented number of black men in prison for nonviolent drug offenses. In some communities, as many as 50 percent of young black males were incarcerated. This, too, created unintended consequences — but this time for black women. With so many men in prison, according to the Frontline documentary, men in the community could dictate the rules of sexual play. If a man wanted unprotected sex, he was likely to get it, which unfortunately spread the virus more widely among women.
The Cultural Stigma of AIDS
Many local and national leaders failed to respond, despite the fact that AIDS was wreaking havoc throughout black communities. HIV-AIDS was just one of a long list of vital issues for black leaders to tackle, including education, housing and jobs. Other leaders were ignorant of the problem. “I think we thought about AIDS as affecting only white people, and then only white gay people, and there were no black gay people,” recalls Julian Bond, veteran 1960s civil rights activist, Georgia state representative, and chairman emeritus of the NAACP, in the documentary.Even the traditional bulwark of social support and activism in the African-American community, the black church, has done little to address the AIDS crisis. In "Endgame," Phil Wilson, president and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute, recalls an eye-opening moment while he was addressing the Black Ministerial Alliance about AIDS. One minister jumped up and shouted, “We’re not going to let them blame this one on us.” The frantic desire that AIDS not become another "black problem" in the eyes of American society has severely hampered prevention and treatment efforts, Wilson says.
An African-American aversion to hanging your dirty laundry in public didn't help. “You don’t tell other folks how poor you are. You don’t tell other folks that you can’t pay the rent. You don’t tell other folks that so and so is sick. And you certainly don’t tell other folks that there’s a gay son," he says. "And you don’t tell other folks that someone in the family has AIDS. It’s all about those things that you think are ways to protect yourself — going all the way back to slavery, that the slaves kept secrets ... some of that cultural baggage travels with us.”
These cultural views reinforce homophobia as well. “The African-American community and a lot of communities have stigma around being gay,” says Bay Area AIDS activist Jesse Brooks, who is gay, in the film. “I had an uncle, and I remember being in the car with him and he pointed to an obviously gay man and said, ‘I hate them!’ And this is my uncle, who was my favorite uncle, and it crushed me. And so it also led me to not want to open up about who I am, and for me to be ashamed about who I am.”
Last Updated: 07/06/2012
