Black community ignores HIV/AIDS

Black community ignores HIV/AIDS
By Leonard Pitts, a syndicated columnist based in Washington
Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
Published February 6, 2007

I've written this column before.

Eight years ago, to be exact. I opened with a line from Marvin Gaye's most celebrated song. It goes: "Talk to me, so you can see. Oh what's going on?"

Eight years ago, the statistics were terrifying: 9,526 African-Americans dead of AIDS in 1997, the latest year for which figures were then available. At 13 percent of the nation's population, blacks accounted for 36 percent of its AIDS cases.

Eight years ago, I wrote this: "The silence, the absence of voices raised in fear, raised in warning, raised in alarm--raised--is deafening."

Eight years later, the silence is still loud and the numbers are worse. Blacks now account for nearly half of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses and contract AIDS at a rate 10 times that of whites. Sixty-four percent of all American women living with HIV/AIDS are black. AIDS is the leading cause of death for black women 25 to 34.

And eight years later, Gaye's advice still haunts. Because while poverty plays a role in those ghastly numbers, while access to health care and lack of information are factors, who can deny that the main reason for this plague is the silence, the closed-mouth social conservatism, the priggish moral rectitude, of a people still ill at ease discussing sexuality, homosexuality, drug use and other realities. Instead, we mouth piety, prayers and platitudes while the world burns down around us.

Wednesday is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, and if Gil L. Robertson IV, an Atlanta-based journalist, has his way, it will be the last AIDS Day of silence. He is the brother of a man with HIV and the editor of "Not in My Family," an anthology of essays on HIV/AIDS by black writers. (Full disclosure: The same company that released the paperback version of my book, "Becoming Dad," published "Not in My Family.")

Robertson has gathered an eclectic cross-section of black America. Some you know (Patti LaBelle, Mo'Nique and Joycelyn Elders), most you've never heard of. They are preachers, politicians, professors, activists and one porn star. But there are no hip-hop artists despite, Robertson says, his best efforts to recruit them. The unwillingness of those icons of loud and lusty machismo to speak about AIDS speaks volumes about the conflictedness of black America. Sex and violence they can talk about, but AIDS cows them to silence.

The book, Robertson says, is an effort at breaking that silence. "It was an opportunity for black folks to sound off and engage in dialogue that would indicate to the rest of society that we are concerned."

In the aggregate, the essays depict a community coming slowly to terms with the fact that silence kills.

It is no coincidence that the communities where that discussion happens freely are the communities where death from AIDS has sharply declined. Black America needs to quit pretending homosexuality does not exist, intravenous drug use does not exist. It needs to pull its collective head out of the sand and follow Marvin Gaye's advice.

Otherwise, something else he said in that song will still be true--"preventably" true--eight years from now.

"Mother, mother, there's too many of you crying.

"Brother, brother, brother, there's far too many of you dying."

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Leonard Pitts is a syndicated columnist based in Washington. E-mail: lpitts@miamiherald.com