COMMENTARY: Black Americans Still Don’t Get the Message About HIV/AIDS

By: Deborah Mathis

Forget the woeful statistics, the sheer redundancy of reporting on HIV/AIDS among black Americans has itself become depressing.

Year after year, there is worsening news. According to the Black AIDS Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank, it is now so bad that infection rates among blacks in some parts of the country rival those in Uganda and South Africa.

In Africa, the epidemic is being fed by ignorance, misinformation, superstition, cultural restraints and the unavailability – sometimes by government edict – of certain therapies.

It was in Cape Town, South Africa six years ago that I met scores of men, women and babies with the virus. One evening, I accompanied a community counselor to a secret meeting place with a young rape victim whose assailant – a man old enough to be her father – believed that having intercourse with a virgin would cleanse him of the disease.

The girl’s family had banished her from their home in the poverty-stricken Nyanga district once they learned of the attack. She was living with an aunt in Khayelitsha township when I met her. She had the virus and desperately wanted treatment, but the aunt had forbade it, fearing ostracism from her neighbors, should they find out.

COMMENTARY....