Column: Dispatches from Black America
By Phill Wilson
I grew up on the south side of Chicago. My mother never met a Jet or Ebony Magazine she was willing to throw away. So, like most Black folks of my generation, copies of Jet and Ebony were living room accents as important as coffee tables and lamps. This month’s news of the death of their founding publisher, John Johnson, sent me back to those times. Ebony magazine often admonished us for not being where we, as a community, needed to be, but it always reminded us that we weren’t where we used to be, either. As we think about the AIDS epidemic in Black communities today, that balance is an important one to remember. On AIDS, we are clearly not where we need to be. Much of the latest news about AIDS and Black people, either here or in Africa, is bad. Very bad. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that African Americans represent about half of the over one million people living with HIV in the U.S. – even though we’re only 12 percent of the country’s overall population. We’re not where we need to be. But, in the spirit of Johnson’s magazines, there is a positive aspect to our journey on AIDS too. Led by today’s Johnson Publishing, Essence Communications, the National Newspaper Publishers Association and others, the AIDS-related content published by Black magazines and newspapers last year added up to nearly 50 million “media impressions,” meaning the combined circulation of the articles they published. And that doesn’t even count broadcast media. Over 220 Black-owned newspapers and magazines in 34 states published HIV/AIDS stories last year. No, we definitely are not where we used to be. And that’s not the only place where we’ve made progress. Many civil rights organizations have recently put AIDS at the top of their agenda. The NAACP has officially made AIDS a top priority. This summer, the National Urban League Young Professionals and the Delta Sigma Theta made AIDS work the centerpiece of their annual “day of service.” At their 30th annual convention in Atlanta this year, the National Association of Black Journalists offered three AIDS workshops, and President Bill Clinton dedicated his entire keynote speech to the subject. Black churches are starting to come around as well. Churches like Trinity in Chicago, First AME in Los Angeles, Metropolitan in Nashville, and Riverside in New York are being joined by mega-churches like New Birth in Atlanta and Inspiring Body of Christ in Dallas in developing aggressive AIDS ministries. On the heals of devastating news about HIV outbreaks among Black college students, L.I.F.E. AIDS (a student-led initiative of the Black AIDS Institute) has already expanded to 50 college campuses just one year after its launch. The students’ AIDS-focused magazine, Ledge, has a circulation of over 200,000 and is distributed on 150 campuses. I don’t know if the glass is half empty of half full. At the Institute, we’re still getting the calls – the frantic late night and early morning calls, the calls from young people who just found out they are infected with HIV and are more afraid of the stigma than the disease. Even as I write, I’m haunted by a call we got yesterday, from a young man whose father had just died of AIDS. He hadn’t even known his father had HIV. Maybe it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. Maybe it doesn’t even matter that we’re not where we used to be. After all, we have to get where need to be—the end of the AIDS epidemic. But, it helps to know we are on the move. It helps to stop, take a deep breath and look around to see who’s joined the battle. “I don’t feel no ways tired. I’ve come too far from where I started from…” That’s a lesson John Johnson also taught. Good night, Mr. Johnson. I hope we learn your lesson.
By Kai Wright
Today’s magazine editors and T.V. producers have roundly patted themselves on the back for their supposedly-groundbreaking coverage of the “down low.” But through all of the push and pull that story has generated, everyone has overlooked one clear piece of evidence that it’s just warmed over hype: Ebony magazine reported it as long ago as January 1988. To be sure, the Ebony article was just as salacious as today’s coverage. Titled “The Hidden Fear,” the story profiled men who “confessed” having had “sexual dalliances” with other men while dating or married to women. “None of the women suspected their lovers’ secret,” the writer intoned, later calling them “undercover bisexuals with a double sex life and high risk factor.” Then, as now, the story ostensibly explored the HIV risk these men pose to women, while actually plumbing communal anxieties about sexuality rather than talking about the unsafe sex that transmits HIV. But unlike today’s coverage, Ebony did offer sobering perspective. The article was clear that its subjects formed a relatively small group in the community, and it took pains to avoid demonizing gay and bisexual men in general. “This poses a problem that has nothing at all to do with gay or homosexual lifestyles,” the writer declared. The article was an ambitious, if flawed effort to address important questions about STDs in our community -- and it is an apt example of the legacy that Ebony and Jet founder John H. Johnson leaves behind. The history-making publisher’s August 8 death, at age 87, has spawned reams of copy analyzing his contribution to 20th Century Black American life, and his eulogists have been universally laudatory. He’s been called “giant,” “genius,” “inspiring” -- all justifiably so. But Johnson’s life work -- two of the nation’s most successful and long-lasting publications -- may also offer definitive examples of the tenuous balance our community still struggles to strike when painting its own portrait. From the first, we have groped for answers to a crucial question: How do we debunk white supremacy’s stereotypes of Black depravity while, at the same time, educating our community and America at large about the urgent, dire problems we face? When it came to AIDS, Johnson’s magazines answered that question in the same way they had other issues. As always, he was first and foremost bold. He launched his publishing empire, as a young man not long out of high school, by leveraging $500 in borrowed money and convincing 3,000 people to buy subscriptions to a magazine that didn’t even exist yet. He could be just as bold editorially. During the early Civil Rights Movement, he shocked Jet readers out of complacency by defiantly publishing a now iconic image of Emmett Till’s mangled and bloated body following his 1955 lynching. Ebony and Jet were equally ambitious about covering the AIDS epidemic. According to Cathy Cohen’s definitive study of Black institutions’ response to AIDS, The Boundaries of Blackness, Ebony and Jet (along with Essence) leapt forward in the 1980s and early 1990s, publishing dozens of stories on the epidemic at a time when few other media outlets -- either Black or mainstream – were discussing HIV/AIDS’ impact on African Americans. But Johnson’s boldness was only half of his patented publishing formula. He also maintained an unflinching focus on what he felt to be the positive aspects of Black life. “We try to seek out good things, even when everything seems bad,” he once said, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution. “We look for people who have made it, who have succeeded against the odds, who have proven that long shots do come in.” Add to that list people who advertisers can sell things to. As Johnson’s broadcast counterpart, BET’s Robert Johnson, put it, “Our goals are the same: to provide content to an underserved audience and convince advertisers that these are consumers who need to be reached.” In AIDS, as with other topics, this combined focus on the positive and the monied constrained Johnson’s rendering of Black America. According to Cohen’s review, both Jet and Ebony’s AIDS coverage narrowly focused on celebrities like Arthur Ashe and Magic Johnson and on how HIV altered middle class, heterosexual dating norms. While these issues are valid and important, the magazines were all but silent about two of the Black epidemic’s most heavily impacted groups: injection drug users and openly gay men. But Johnson was a publisher, not a public health advocate. So why does it matter how his magazines covered HIV? Because in a 2004 Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 71 percent of respondents cited media as their primary source of information about HIV/AIDS, compared to 9 percent who cited health care providers. Almost two-thirds of African Americans said they know someone who is either HIV positive now or has died from AIDS-related illnesses. So media is important -- and particularly community media, as previous Kaiser surveys have found that African Americans and immigrants are far more likely to trust community-based media when it comes to health issues. Today’s Black media giants are rising to the challenge – NNPA’s George Curry, American Urban Radio Network’s Jerry Lopes, Tavis Smiley and others on both the national and local level have committed to giving their readers, listeners and viewers consistent and full coverage of the epidemic. Others will surely follow on the path -- one which Johnson helped blaze. So while his publications may not have hosted a full conversation on AIDS, Johnson will be remembered for getting the talking started when others ignored it altogether. Kai Wright is editor of BlackAIDS.org.
African Americans are more supportive of HIV vaccine research than the general population, according to a government-led survey, but are far more likely to believe participating in one puts them at risk for contracting HIV. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a division of the National Institutes of Health, released the findings from its survey last week. Between December 2002 and February 2003, NIAID polled just over 3,500 U.S. adults to find out what Americans think about the search for an HIV vaccine. Researchers first surveyed 2,008 people randomly selected from the general population, then polled another 1,501 people from three groups hit hard by AIDS -- African Americans, Latinos and homosexual and bisexual men. The results, which will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, shed light on questions that have plagued vaccine researchers for years: Why do fewer people of color participate in vaccine trials and what can be done to change that fact? The NIAID survey suggests that one answer is African Americans simply don’t know enough about the process. Black respondents to the poll sent mixed messages about their level of trust in AIDS research. Almost half of Blacks in the poll, 47 percent, said they believed an HIV vaccine already exists and is being kept secret. Only 18 percent of the general population and 26 percent of Latinos said the same. Yet, 55 percent of African Americans nevertheless said they trust the U.S. government to protect volunteers in vaccine research trials, roughly on par with the general population. Researchers however found that African Americans and Latinos are deeply misinformed about what exactly vaccine research does. No vaccine “candidate” -- as researchers call the various experimental vaccines now being tested -- causes actual HIV infection. But 78 percent of Blacks and 68 percent of Latinos polled either thought they could get HIV through the vaccines being tested or did not know whether it was possible. Only 24 percent of the general population made the same mistake. “It is clear that we have a lot of work to do in explaining vaccine research,” said study co-author Matthew Murguia in a NIAID press statement announcing the results. Despite their uncertainty about the process, African Americans strongly supported it as an idea. Eighty-six percent felt it was important to personally support vaccine research in some way, and Blacks were more likely than any other group to express “strong support” for family members volunteering for trials (35 percent, as opposed to 29 percent of the general population). The search for an HIV vaccine is a long and slow one. Each trial must go through years of lab and animal testing before beginning with human volunteers. Around 40 potential vaccines have made it into human trials, but none yet has shown lasting promise. According to the NIAID statement, there are more than 30 human trials either now underway or in planning stages. Those trials will require tens of thousands of volunteers. “It is essential that current and future trials involve volunteers from diverse communities,” said NIAID Director Anthony Fauci, “to enable us to find a vaccine that works for all populations.”
Column: The Politics of AIDS
By Kai Wright
The nation’s governors have finally said uncle. Last month, they gave in to the Bush administration’s reckless plans for slicing up the nation’s health care safety net. The National Governor’s Association summer meeting in Iowa rightly focused on the largest problem most of them face, both fiscally and politically: What to do about their states’ skyrocketing healthcare costs. Their solution was to make poor people pay for it. Medicaid -- a joint state- and federally-funded program that provides health insurance for the poor -- has been a budget buster for just about every state in recent years. Nearly all of them have instituted some sort of cost-control restriction this fiscal year -- at least 43 limited access to prescription drugs in some way, 15 tightened eligibility, nine cut benefits. Medicaid is the largest single payer for AIDS treatment in America, covering almost half of people in treatment today. Positive African Americans in particular turn to the public insurance program. Only 14% of positive Blacks have private insurance, compared to 44 percent of whites living with the virus; 64% of Blacks in treatment for AIDS pay for it with Medicaid or Medicare. Currently, the federal contribution to state Medicaid programs rises to meet their needs, with the feds kicking in a prearranged share of the costs, no matter how high they go. Since the first Bush term, the White House has been pushing a plan to turn the federal contribution into a fixed, lump sum payment -- which would leave states holding the bill for the upwardly spiraling costs. In reaction to that effort, states have in turn been urging the feds to either pay more or relieve them from a litany of long-standing federal rules designed to protect Medicaid’s beneficiaries. This spring, Congress passed a budget plan that made it clear that Washington is in no mood to give out more money. The budget blueprint, passed at the administration’s urging, would cut Medicaid spending by $10 billion over the next five years, while handing out another $106 billion in tax cuts over the same time period. So the governors circled their wagons and emerged with a plan to trim the program’s costs before Congress does it for them. At its core is a proposal to allow Medicaid to begin charging co-pays – the first step in devolving the safety net’s costs to the people it’s supposed to be helping, people who are already living at the poverty level. The governors’ plan also asks for more “flexibility” in designing their states’ programs. That would mean the end of a national standard for what level of healthcare is considered a basic need in America. It would likely also mean forcing poor women to face the same sorts of bizarre hurdles and mazes that welfare “reform” presented. One example of what states may do with their new “flexibility” can be found right in Iowa. There, a pilot program wields co-pays as incentives for healthier choices: lose weight, and you don’t have to pay anything for your care; keep packing on pounds and it’s coming out of your own pocket. Another option, of course, would have been to invest in prevention by encouraging doctors’ office visits where patients could learn about nutrition. But then, that wouldn’t be in keeping with the declared intent of the incoming NGA chair, Arkansas’ Republican Gov. Mike Huckabee, to focus on personal responsibility in healthcare. While some Democrats made meek noises about the co-pay proposal, all 50 governors signed onto the larger plan. That leaves nobody but healthcare advocates standing against Medicaid’s erosion. The governors’ plan does demand greater rebates from drug companies, and some governors noted that they wouldn’t exercise their co-pay options. But as any public policy vet will tell you, the real threat is in having ceded the intellectual ground. If Congress embraces the governors’ proposals, America will have discarded a central tenet of its once Great Society – that there exists a basic standard of health care that even those who can’t pay for it deserve. Kai Wright is editor of BlackAIDS.org. His Politics of AIDS column appears monthly. A version of this month's column was syndicated to daily newspapers through the Progressive Media Project.
Positive Poetry
By Tim'm West
between infection and affection Lovemaking shouldn't be so psychological. There are strong arms to hold some body with At such a juncture, there is often the seductive fantasy This peom was first published in Tim'm West's 2003 collection Red Dirt Revival.
there is the utter unfairness of over-contemplating
deep kisses,
somebody's rejection of not just your truth,
but your essence, your positive spirit.
There is the soft brown flesh around you
strugglin' against obsessions with guilt, disclosure,
and the dirty you are sometimes made to feel
for loving this way.
There is the battle waged in the body,
but a gym membership and good looks
to mask it.
There are guilty erections.
There is evidence that it is still ecstatic, magical,
sticky-sweet, carefree, sexy
and that the right kind of baritone
gets you hard.
and a beautiful boy before you...
but tonight, you need to be held.
And though your heart knows no ill-intent,
it fails sometimes to beat on-beat,
and skips
becomes insecure, volatile, loses its rhythm...
especially when it senses another heart
across a crowded smoky bar
with an intense gaze to match your own.
that there is no infection
just you and he and your reciprocal affection:
knowing his soul, opening your own
trusting the safety of condoms and intentions.