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The Garvey Corner
AIDS PANDEMIC HAS EXPLODED
RATES OF INFECTION ACROSS THE BLACK COMMUNITY.
EMERGING
CRISIS
Single women are the heads
of household in approximately 45 percent of African American
households. Children raised in such homes are five times more
likely to live in poverty. As much as they have been harangued
for all of society ills, young black mothers are being threatened
from a much more malicious source. Black women have now supplanted
gay white men at the center of the HIV epidemic and it is
being further reflected in exposure of their young teenage
children who have accounted for over half of all HIV cases
for the 13-24 age group ever reported. Ebony magazine has
reported that AIDS was the number one killer of young black
women in many major urban areas and among the three top causes
of death for black women ages 35 to 44. Studies show that
black women are no more promiscuous than white women to explain
the fact that HIV rate for black women is approximately 20
times that of white women.
Black women are not more promiscuous than other groups of
women, but they are the least likely to be married of all
women because most live in communities where men are more
scarce according to researchers. As black men cycle in and
out of jail and prison, black women are torn from relationships
and go on to have "more concurrent relationships,"
or more than one partner in communities where more people
are infected, according to an article, " Social Context,
Sexual Networks and Racial Disparities in Rates of Sexually
Transmitted Infections," written by Adimora and Victor
J. Schoenbach, an associate professor in UNC's school of medicine.
"Incarceration directly affects sexual networks through
disruption of existing partnerships," Adimora and Schoenbach
wrote. Black men entering prison are placed in an environment
with "a pool of individuals among whom . . . high risk
sexual behaviors, HIV infection and other sexually transmitted
infections are high."
The explosion of AIDS in the Black community has now been
tied directly to the growth in the prison rates of Black men
in the drug wars of the 1982-1996, during which the overall
U.S. prison population doubled. In 1982, Black men accounted
for 40 percent of the overall prison population. Black AIDS
victims were 25% of the total US AIDS population. By 2002,
Blacks were over 50% of the prison population which had doubled
and over 50% of the AIDS population, even though we are 12%
of the overall population. Wash. Post
Across the black population, which is 12 percent of the total
U.S. population, our infection rates are approaching pandemic
levels, easily over 50 percent of infected individuals across
all demographics, age and sex. Personally, the loss of two
sisters and a host of infected family and friends have already
brought home the stark reality of the emerging crisis for
the black family. While we scream at the funerals of those
violently deceased, to which we have contributed a brother
to Cypress Hills cemetery in NYC, building roadside commemorations
to their thuggish life, and anguish over the unfair and long
sentences of the drug wars, another brother donating 18 years
of his youthful life in the federal penitentiary, there is
a mere silence for the victims of the greatest threat to the
black family since crack cocaine.
Marlon Charles
MAY 2006
A Luta Continua.
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