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Blacks Are the 'Invisible Man (Woman)' at AIDS Conference
For New Pittsburgh Courier | http://newpittsburghcourier.com/?article=5521
Friday July 16, 2004
by George E. Curry
BANGKOK, Thailand (NNPA) – Although African-Americans represent more than half of all new AIDS cases diagnosed in the United States each year, they were virtually invisible among the hundreds of presenters at the 15th International AIDS
Conference.
“The theme of this year’s global conference AIDS conference is ‘Access for all,’” observes Phill Wilson, executive director of the Black AIDS Institute, a Los Angeles-based HIV/AIDS policy center. “I keep looking for the fine print. I can’t find it, but it must be there. Access for all – except African-Americans."
“… 21,000 African-Americans are diagnosed with AIDS every year and more than 185,000 are living with AIDS today,” Wilson says in a statement. “Those numbers might pale in comparison to what we’re seeing in South Africa and Zimbabwe. But tell that to Keith Cylar, an African-American activist with AIDS who died two months ago. Tell it to Jonathan Perry, a student at Johnson C. Smith University in North Carolina, who was infected his freshman year in college."
Pernessa C. Seele, founder and CEO of Balm in Gilead, a nongovernmental New York-based that mobilizes the faith community in the U.S. and Africa, suspects there is a racial component to lack of Blacks playing key roles in the conference.
“When this was seen as a primarily a gay, White male disease, there was all kind of interest in what was happening in the United States,” says Seele. “But now that most
of those contracting HIV/AIDS are Black, no one seems to care."
Wilson says that of more than 5,000 presentations at the conference – 445 oral presentations and 5,232 posters – only 10 were related to African-Americans.
“Whether it’s intention or not, it definitely sends a message that AIDS does not impact Black people,” Wilson says. “It undermines our efforts for prevention and it undermines our effort to get people into treatment. Here we are at the most important HIV scientific conference in the world and we’re absent."
Wilson says he discussed the paucity of Black presentations with conference organizers.
“When I asked on of the conference organizers about the dearth of information concerning African-Americans, I was reminded that the Black epidemic is a domestic one and told this is a global conference,” Wilson recalls. “There is no global epidemic; all epidemics are domestic and the African-American one is no less legitimate than any other. You can drive through parts of Washington, D.C., or Detroit or East St. Louis and see images that remind you of Johannesburg, Harare or Nairobi. In fact, some African-American sub-populations, the AIDS rate rival those of sub-Saharan Africa."
He said Blacks are caught between two major perceptions.
“Structurally, when people think of prevention, they think about it in a geographic paradigm,” Wilson notes. “The United States means rich and, quite frankly, to the rest of the world, it means White. Africa means poor and it means crime. For African-Americans, we get left out completely."
Blacks are also partly at fault for not have a larger role at the conference, Wilson says.
“There are so few African-Americans who are in leadership roles around fighting HIV and AIDS that that limits our ability to impact HIV policy,” he says. “The people who organize these meetings don’t think about us when they organize them. The reason they don’t think us is because we’re not there."
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