This Era of Black Women and HIV/AIDS – Inclusion

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Are these statistics overwhelming?! But so, too, is the failure of leadership African Americans have faced since the epidemic began. And no group of women is as affected by the failure of leadership in this country than women of African descent.

American women and their struggle against the AIDS epidemic was never so glaringly obvious than in the 2004 vice presidential debate between Dick Cheney and John Edwards. The invisibility of my group’s plight has less to do with African-American women’s agency to combat the epidemic than with how the government, African-American men, the Black Church, and race and gender biases inherent in the problem collude with African-American women’s efforts to get help.

Gwen Ifill, an African-American female journalist with PBS’ Washington Week and moderator of the vice presidential debate, brought the issue of AIDS in the U.S. front and center when she asked the men to comment on its devastating impact on African-American women.

“I want to talk to you about AIDS, and not about AIDS in China or Africa, but AIDS right here in this country, where black women between the ages of 25 and 44 are 13 times more likely to die of the disease than their counterparts. What should the government’s role be in helping to end the growth of this epidemic?” Ifill asked.

Vice President Cheney responded to Ifill’s question by saying, “Here in the United States, we’ve made significant progress. I have not heard those numbers with respect to African-American women. I was not aware that it was – that they’re in epidemic there.” Edwards’ response wasn’t any better. Edwards deflected the question by first going back to answering the previous question. Then with the remaining seconds left, he flubbed his way through.

However, three years later, at this June’s Democratic Primary Debate at Howard University that focused on African American issues ranging from health care and housing to Katrina relief, the economy and the environment, Black women stood on their feet as they applauded Sen. Hillary Clinton’s comment about the impact of HIV/AIDS on African American women. “Let me just put this in perspective: If HIV-AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34 there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”

“There are many women, too many women, in relationships with men who they think they know but really don’t. He knew he had the disease, his mother knew he had the disease, his doctors knew, everyone seemed to know except me. And no one said a word,” LaJoyce Brookshire wrote in the foreword of Browder’s book, herself author of Faith Under Fire: Betrayed by a Thing Called Love. While homophobic attitudes in the larger African-American community and church contribute to their behavior, African-American men are also not taking responsibility for how their behavior is killing African-American women, and putting the entire community at risk.

The disparities within the healthcare system also contribute to the disproportionately higher number of HIV cases among African-American women, and this directly affects their quality of life and the spread of HIV. While healthcare disparities in the black community are overwhelming, so too is the failure of leadership that African Americans have faced since the epidemic began.

“The story of AIDS in America is mostly one of a failure to lead, and nowhere is this truer than in our black communities,” said Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, at the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto.

Therefore, women with AIDS are as unwelcome in the Black Church as LGBT people. Within Black Nationalist milieus like the Black Church and the Nation of Islam, African-American women with AIDS are also viewed as race traitors. In this patriarchal straightjacket, biological essentialist views are as holy and deified as the Bible itself. And with the belief that women are to multiply and bring forth new life for the perpetuation of the race, women with AIDS lose their status in the community. Often labeled as “loose” for having contracted the virus, she is viewed as not only diseased but also dangerous because her sexual wiles continue to seduce men. A woman with AIDS is a fallen woman, not only for having contracted the disease, but also for having disregarded the policing of sexual behavior by the Black Church.

While some women have felt shamed and stigmatized by the Black Church for contracting the virus and have stayed away, many more have fought back with a righteous indignation. One of our sister warriors in Boston, Belynda Dunn, who died of AIDS in March, 2002, at the age of 49, had done so. As a tireless AIDS activist, Dunn was the founder and director of the multicultural multidisciplinary Who Touched Me Ministry, an initiative to educate black churches in stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS in their communities. She was the HIV Prevention Manager and Educator for the Boston-based AIDS Action Committee.

As a heterosexual African-American woman, Dunn was the wake-up call to the African-American community and the Black Church that HIV/AIDS is not solely a gay disease, but an equal opportunity virus. In her tireless effort to get the Black Church to see this epidemic through her as a Christian heterosexual female, Dunn became the driving force behind making the African-American community confront its homophobia and AIDSphobia.

“Belynda really lit a fire under me. That’s what Belynda did with everyone. She really helped us cross ideological lines and theological lines and not get hung up on the homosexual issue. She said to the Black Church: ‘Get over it,'” according to Dunn’s pastor, the Rev. Martin McLee of Union United Methodist Church in Boston’s South End, the only African-American church in Boston welcoming of its LGBT and HIV-positive members.

“She was known for her strength, her charisma and her vision. She had the ability to fight even when no one was listening. She was able to cut through the levels of denial. She wanted to turn this epidemic around and her vehicle to do that was the Black Church,” AIDS Action’s then-executive director, Larry Kessler, told a newspaper back in 2002. Ironically, she died the week when black churches in the greater Boston area held AIDS prayer services, but sadly, most black churches still turned a deaf ear to Dunn’s call for action.

In African-American communities across this country, the disease still shows no sign of abating. Black cadaverous bodies have hid and still hide from the community and each other. And with its harsher judgment against women with HIV/AIDS, African-American women are less likely than any other group to seek help.

The feminization of this disease makes many of us AIDS activists and scholars wonder if the same amount of money, concern, communication, and moral outrage that was put into white gay men with the disease will be put into curbing its spread among black women. “What do we need to know to provide better HIV and AIDS prevention services to African-American women?” Dr. Gerri Outlaw, an African-American lesbian and chair of the Department of Social Work at the College of Health Professions at Governors State University in Illinois, asked in 2005, leading to setting up the pilot project “Women Making Meaning of HIV and AIDS in Economically Marginal African-American Communities: Implications for Community-Based Education.”

Working in conjunction with the “Politic of silence” is what African-American women historically created as a “culture of dissemblance” and “the politic of respectability,” the silence African-American women created around their bodies and sexuality that had been exploited during slavery was viewed as a revolutionary act against the white oppressive gaze.

The “culture of dissemblance” was a proactive black feminist politic that aimed to protect the sanctity of the interior aspects of African-American women’s social and sexual lives. Darlene Clark Hines, professor of history at Northwestern University and editor of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, defines this culture as “the behavior and attitudes of black women that created the appearance of openness and disclosure but actually shielded the truth of their inner lives and selves from their oppressor.”Only with secrecy could African-American women achieve the psychic and sexual space to protect their bodies and sexuality.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, professor of history at Harvard University and author of Righteous Discount: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, points out that the “politics of respectability” emphasized reform of personal behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations. Higginbotham also points out that through the discourse of respectability, the women’s movement in the black Baptist Church emphasized manners and morals while simultaneously asserting traditional forms of protest, such as petitions, boycotts, and verbal appeals to justice.

African-American women are no more promiscuous than white women, however, stereotypes about African-American women’s bodies and sexualitities prevent the proper prevention and education needed to stem the tide of HIV/AIDS.

The iconography of black women is predicated on four racist cultural images: the Jezebel, the Sapphire, Aunt Jemima, and Mammy. With the image of the strong black women who can endure anything and “make a way out of no way,” her strength is either demonized as being emasculating of black men or impervious to the human condition. The Aunt Jemima and Mammy stereotypes are now conflated into what’s called “Big Mamma” in today’s present iconography of racist and sexist images of African-American women.

But the suffering can stop by breaking the silence with SISTA (Sisters Informing Sisters About Topics on AIDS), an intervention program that helps African American women reduce their risky sexual behaviors, and WILLOW (Women Involved in Life Learning from Other Women), an intervention program for women living with HIV.