Miami Herald - February 5, 2007
Leonard Pitts Jr., lpitts@MiamiHerald.com

Eight years ago, the statistics were terrifying: 9,526 African Americans dead of AIDS in 1997, the latest year for which figures were then available. At 13 percent of the nation's population, African Americans accounted for 36 percent of its AIDS cases.

Eight years ago, I wrote this: "The silence, the absence of voices raised in fear, raised in warning, raised in alarm -- raised -- is deafening."

Eight years later, the silence is still loud and the numbers are worse. Blacks now account for nearly half of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses and contract AIDS at a rate 10 times that of whites. Sixty-four percent of all American women living with HIV/AIDS are black. AIDS is the leading cause of death for black women 25 to 34 years old.

And eight years later, Gaye's advice still haunts. Because while poverty plays a role in those ghastly numbers, while access to healthcare and lack of information are factors, who can deny that the main reason for this plague is the silence, the closed-mouth social conservatism, the priggish moral rectitude, of a people still ill at ease discussing sexuality, homosexuality, drug use and other realities. Instead, we mouth piety, prayers and platitudes while the world burns down around us.

A DAY OF AWARENESS

Wednesday is National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, as declared six years ago by the Community Capacity Building Coalition, an affiliate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. If Gil L. Robertson IV, an Atlanta-based journalist, has his way, it will be the last AIDS Day of silence. He is the brother of a man with HIV and the editor of Not In My Family, an anthology of essays on HIV/AIDS by African-American writers. (Full disclosure: Not In My Family was published by the same company that released the paperback version of my book, Becoming Dad.)

Robertson has gathered an eclectic cross section of African America. Some you know (Patti LaBelle, Mo'Nique, Joycelyn Elders), most you've never heard of. They are preachers, politicians, professors, writers, activists and one porn star. But there are no hip-hop artists despite, Robertson says, his best efforts to recruit them. The unwillingness of those icons of loud and lusty machismo to speak about AIDS speaks volumes about the conflictedness of African America. Sex and violence they can talk about, but AIDS cows them to silence.

EXPRESSIONS OF CONCERN

The book, Robertson says, is an effort at breaking that silence. "It was an opportunity for black folks to sound off and engage in dialogue that would indicate to the rest of society that we are concerned."

In the aggregate, the essays depict a community coming slowly to terms with the fact that silence kills. Writer Ivory Brown anguishes over the loss of her soul's brother, a white hair stylist who died of AIDS. The Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, seems palpably torn, walking a narrow ledge between concerns of flesh and faith. And fear.

"I hope folks will stop being afraid of this disease," says Robertson. "I hope this [book] will result in a growing willingness to discuss sex and sexuality openly without all of these mixed messages."

Amen. It is no coincidence that the communities where that discussion happens freely are the communities where death from AIDS has sharply declined. African America needs to quit pretending homosexuality does not exist, intravenous drug use does not exist. It needs to pull its collective head out of the sand and follow Marvin Gaye's advice.

Otherwise, something else he said in that song will still be true -- preventably true -- eight years from now.

Mother, mother, too many of you crying.

Brother, brother, far too many of you dying.

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