According to the Michigan Department of Community Health, the HIV/AIDS rate for blacks, particularly black women in the metro Detroit area (Lapeer, Oakland, Macomb, Monroe, St. Clair and Wayne counties), is almost eight times higher than that of whites.
Latasha Booth, a Wayne State clinical psychology student, said that HIV statistics are typically broken down by county, then zip code. Detroit, is not included in Wayne County because its rate of new HIV cases is so high — there were more than 7,000 cases in 2004, according to the Michigan Department of Community Health.
Booth is just one example of an HIV-positive woman who is trying to raise awareness of the disease. HIV/AIDS was first discovered, and therefore only considered a problem, in gay white males.
In Detroit, women make up 57 percent of new HIV cases and 91 percent of those women are African-American.
Stigma is a large factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS in the black community. Some men in the community have spent time in prisons where homosexual intercourse is not uncommon and STDs can be easily contracted. This type of behavior is not seen as gay, but rather as part of being in jail, or “situational sex.”
“A good man is hard to find in our community,” Booth said. “A lot of our men are locked up.”
Booth said that criminals are tested for HIV/AIDS going into prison, but not coming out.
“A black woman is [seen as] a failure if she doesn’t have a man,” said Dr. Xavier Liverman, who studies issues of race, gender and sexuality in the black community.
On keeping and having sex with the “few good men,” Booth said many women feel that, “If I don’t do it, another woman will.”
“We’ve moved to a point in American society where poverty is being criminalized,” said Liverman, who said that communities below poverty level are typically African-American, while studies show that social and sexual networks are smaller and tighter in the black community than in others.
On Nov. 29, 2008, in preparation for World AIDS Day, the Detroit Free Press ran a page of HIV-related interviews. One included Rosie Hayes of Redford Township, who has been HIV positive since 1996.
“Her goal is to make sure other women in high-risk populations don’t find themselves in her situation,” the Free Press reported.
“Some [heterosexual black women] are aware but not enough in my age range, especially in women of color, have a passion to be educated,” Hayes told the paper.
The Free Press also mentioned Mark Peterson, a local HIV-prevention advocate, who is alive because of the successful passage of government-funded treatment programs.
“Today, he sees the next generation of young men, mostly African-American, still stigmatized for having sex with men and still getting infected in record numbers,” the Free Press reported. “Yet the urgency to fight and prevent HIV is gone. ‘Living with HIV’ is now a catchphrase.”
Booth and Liverman agree that in Detroit, where economic and racial segregation has resulted in the majority of the city living below the poverty line, the best thing for journalists to do in the struggle against HIV/AIDS is to “put it on the front line” and decrease the stigmatization around the disease.
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