AIDS in blackface.

Abstract

MY AMBITION IN THE PAGES THAT FOLLOW ?S tO account for why we African-Americans have been reluc tant to the AIDS epidemic, to acknowledge the devastating toll it is taking on our communities,1 and to take responsibility for altering its course. By the end, I hope to convince you that what may appear to the uninitiated to be a crazy, self defeating refusal to stand up and be counted is in fact sane, sensible, and determinedly self-protective. The black community's impulse to distance itself from the epidemic is less a response to AIDS, the medical phenomenon, than a reaction to the myriad social issues that surround the disease and give it its meaning. More fundamentally, it is the predictable outgrowth of the problematic relationship between the black community and the larger society, a relationship character ized by domination and subordination, mutual fear and mutual disrespect, a sense of otherness and a pervasive neglect that rarely feels benign. If I am right, then there is a profound need to reorient the public health enterprise so that it can succeed in a multicultural society. Public health officials cannot simply wander uptown (or wherever the local black ghetto is situated), their expertise in one hand, their goodwill in the other, and expect to slay the disease dragon. They must first discern just who this particular public is and how it sees itself in relation to them. How does the black community see its own