What if Black America Was a Country unto Itself?
Welcome to Left Behind, the latest in a series of reports on the state of AIDS in Black America by the Black AIDS Institute.
While the world wasn’t looking, the AIDS epidemic in the United States refused to go away. In fact, the domestic AIDS epidemic in the U.S. is much more serious than previously believed. According to analyses of epidemiological data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the annual rate of new HIV infections is nearly 50% higher than previously believed.
And as America lost interest in its own epidemic over the last decade, the disease became even more firmly implanted in Black America. Nearly 600,000 Black Americans are living with HIV, and as many as 30,000 become newly infected each year. In New York City, Blacks living with HIV have an age-adjusted death rate that is two and a half times higher than for HIV-infected whites.
According to public opinion surveys, Blacks regard AIDS as the country’s most serious health threat. America’s opinion leaders and policy makers apparently don’t share this view. In recent years, domestic AIDS issues have virtually disappeared from the front pages of the nation’s daily newspapers and from the evening news. And funding from governmental agencies and most foundations for essential programs to prevent new infections and treat people living with HIV in the U.S. has declined in real terms in recent years.
For much of the AIDS epidemic, an impediment to progress in Black America has been the shortage of Black leadership, activism and mobilization to address the disease. This is no longer the case. Black leaders, political organizations, civil rights groups, churches and community groups across the U.S. are mobilizing to wage battle against this most serious of health problems facing Black America. So what’s missing?
In this report, we point out that Black America is lacking a partner in the federal government when it comes to fighting AIDS, and in many ways has been left behind by most foundations and almost all global health agencies. As America goes to the polls in 2008 to decide the country’s future, this report argues that official neglect of the epidemic in Black America must become a thing of the past.
This report underscores the ironies in the U.S. government’s failure to take AIDS in Black America seriously by juxtaposing the federal response to the domestic epidemic in recent years with its pioneering leadership on global AIDS issues. This isn’t meant to suggest that U.S. leadership on the global epidemic is misplaced. On the contrary, helping lead the global response to AIDS is one of the most important actions the U.S. has taken in the international arena in decades. It might even be the one shining example in an otherwise dismal foreign policy agenda. The point of this report, rather, is that the same zeal, wisdom and courage our government is now showing on global issues must be brought to bear in the fight against AIDS at home.