An Opportune Moment—If We Act
As a 52-year-old Black gay man with HIV, I have many reasons to welcome the inauguration of Barack Obama. A big one is that an Obama administration has enormous potential to reinvigorate a struggle that has been allowed to flag over the last eight years: our national fight against HIV/AIDS.
With our country facing so many challenges—two wars, a financial meltdown and the growing threat of environmental devastation—it may be tempting to relegate the AIDS epidemic to the lower rung of national priorities. That would be a grave mistake.
Every year, more than 56,000 people in this country contract HIV. The devastation is worst among Black Americans, who represent nearly half of all new HIV infections, including two-thirds of the new cases among women and 70 percent of the new cases among adolescents. AIDS clearly has affected certain groups more than others. But as then-Sen. Obama said in 2006: “We are all sick because of AIDS—and we are all tested by this crisis.
It is a test not only of our willingness to respond, but of our ability to look past the artificial divisions and debates that have often shaped that response.” AIDS, in short, is a sickness at the very heart of the American family. Like any family, America must respond to the sickness in its midst by displaying both solidarity with those who are living with HIV and a determination to make sure no one else gets infected.
This report—Making Change Real, the 2009 installment of our annual State of AIDS in Black America series—details both the promise and the peril of the era we now enter.