AIDS in Black America

A Question of Accountability
ABC has got a special coming on tonight called 'Out of Control: AIDS in Black America.' It was one of the projects the late, Canadian Peter Jennings was working on before he was ethered by lung cancer (sure it was...) about a year ago.

As with any issue of a certain degree of import, it would be easy to spread the blame for the current AIDS epidemic throughout the black community - DL brothers for taking it up the coat and not telling anyone; black women for not having their gaydar in order; the black church for believing in silly bullshit.

But like rock great John Fogerty (as opposed to, say, Kurt Cobain) I never believed in taking the easy way out. Or the short rode home. I wonder if AIDS is yet another one of these issues where the black woman is really at fault but has managed to deflect the blame onto everyone else.

After all, it's black women you see getting AIDS so often and making up, to a disproportionate degree, what's referred to as the black AIDS epidemic. If this was black men catching AIDS as if was a cold, this special would almost certainly be called 'Out of Control: Black Men and AIDS,' if not When AIDS-ridden Niggers Attack! or some such. Meanwhile, black women have arguably less of an excuse for getting AIDS than anyone.

Women command a greater degree of control over their sex lives than men. A man might have to jump through a series of flaming hoops to convince a woman to have sex with him or end up thrown in jail where he gets ethered in the a by other men. A woman can essentially have sex with anyone she wants, like a gay guy, and I think we all know that no woman ever got raped by anyone other than her boyfriend.

Experts tend to agree that the spread of AIDS in the black community, and especially among black women, is due primarily to a) man-sharing among black women, i.e. all black women deciding they want to fuck the same nigga - typically, someone that's likely to have AIDS (pretty boys, thug types), and b) black women having sex with gay men, who probably all have AIDS. And I bet most of them are aware that these guys are fruits.

Denial: It's not just a river in Africa.

So you see, the vast, seemingly inexplicable epidemic of AIDS in the black community is really the fault of the black woman. The fact that it's being characterized as a black issue rather than a black women's issue is yet another example of the media's attempts to demonize the black man and to glorify the black woman at the black man's expense.