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HIV/AIDS
A potentially fatal transmittable disease that has disproportionately affected African Americans in the United States, as well as millions of blacks in Africa.
The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is transmitted through exposure to blood, semen, vaginal secretions, and breast milk. The virus can remain dormant for months or even years, but if left untreated, it causes a gradual deterioration of the immune system. As the immune system is increasingly depressed, patients develop infections that progress to full-blown acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. Unless patients follow a very strict drug regimen, they will die when their immune systems can no longer resist the infections that attack their bodies.
Early Years of the Epidemic
The first HIV/AIDS patients were young gay men in New York City who began to appear at health clinics in 1981. Doctors deduced that the disease was spread through sexual contact. At first, believing that only homosexuals were susceptible, they named the disease GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). However, when intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs, and heterosexual men and women started to develop the disease, it became clear that the disease did not discriminate between victims. The disease was renamed AIDS.
Nevertheless, AIDS continued to be viewed by both victims and experts as a white middle-class problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) focused early research on members of the white gay community, who were determined to be at “high risk.” When Haitian immigrants began to appear at clinics with the disease, the CDC concluded that AIDS had likely originated in Haiti. Additional research, however, suggested that the virus came from sub-Saharan Africa. Scientific evidence for this theory was inconclusive, but many experts showed social bias by concluding prematurely that AIDS had its roots in non-Western, nonwhite regions of the globe.
While studies on the origins of AIDS focused on the developing world, treatment in the United States continued to serve gay whites and intravenous drug users. However, this strategy overlooked trends that were developing in minority communities. CDC data from 1984, for example, showed that the proportion of heterosexual AIDS patients who were African American far exceeded the African American proportion of the population. That trend grew as heterosexual AIDS cases increased over the next decade.
The Black Community and the Disease
Social and economic challenges that African Americans faced as members of a disadvantaged minority fueled the spread of the disease in the black community. Between 1970 and 1990, the income gap between white and black Americans widened. Low-income African Americans were increasingly living in depressed, racially segregated urban neighborhoods. Intravenous drug use, accounting for the majority of HIV/AIDS transmissions, was high in these areas, and few residents had access to information about the disease. Residents of poor urban neighborhoods also tended to have sex at an earlier age, had sex with more partners, and used condoms less frequently than affluent Americans. Many African American women, lacking financial and emotional independence because of complex social factors, were infected through heterosexual contact.
As the numbers of cases increased in the black community, African American leaders proved slow to address the problem. Religious leaders tended to see AIDS as an issue that affected only gays and drug users—marginalized groups in minority communities where homosexuality remained a delicate subject. Meanwhile, the community centers that had mobilized urban residents in the 1970s were suffering from reduced funding, and they failed to provide education or assistance to victims.
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