Issue Features |

Issue Features |

From the January/February 2011 issue
Breaking the Silence

In honor of National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on February 7, HIV Plus takes a look at some of the creative ways organizations are utilizing images of African-Americans to contain, and eventually defeat, HIV in this hard-hit community
By Neal Broverman

At age 19, Marvelyn Brown thought she’d met her Prince Charming. He was sweet, attentive, and hot—so when he asked to have sex one time without a condom, she obliged. Brown worried about getting pregnant, not about getting HIV, but contracting the virus was exactly what happened.

“At that age, I didn’t care about HIV,” says Brown, now 26. “It wasn’t an issue of mine. Up until then, my concerns were boys, school, and the prom. HIV was really at the bottom of the totem pole.”

Brown is now an AIDS activist, and often speaks about the importance of treatment and testing in New York City and Nashville, the cities where she splits her time. Her story is heartbreaking, yet inspiring. And it’s exactly the kind of relatable tale that an expansive media campaign called Greater Than AIDS hopes will encourage African-Americans, a group hit especially hard by HIV, to stay vigilant against the disease. This approach is emblematic of a new kind of campaign, featuring black faces and personal testimonies—on subway cars, on YouTube screens, and even on the fans fluttered by ladies in church, to reduce the stigma and change the perception of HIV.

Brown tells her story on the website for Greater Than AIDS (GreaterThan.org), which includes a microsite called Deciding Moments, which contains a dozen personal stories about people and their relationships with HIV, including African-Americans who remain negative, knowledgeable, and empowered. Launched in the late summer of 2009, Greater than AIDS was sparked by a conversation at the 2008 International AIDS Conference in Mexico City between Phill Wilson, the president and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute, and Tina Hoff, the director of entertainment media partnerships at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health advocacy group.

“At the time of that AIDS conference, the Centers for Disease Control had just released new statistics on infections in the U.S. that showed that the situation wasn’t improving, but was actually worse than we thought it was—with about 40% more infections happening each year” than assumed, Hoff says. “And when you looked at the epidemic in certain communities, particularly black Americans and men who have sex with men, we were seeing trends indicating we may see a rise in those specific groups.”

The hard numbers that Hoff and Wilson saw were indeed disturbing. While African-Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population, they accounted for 51% of all HIV/AIDS cases diagnosed in 2007, according to the CDC figures (the most recent available). The rate of new HIV infections for black men in 2006 was six times higher than for white men and nearly three times that of Latino men. New infection rates for black women, according to the same 2006 numbers, are almost 15 times that of white women and nearly four times that of Latinas. Blacks account for half of the approximately 1.1 million Americans currently living with HIV, according to the Black AIDS Institute.

Even with numbers like that, focus groups conducted in mid 2009 by KFF (not affiliated with the Kaiser Permanente health insurance company) and the Black AIDS Institute showed the issue of AIDS was falling off the radar of African-Americans, mostly because it had fallen off the media’s radar. “AIDS the epidemic is out there, but nobody really talks about it,” said a young woman at one of the focus groups. “That’s probably our biggest disease, lack of knowledge,” said another focus group attendant.