Acknoweldging
that HIV/AIDS has violently ravaged rural and urban black
America, black leaders at the International AIDS Conference
in Toronto on Monday declared war on homophobia and
AIDS.
"The majority of
new HIV infections here are black, the majority of
people who die from AIDS here are black, and the people most
at risk of contracting this virus in the United States
are black," Julian Bond, the longtime chairman of the
NAACP, wrote in a Monday opinion piece for The Washington Post. "AIDS is now in our house.
It's now our problem, and we must come up with
solutions."
And it has a lot
to do with black gay men, according to the Chicago Sun
Times. Nearly 50% of black gay and bisexual men in
some of America's cities are estimated to be infected
with HIV.
Of the 1 million
people who are living with HIV/AIDS, nearly half of them
are black, according to the latest statistics from the U.S.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "AIDS in
America today is black,'' said Phill Wilson, executive
director of the Black AIDS Institute and the driving
force behind what's being called a "national call to action
and declaration of commitment to end the AIDS epidemic in
black America."
The commitment
was personally signed by a lineup of national black
leaders that came to the conference: U.S. representative
Maxine Waters, California Democrat; Pernessa Seele,
founder of the Balm in Gilead, a network of
African-American churches that has been at the forefront of
issues concerning disparity of health care; George Curry of
the National Newspapers Publishers Association; and
Cheryl Cooper of the National Council of Negro Women.
The pledge was
being hailed as historic. It signaled a willingness on the
part of black organizations to move AIDS to the top of their
agendas, and it put these organizations on the spot.
"We call on leaders to lead," Wilson said at a Toronto
press conference. "The AIDS story in America is mostly
one of a failure to lead."
In a media
roundtable discussion put together by the Black AIDS
Institute before the convention kicked off, several
black men who are living with the virus challenged
black journalists to begin the conversation on this
subject. "What is it that the African-American community
believes about homosexuality and why?" one speaker
asked. "We are having a debate about same-sex
marriage--and in my view same-sex marriage isn't in
the top 10 of our agenda. Same-sex marriage is no threat to
anyone else."
This year's
conference marked the first time the Black AIDS Institute
has played a prominent role in conference programming.
The group coordinated several of the sessions geared
toward African-American policy makers. (The Advocate)