Black women must fix behavior or risk death from AIDS

JWR ^ | 4-25-05 | Rochelle Riley

[FlyLow]

Dr. Gail Wyatt has a message for black women: We need to change our views and actions regarding sexuality.

Or die.

Nearly three-quarters of America's new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are African-American women. Black women between 25 and 44 are 13 times more likely to die of the disease than white women of the same age.

It is one of the most underreported news stories of this new decade, and sadly, more women will die before we pay attention.

Black women and their sexuality are the focus of Wyatt's research since she conducted the first study of black women's sexuality in 1980. A professor and associate director of the AIDS Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles, she included 4,000-5,000 women ages 18-80 in her research for "Stolen Women: Reclaiming Our Sexuality, Taking Back Our Lives" (Wiley, $12.95).

She concluded that black women are too easily influenced by what others think of us and depreciate ourselves based on those opinions.

"There isn't any group in the world that has experienced what we have, over 400 years of the kind of slavery we experienced, isolated in language, physical contact and relationships developed at the whim of someone else."

Wyatt says many black women have no healthy perspective to use to model relationships.

"Since we've failed to address the problem, we go limping along, trying to walk but never having a chance to heal." Black women's sexuality "is looked upon by others as aberrant, hypersexual, irresponsible, spontaneous and at the risk of one's life, one's health and well-being. The irony of it is that ... we have women who are actually living their lives as a stereotype, and they don't even know it. ..."

[cyborg]

This article is RIGHT ON THE MARK.

[jocon307]

"Nearly three-quarters of America's new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, are African-American women."

That is a pretty bad statistic, I gotta say.

[freebilly]

Wyatt says many black women have no healthy perspective to use to model relationships

BS...

[twas]

This article is right on the mark?

"There isn't any group in the world that has experienced what we have, over 400 years of the kind of slavery we experienced, isolated in language, physical contact and relationships developed at the whim of someone else."

Wyatt says many black women have no healthy perspective to use to model relationships.

Blaming slavery and arguing that black women are incapable of recognizing healthy sexual behavior (ie. monogamy) seem way off the mark to me.

[caver]

I assume that the majority of these women are contracting AIDS from black men? Maybe there is more of the problem.

[cyborg]

That's YOUR uninformed opinion. I live in a predominantly black community and interact with MANY black women on a daily basis.

[cyborg]

No you don't get it. I do get it because of where I live and the people I meet everyday. FReepers really need to stop having such a kneejerk reaction when they read things about slavery and black people.

[Bruceski]

But you have to question any "scientist" who after gathering her data sounds more like an activist than an objective observer. I would question the results of any study from an academic -- like this one -- who uses her data to promote a political message.

[Redbob]

It's ALMOST "right on the mark."

The problem is not their "sexuality," it's their BEHAVIOR.

That's an important and not very subtle difference.

[cyborg]

Yes it's a big problem but the whole 'downlow' phenomena is not being discussed in a way that would help solve the problem IMHO. There are maybe one or two books on black male homosexuality and the discussion hasn't been good.

[cyborg]

I think she's right though and more women need to hear this message. Actually parts of what she is saying can be universally applied.

[cyborg]

A warped sense of sexuality leads to bad behavior. They're both connected. If a woman doesn't value herself, she will treat herself accordingly.

[yankeedame]

Blaming slavery and arguing that black women are incapable of recognizing healthy sexual behavior (ie. monogamy) seem way off the mark...

And a more than a little condescending.

[mhking]

My only problem with the piece, and be extension, Dr. Wyatt's statements are tied to the really old mantra of "400 years of slavery that we've expereienced..."

If she's publishing today, she's pretty damn spry for a young woman of 400 years of age.

Outside of that almost obligatory mantra, she's right. Black women do need to take personal responsibility for their own actions and their own sexual actualization. Then, perhaps, black women might come down off of that not-so-lofty perch of being the top social group victimized by AIDS.

Black conservative ping

If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)

Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.

[freebilly]

I live in a predominantly black community and interact with MANY black women on a daily basis.

Sorry, your opinion is that black women have no healthy perspective from which to model relationships. I know plenty of black, yellow, white people who use Christian principles and relationships drawn from the Bible on which to model their own relationships.

Of course, why follow the examples of Esther, Ruth, and Mary when you can use Whitney Houston as a role model...?

[The_Reader_David]

Not quite: it overlooks the fact that the sexual culture among America's poor (which by and large includes the black women whose behavior the author is discussing) was shaped by 1960's social policy--benefits originally directed toward poor married women with children were extended to unmarried women by an 'equal protection' court decision, and we got subsidized illegitimacy, and subsidized male irresponsibility.

Until then, I understand from reading social scientists, while one out-of-wedlock birth to a woman was quite common, the norm among American blacks was for the father to wed the mother and form a family. Beginning in the 60's that would have often meant the loss of social benefits, since the couple wouldn't qualify on the needs test. Without the formation of families, the fluid sexuality seen among America's poor became the norm. (And I want to hear nothing about 'decay of moral values'--as an Orthodox Christian, I know that only marriage and monasticism are stable guarantees of chastity. However moral one tries to be, long term virginity in the world is dangerous, and long term unmarried chastity in the world after repentence from fornication is almost impossible.)

The rise of AIDS among black women is another great legacy of legislation-from-the-bench.

[agere_contra]

Black women in US are NOT more likely to get the so-called Aids virus.

However they ARE far more likely to show reactivity on the ELISA or Western Blot serological tests (aka the "HIV tests")

These are blood protein tests. Certain groups of humanity have very different blood serologies from the caucasian norm, and so show up as seropositive when they are, in fact, not.

It's not only blood serology that throws these tests off. There are about 70 conditions (such as ancestral exposure to malaria, malnutrition, being pregnant and a whole host of others) that cause false-positives but "being black" is right up there.

The HIV tests are junk anyway - they haven't been calibrated against an isolate of the HIV virus. This means that we cannot know the false positive rate of the tests among any test population that isn't composed of fit healthy people.

But the false positive rate (whatever it is) is going to be many times higher when testing clades of humanity that are prone to sickle cell or "sticky blood" syndrome.

Fellow Freepers, please don't fall into the trap of making assumptions about behaviour based on the results of these tests. All known HIV tests are useless because they are uncalibrated. All that the article tells us is that the test are more useless on black people. Until the virus has been isolated we cannot meaningfully test for HIV. It's been twenty years - you have to wonder what the hold-up is.

[cyborg]

I agreee with you. I can tell you that's not the predominant mentality though, especially in the inner cities where one mindset is accepted and circulated.

[LWalk18]

Biblical examples are well and good but most people take their behavioral cues from 1)parents and 2)the world around them. When you have an illegitmacy rate of 70%, it means that most young black girls, particularly in the inner city, see marriage as an almost foreign institution.