Here’s the longterm effect of Obama’s presidency on race relations: Nobody Cares
As an aside: I watched part of a PBS special on race…on the topic of AIDS, black women and commentators were moaning, “nobody told Black people about it. Nobody helped us.”
Truth is, nobody told anyone about it at first, because nobody knew what it was. When it was identified as a sexually transmitted disease, it was all over the news. Daily. For years. Did Black people not read newspapers? Nor watch nightly news shows?
Socialite Mary Fisher, who contracted AIDS from her husband, gave a speech about women and AIDS at the Republican National Convention in 1992. So it was no mystery. How many black women watched that? Or read the books and articles that were coming out daily about women and AIDS? Did they expect personal messages delivered to their doors by FedEx?
The Red Cross now uses the date of 1977 for the start (banning "men who have sex with men" if they have done so since 1977, from donating blood), but I ran across a newspaper story about a black teenager in St. Louis who died from it in the late 1960s. The doctors were mystified about his illness, and he was uncommunicative, so they saved a sample of his blood, and when the AIDS epidemic exploded they had it tested and found that he had had AIDS.