Thursday, April 12, 2018
Black Man in a White Coat Chapters 6-10
In Damon Tweedy's Black Man in a White Coat Chapters 6-10, he discusses in Chapter 7 "The Color of HIV/AIDS" how HIV is more prevalent in African American male-to-male contact now, while HIV started out as a predominately white male-to-male contact disease. The question Tweedy addresses is why is HIV/AIDS more prevalent in African American males today. From the reading and what I was thinking, there are a few main factors that come to mind. These factors would be access to sexual education, health care, and sexual dishonesty in the black community. From my experience of sex ed, it was actually a health class where I learned about how to be healthy, give CPR, and watched a C-section video. We never actually talked about STIs or how to practice safe sex, and my high school was in an extremely rich area with predominately white students, and I still didn't learn about safe sex; thus, I can't even image how lower educations take on STIs or safe sex could be. Though Tweedy seems to lean towards it being worse of than my experience, and I, sadly, agree. As for health care, we know from reading Henrietta Lacks' story that African American people get worse health care, and in return, don't go to the doctors as much as they should/ would like to. Nevertheless, treatment for HIV/AIDS is expensive and without health care almost unattainable for some. Lastly, Tweedy talked about Monica-- a black female who was HIV positive-- and she had no idea how she had gotten it because she had sex with only two men in her life that she thought she knew (Tweedy, 170). The man that most likely had HIV was Larry he ex-boyfriend that Monica's mother presumed was gay. From what Tweedy stated in the book, black communities are more homophobic, and, thus, black gay men try to hide that they are gay (Tweedy, 172). Monica would not have been in the situation of having HIV that caused lung cancer, if Larry would have stayed true to himself and been openly gay, but being openly gay was (is?) frowned upon in the black community.
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I agree with you about the access to sexual education. My high school was predominately white--I believe that when I graduated there were under ten African-American students enrolled in an almost 2000 student population. Still, our school district did not provide classes nor programs which focused on sexual education. The school board prided themselves on giving students access to all programs and aspects of education, but left sexual education very out of the picture. The lack of knowledge can have a detrimental effect on people's current and future health as we know. With Tweedy and even Henriette Lacks', I believe that it shows that communities with even a higher loss of access to these programs suffer as well, maybe even more. If Larry had lived in a community where the social aspect acknowledged and accepted gay men, then I also believe that he could have been able to be open, probably would not have had sex with Monica, and thus, she would not have lung cancer or HIV.
ReplyDeleteGood responses here. I think you're correct that both the lack of sex education in many public schools and the complicated politics of same sex relationships in African American communities are contributing factors to higher HIV/AIDS rates. I also remember that when Stuart visited us he talked about incarceration rates. Does any of this point to meaningful interventions that can be made in those communities?
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