No one has been more outspoken than Eugene Rivers in arguing that they do. Indeed, the Boston-based minister and activist goes much further, accusing black American leaders of collectively turning their backs on those suffering in Africa.
Prominent African-Americans, as might be expected, are not greeting Rivers’s words with a hale-and-hearty amen. They are more likely to argue that the fault lies not with them but elsewhere. Randall Robinson, head of TransAfrica, a Washington-based nonprofit that promotes African causes, agrees that not enough is being done to fight AIDS in Africa. But he blames the Congress and the Clinton administration, not black American leadership. The U.S. government’s stinginess with humanitarian aid, and its pressure on developing countries to adopt market-oriented policies, has made African nations focus more on debt repayment than on fighting AIDS, Robinson says. “I don’t think black Democrats and black leaders generally have known what to do about it.”
Granted, black American groups don’t have the wherewithal to solve Africa’s problems. But they could have done much more to mobilize against AIDS, both internationally and domestically. One reason they haven’t is that the full extent of the crisis in America–let alone in Africa–has only recently begun to sink in.
Hershell Warren, director of Meharry Medical College’s Elam Mental Health Center in Nashville, recalls that when the center started its AIDS outreach programs in the early ’90s, “We had a lot of resistance, particularly in the faith-based community.” Most black preachers wanted nothing to do with activities focusing on condoms, drug use and homosexuality in their communities. And such attitudes were hardly peculiar to Nashville. Now, says Warren, black churches are clamoring to get involved. At a time when blacks account for 37 percent of diagnosed AIDS cases in the United States, denial is no longer an option–a point that high-profile blacks are making with increasing frequency. Indeed, the past few months have seen an explosion of anti-AIDS activity.
Last Nov. 30, U.S. Surgeon General David Satcher led a conference–beamed via satellite to several historically black colleges–devoted to the impact of AIDS on minority communities. Shortly before that, the NAACP announced its own drive to raise awareness about the disease. Next week the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank in Washington, will host a conference on “Mobilizing to Fight AIDS in the African American Community.” And though African-American voices have not dominated the international HIV debate, several individuals, from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to former congressman Ron Dellums (who has crusaded for an “AIDS Marshall Plan for Africa”) have spoken out against apathy to the crisis in Africa. “Unless we are outraged… at what is clearly the greatest holocaust in the last 100 years, no one else will be,” observed NAACP president Kweisi Mfume.
Still, Joint Center president Eddie Williams doesn’t find it odd that black Americans focus more on the domestic threat than on the plague in Africa. Credibility, he suggests, begins at home. “I don’t know how you place emphasis on a disease that is ravaging a continent when you don’t place emphasis on one that is ravaging your own community.” Also, AIDS in Africa, by its very nature, is a much harder issue to rally around than, say, apartheid. Apartheid, after all, had an obvious villain and an equally obvious–albeit politically complicated–solution. Nor is AIDS comparable to a natural disaster. In the aftermath of a devastating tornado or flood, the world finds it relatively easy to get engaged for the brief period of time necessary to help people pick up the pieces. AIDS is an unrelenting plague, with no single evil face to unite against and condemn. But it is no more a black problem than ethnic cleansing is a white problem. To define it as some sort of black issue is to misunderstand both the nature and the magnitude of what needs to be done.
In India, some 4 million people are infected with AIDS. In Russia, the incidence of HIV has doubled in the past two years. In the Caribbean and much of Latin America, AIDS numbers are rising to frightening levels. The problem of AIDS is global and multiracial. That said, Rivers has a point. America’s black leadership does have an obligation to take on the issue of African AIDS–if only because Africans have no other natural constituency in America; if only because the situation in Africa is so dire; if only because black Americans know, from personal experience, what it means to be a people desperately in need of friends.
