Minorities Slow to React to High Rate of AIDS

The figures are ominous. Although minorities make up only 20% of the U.S. population, they account for more than 40% of the nearly 80,000 reported cases of AIDS. As many public health officials had feared, AIDS is fast becoming a plague of the inner cities.

Yet the disease seems to have been largely ignored by mainstream minority organizations. And it has failed to join poverty, joblessness, drug abuse and teen-age pregnancy as a major political issue, even though it is related to them.

Groups Set Priorities

“You have to prioritize your pain and your fights,” explained the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “AIDS is on the list, but it’s not central to the core of survival.”

Minority voters and the national groups that represent them have not mobilized around AIDS. Nor, unlike gay groups, have they demonstrated political muscle in trying to influence public policy toward AIDS.

“The black community and the Hispanic community in this country are much better organized than the gay community,” said Tom Stoddard, executive director of Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, the nation’s largest gay rights organization. “They have far greater political might than gay people. But they’re not using it. By and large, the mainstream civil rights organizations have covered their eyes and plugged their ears up until now.”

The reasons AIDS especially afflicts minorities are complex, related to the disproportionate representation of minorities in the underclass. AIDS has struck particularly hard not only at gays but also at intravenous drug abusers--who become infected by sharing needles contaminated by the AIDS virus--and their sexual partners and children.

Although community-based minority groups have sprung up to provide services on the local level for those struck by AIDS, little has been heard from the larger, more powerful organizations with national minority constituencies. The NAACP, the Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and others have either ignored the disease or have just begun to confront it.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which sponsored a conference on AIDS in 1986 and recently received a federal grant to launch its first AIDS education project, admits that the minority population has hesitated to tackle AIDS.

“There is still a lot of resistance in the minority community to dealing with AIDS,” said Brenda Taylor-Hines, director of the SCLC’s new AIDS program. “A lot of their concerns are on survival--food, housing, clothing, employment--the things they are faced with every day. AIDS is something that is perceived as, ‘I may get--if.’ When you’re hungry, knowing the facts about AIDS doesn’t help you get rid of that pain.”

These attitudes inevitably influence the agendas of these national organizations, their officials contend. “You can’t do everything,” said Jim Williams, a spokesman for the NAACP. “It’s only logical that most of our resources be devoted to these broader problems.”

Problems Could Pale

Yet public health officials and others say they believe that, if the recognition does not come soon, other problems will pale in comparison.

“I think AIDS is going to dwarf all these other social problems because time is running out,” said Carol Levine, executive director of the Citizens Commission on AIDS for New York City and Northern New Jersey.

“Huge numbers of people will be sick and dying. Families will be devastated. The social services required to beat this will be enormous. They’ve been surviving with all of these other terrible problems, but this one is of a different magnitude. It is lethal. And it will affect future generations.”

The public health community has been trying for several years to make the public aware of how serious the AIDS crisis has become in the inner cities--initially with some trepidation. When officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control first realized the trends several years ago, they were extremely nervous about making the figures public.

“We wondered if we were going to be perceived as racist, or racially motivated,” said Dr. James O. Mason, director of the CDC. “We were very concerned about how it would be received. Yet we had no choice but to do exactly as we did. It falls upon us to collect and analyze the data.”

Concerned About Reaction

Further, although health officials continue to worry that not enough attention is being paid to AIDS as a minority disease, they are just as worried about what will happen when that recognition finally comes.

“When most Americans realize the impact that AIDS is having on minorities, I’m afraid they’re going to revert back to the attitude they had when it was ‘only a gay man’s disease’ and ‘not my problem,’ ” said one public health official who requested anonymity.

“For the last couple of years,” he added, “there has been concern that the epidemic will ‘break out’ into the heterosexual population. If we then say, ‘Yes, it is spreading in heterosexuals, but the heterosexuals mainly affected are racial minority groups living in the inner city,’ the risk is that people will once again yawn and say: ‘Oh, now we don’t need to worry.’ ”

The spread of the virus has been reduced dramatically among gay white men--the first group hit hard by the epidemic--largely as a result of education initiated by the gay groups themselves. But evidence indicates that the virus is continuing to spread unabated among minorities.

Since the epidemic began in 1981, there have been more than 33,500 cases of AIDS among minorities--including blacks, Latinos, and others--more than 42% of the total of 79,389 cases.

Less Than Aggressive

Yet, for a variety of complicated reasons, many groups representing minorities have been less than aggressive in response. The CDC’s Mason believes that minorities are still in the “denial” phase, refusing to admit that the disease could strike them.

“Also,” Mason said, “I think AIDS is perceived by many minorities as someone else’s disease--that it’s a disease of the drug abusers, the uneducated, the unwashed: the minorities’ minorities. And increasingly, the mainstream organizations have come to represent the mainstream minorities, not the inner-city minorities.”

Leaders of gay rights groups also maintain that a great deal of homophobia still exists among minorities and that many minority men who engage in homosexual behavior still do not think of themselves as homosexual. As a consequence, many do not believe that warnings about AIDS apply to them.

“People hit you with it--that Hispanics are getting AIDS in high numbers--and you don’t really believe it at first,” said a spokesman for the National Council of La Raza. “It takes a while to sink in. You think it’s just another form of discrimination they’re hitting you with.”

Others say that minority organizations, which often have strong religious affiliations, are extremely uncomfortable dealing with a disease associated with behavior considered unacceptable--homosexuality and illegal drug use.

“I think it’s still a very sensitive kind of issue,” said the SCLC’s Taylor-Hines. “For some black leaders, it’s an issue they would rather not address. Some issues are safe--teen-age pregnancy, drugs--but AIDS is still prone to a certain bit of hysteria.”

Levine, of the New York citizens’ commission, added: “The things you have to do to prevent AIDS go against very deeply held values. In many ways, the black leadership is extremely conservative. Black churches are the major social institution, or glue, of these communities, and they are very traditional. They don’t want education that talks about sex, or any programs that give the slightest encouragement to drug use. They are reluctant to confront reality.”

Oppose Needle Plan

For example, most of New York City’s prominent black and Latino leaders recently came out in vigorous opposition to the city Health Department’s experimental needle exchange program, which began last month in an attempt to stem transmission of the AIDS virus among intravenous drug abusers who are not yet in drug treatment programs.

Minority leaders accused the Health Department of promoting “genocide” by encouraging drug use.

“I think they are reflecting anger over AIDS generally, to some degree denial, and hostility toward the . . . Establishment,” said Stoddard, of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund. “The emotional context of AIDS has transformed what should be a debate about the merits of a particular program into an emotional explosion over AIDS and minority people generally.”

This makes it tough for those at the grass-roots level.

“Blacks and minorities are three years behind in AIDS education,” said Reggie Williams, AIDS project director for the National Assn. of Black and White Men Together, a coalition of 23 local gay minority groups. “It would make my job so much easier to have the support, the funding and the interest of these major organizations and their leaders. But they want to talk about morality. You can’t be talking about morality when people are dying.”

Favor Early Information

Many involved in the AIDS fight believe that these organizations should have been providing information earlier to their constituents and lobbying to change public policy, much as the gay community did during the early years of the epidemic.

“I’m not sure that the magnitude of (federal) funding would have been different” if the national organizations had lobbied Washington, the CDC’s Mason said. “But it would have occurred earlier,” he said.

Stoddard is convinced that a concerted effort by the national groups to influence AIDS policy could have a powerful effect.

“It was the political might of the black community that killed the nomination of Robert Bork” to the Supreme Court, he said. “It was the Southern Democrats who exist by virtue of black votes, no question of that. If that same energy were applied to AIDS, we would see similar political advances in this area.

“AIDS is an urban problem,” he continued. “It is an issue that centers on life in large cities. We can’t ignore that. If AIDS is to be conquered, all those who care must fight hard. We just don’t see that happening now.”