H.I.V. Continues Its Grim Toll on Blacks in the U.S. ‘Endgame: AIDS in Black America’ on PBS
ByNEIL GENZLINGER Published: July9,2012
“Frontline” tackles one of the country’s thornier and more invisible problems on Tuesday with “Endgame: AIDS in Black America,” which tries to pin down why rates of AIDS and H.I.V. infection are disproportionately high among black Americans. The program focuses largely on institutional causes that have been suggested by various studies, a play-it-safe approach that omits a core question: With so much known about the disease and so many years of safe-sex messages out there, how can anyone still be cavalier or uninformed about this subject?
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the start of the epidemic, and soon along came the drug nightmare of the 1990s, with sex being traded for a fix, rampant needle sharing and resistance to needle-exchange programs that sought to do something about the problem. Endemic poverty in black America of course exacerbated everything about the AIDS crisis.
Black leaders acknowledge that they failed to take the kind of vocal role in the early years that they had been known for in civil rights battles and other struggles. “I didn’t do what I could have done and should have done,” Julian Bond, the civil rights activist and a former chairman of the N.A.A.C.P., says bluntly.
Churches receive particular criticism for not stepping up, and abstinence-only versions of sex education are also faulted. (“Ignorance makes you more susceptible to the virus,” one young woman says.)
here is where the program starts to feel as if something were missing. White churches, too, have been hostile to gay people and pretended AIDS didn’t exist. The abstinence-only view of sex education is hardly a black phenomenon. And even if churches and schools didn’t do their jobs, who, especially in black America, could have missed the omnipresent news of Magic Johnson, the basketball legend who contracted H.I.V. (and who tells his story again in this program)?
Ms. Simone punctuates the big-picture issues with individual stories, several of which involve intelligent-sounding women who contracted the virus from men they thought were upstanding and trustworthy. Their stories are moving, but the men are seen only in photographs, their faces blurred out. These men’s stories are what is missing from this program, because flawed institutions and economic inequality are only part of what spreads AIDS; human behavior and, at least in these particular cases, personal irresponsibility are also vital to the story.
