In Black America; Aids Awareness In The Black Community

Music From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is In Black America. The education needs to be across the board, please don't misunderstand. But within the community, we need to focus some serious attention on the issue of IV drug abuse. We need to really

use our skills as journalists to point to really the tragedy of far too few drug treatment centers. You have a situation in this country where people are requesting help and they have to stay on the waiting list for weeks and sometimes months in order to get help with drug abuse. And I think that is a particular aspect of the story that has not been adequately covered. And I think that we as journalists can point that up and point to it as a political problem, point to it as a problem that our city leaders need to deal with and that the entire community, that all of us as citizens have a responsibility to put pressure on our city leaders. We have a responsibility to really look at our own neighborhoods and when the city council or when someone like Rita, your local health commissioner says

we're going to put a drug treatment center here and everyone says, well, anywhere but here, you know, we have to deal with that as journalists as well as as with citizens. Joe Davidson, a reporter, was the Wall Street Journal. Minorities in this country have been disproportionately represented among persons diagnosed with AIDS. Health officials and researchers now state that contrary to the myth that AIDS is a gay, white male disease, black and Latino men, women and children, have in fact a significantly higher risk of HIV infection than their white counterpart. Not only is this disturbing reality not widely known in most minority communities, but this lack of knowledge pervades all levels of minority communities from executives to blue and gray collar workers. Recently, the National Association of Black Journalists assembled a panel of experts at his 13th annual newsmaker's conference to address the crisis of AIDS in the black community. I'm Johnny

O. Hanson, Jr. This week, AIDS Awareness in the Black Community in Black America. I'm the health commissioner for a city that is 75 percent black and happens to unfortunately have the 5th largest number of persons with AIDS in America. I have a very clear sense of the symbiotic relationship between you and me. If I am to be successful in saving lives and that's what this is all about, we're talking about life and death. This is an abstract issue here. This is ultimately about survival of black people and whether there will be people around. If I'm going to be successful, I need you just as much as you have a responsibility to lean on me. Therefore, that public policy debate how we work through those issues demands and informed constituency. Unfortunately, the black community for a variety of reasons is not well informed. Dr. Reed Tuxen, Commissioner of Public Health

for the District of Columbia Government since 1987. Black Americans, especially black women and children, are among those who are hit hardest by the deadly AIDS epidemic. According to government health statistics, every two hours of black persons die of AIDS, more than half 52% of all women with AIDS are black. 61% of all babies born with AIDS are black, and black children make up an alarming 52% of all children with AIDS. Presently, only a handful of projects based in black and Latino communities have developed since the AIDS epidemic was identified. Even fewer effective AIDS-specific programs exist in Asian and Native American communities. Recently, the National Association of Black Journalists convened a panel of experts to focus on the AIDS epidemic in the black community. Dr. Herbert Nixon is the first director of the Office of Minority Health within the United

States to Government Department of Health and Human Services. Prior to his current position, Dr. Nixon was director of the Office of Policy, Planning and Analysis of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institute of Health. Dr. Herbert Nixon gives the mission of his office of Minority Health. Dr. Herbert W. Nixon. The Office of Minority Health really got at start as you heard, concerned about all the other things that plague minority populations in the United States. The so-called big six that you may have heard about, and we can talk about later, that really kill minority Americans in excess compared to white populations. And those are your familiar killers such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, chemical dependency, diabetes, and for mortality and violence. As soon as the office got started, however, it was clear that we had to get involved with AIDS. Number one, we had disproportionate representation of minorities and AIDS. I won't give the numbers now, but I can give them to you later. But also that this was an issue that is not being discussed. AIDS was being portrayed at that point as a white gay disease.

And in the case of AIDS, where your only weapon against a disease is information and behavior change, that's a lethal misperception. So we were very concerned about trying to change the public and sort of the groups, if you will, the groups that shape and move our opinions in our communities to change the image of AIDS and to try to get them involved. One of the things we did was to organize some meetings, which I'm not going to talk about because of time, and also began to raise the issue in every kind of way we could. We also started running some programs and other things related to AIDS. Again, I'm not going to talk about that. Federal government role, I think, in AIDS is a very difficult one. You're talking about something that's very sensitive. We're talking about sex. We're talking about drugs. We're talking about homosexuality. We're talking about bisexuality. And all kinds of strange things that, in many ways, we're kind of the underside of our society. Things people don't talk about in polite company. I think that makes it a tremendously difficult issue. The money, I think, is going up and up. And I don't think money is going to be the rate

limiting step in how we handle this disease. I think the rate limiting step is going to be something much more subtle, therefore much more difficult. I think that the thing that we have to do is to try to figure out the behavior change challenge, and that's going to require a lot of local empowerment. I think one of the things that AIDS is providing for all of us is kind of this huge magnifying glass that's revealing all these other problems that we had all along, but now present themselves as an emergency. The federal government is in the sense playing catch up dust as all of us are. I think the whole issue of trying to get community-based organizations, such as churches and schools and sororities and fraternities, actively involved in health, is something that's kind of new in a sense in this level of intensity. That's something that we really have to do at a federal level but has to be distributed to the local level. And at the same time, we have to make sure that the funds get distributed in ways that are not inequitable, because as you know, local politics determines a lot about how money spent. So there's a tremendous challenge

from Washington about how to deal with this disease. One of the main things we've done in the Office of Minority Health is to fund coalitions of community-based organizations to do risk factor reduction. And a lot of this is to try to show that this can be done that the community-based organizations can responsibly handle money, can carry out these programs, can talk about these issues and really show behavior change. We also have initiated a round of grants that directly fund single minority community organizations, even things such as barbershops and so forth that are trying to get involved, small amounts of money, a few thousand dollars. So these are the kinds of things that are really grassroots, nitty-gritty kinds of things that we are trying to do. The other thing we're trying to do is to try to change the image of this disease, not only to talk about it as a minority disease, because it is, of course, a minority disease, just like it's a majority disease, but to also indicate that it's a different kind of disease. It's not a white gay disease on the one hand and a minority, intravenous drug abusing disease, which is

the dichotomy that you hear now, but also that it's a disease of heterosexual transmission and minority communities, and also that we in fact do have minority gays. And I think that that's something that we really need to start to talk about, and it's a very difficult thing for the media to handle, but we have to somehow handle that. The other thing I think that's a challenge for the media is how to start to talk about intravenous drug use in a way that really tries to draw the audience in instead of pushing the audience away. And I think that's something that's going to be very, very difficult to do, because there's a tremendous sense of judgmentalism about drug abuse. People who abuse drugs are weaklings is the image, you know, that it's a moral courage issue. And I think we have to try to find a way to communicate about the reality of drug abuse and the intertwining relationships of drug abuse, poverty, joblessness, and all the rest of the issues. It's a very difficult challenge. Dr. Herbert W. Nickins, Director of the Office of Minority Health. Since physicians began minoring AIDS in 1981, there has been more than 66,000 cases documented in this country. The federal government estimates that a new AIDS case is reported in this nation every fourteen

and one-half minutes. Also a member of the panel was Dr. Reed V. Tuxen, Commissioner of Public Health for the District of Columbia Government since 1987. Prior to his position, Dr. Tuxen was Administrator of the Health Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Administration in Washington, DC. Dr. Tuxen is the Regional Chair for the National Black Leadership Initiative on Cancer, Co-Chair of the AIDS Partner Notification Strategy Task Force, and Chair of the Council on Medical Legislation of the National Medical Association. Dr. Reed V. Tuxen. I'm the Health Commissioner for a city that is 75 percent black and happens to unfortunately have the fifth largest number of persons with AIDS in America. I have a very clear sense of the symbiotic relationship between you and me. If I am to be successful in saving lives, and that's what this is all about, we're talking about life and death. This is an abstract issue here. This is ultimately about survival of black people and whether there

will be people around. If I'm going to be successful, I need you just as much as you have a responsibility to lean on me. People like you, then I think, from my end of the telescope have two responsibilities. Number one, you have the responsibility as journalists to document contemporary social reality. Of course, you are the people who present, analyze, and discuss the issues that occur that are important to the fabric of our community, our daily lives. I am convinced that when the history of our time is written, the history of this time will be best characterized by how we as a society respond to the multiple challenges of AIDS. Just as the civil rights movement defined the 50s as the Vietnam War defined the 60s and 70s, there is no other issue that provides to our society a more wide range of issues that have no right or wrong answers that have a greater degree of consequence in terms of how we resolve them. And so I think that we as a civilization is at stake. Therefore, that public policy debate, how we work through those issues, demands and informed constituency.

Unfortunately, the black community for a variety of reasons is not well informed about the magnitude of the issues, the facts, and what is at stake. Which means that in my city as a quick example, we know that we have a place, a hospice created by Mother Teresa of all people involved in the process of giving a dignified place for people to die who have this disease. A community group organized because they were concerned that this disease was spread through the air. Cat would come and get into the trash bag and therefore their little child would get this disease. And through those sorts of misperceptions and a sense of selfishness, try to rule Mother Teresa out of the neighborhood. You cannot have a civilized society if people cannot be allowed to die with dignity. Misinformation in the public policy arena at the local level can cause a catastrophe, can ruin lives and ultimately destroy the character of the civilization. You have the responsibility of making sure then that we get the issues out that we're very clear about how we articulate them and that as we work through the political mind fields, we're accurate and we try to keep some of the biases out and keep the facts

and the truth in. Secondly is that you have the responsibility that you have the vehicle providing to our citizens information. Information that hopefully will lead to changes in behavior that will therefore save lives. I have the responsibility of the health commission to collect data, to analyze the data, to find out where the trends are, where the problems are. I then have the responsibility to design the thematic content of the messages and to focus those messages as to how to begin to solve those lapses in information and changes in behavior. I also then have the responsibility to create products or have products created that address those issues. I then have a responsibility then to come to people like you to do two things in conclusion. Number one, you control the public space. You control the airway, the radio station, the public service time, the free ads in the newspapers and the magazines and the radios. You have to as a political and moral responsibility advocate at your institutions for that access to free space and time. This issue demands that there's no local government in America that has the money to buy all the air time

that we need. So that becomes your responsibility to be involved in. Secondly, you have the responsibility of the reporting itself. You must realize that as you report information, you change the climate in that community. So it's like if you throw a rock in the water and you have waves that come about, it isn't that you've just done a job and reported a story. You must realize that once you report it, that story, it then has an effect on whether I am successful in reaching black people to change their behavior. As a quick example, how we talk about heterosexual spread of the disease. 4% of Americans have this disease of this disease have gotten it from heterosexual spread. 11% of the black community that has gotten this disease has been from heterosexual spread. The issues are clearly distinct. How you talk about that, though, will either decide to have people to say, well, I'm not listening to that and I'm getting tired of having black folks labeled as having just yet another problem and I would rather go ahead and believe that this is not my problem and I don't want to deal with it. Or you can report it in such a way that begins to say to somebody, hey, I got to think about that because that has to do with whether I live or die.

Dr. Reed V. Tuxen, Commissioner of Public Health for the District of Columbia. Many health care professionals and educators charge that despite the alarming statistics about AIDS, the federal government is failing to adequately form or protect black Americans against the fatal virus. As mentioned at the top of the program, only a handful of projects based in black and Latino communities have developed since the AIDS epidemic was identified. The National Minority AIDS Council is one such project. Die Networks is the Executive Director of the National Minority AIDS Council. Founded in the mid-1987, the council is the only and I repeat, the only national minority organization dealing exclusively with the AIDS virus. Mr. Don Edwards. The National Minority AIDS Council represents about 100 to 150, I think now, organizations that have developed in the last four years in response to this epidemic. These organizations range across the breadth and diversity of our communities. They are

black, they are Latino, they are Native American and Asian. They conduct education and prevention services as well as provide volunteers, buddies, transportation, food banks, the whole range of direct services that people with AIDS and people in our community need to respond to the epidemic. One of the things that I also spent a lot of my time doing is advocacy. What Dr. Nickens and Dr. Tuxen do from the inside, I create an environment to support them for on the outside. We have not had within the last eight years, especially in this administration. A lot of emphasis on the health of our people. AIDS came into our communities at a time when the first line of defense, our community mental health centers and community health centers and drug and substance abuse programs were being defended. Therefore, we did not have a kind of messenger or at least a process by which we could have responded at an earlier point. It's important now that we have this kind of recognition about the significant impact that this epidemic is having in our communities to take advantage of what is really an opportunity

to enlarge and abroad our health agenda using AIDS as a kind of point of focus. And it's not easy. And it's really been the initiative from community-based activities, people who are in the trenches delivering services when there are no resources, trying to help people when there is no other help available, who have been the innovators and the leaders in this kind of activity. One of the things that we also do is make sure that people within the federal health bureaucracy, within the Centers for Disease Control, within the National Institutes of Health, within the various sectors that are responsible for responding to this epidemic, know that there are experts, that there are innovative kind of strategies that have developed looking at our communities of color. It's really important that we not do business as usual in response to this epidemic. When we talk about things like getting black men to wear condoms and getting people in our communities to talk about bisexuality and the whole breadth and spectrum of sexuality in general, that is not business as usual.

We cannot avoid talking about substance abuse in churches or in our families. And so we have to do advocacy and get people to put these kind of issues on the table. Very quickly, if I would ask, if I would say what I wanted you as media people to do, I would say that it's not so much a question of not having done your job. I think what we hope to do today is help you define the job. The job that I see from my perspective is you need to do human interest stories on people who are giving direct service. There are numerous people across this land who have taken people into their homes, who have gotten up in the middle of the night to go sit with babies who have been abandoned by their parents. There are people who drive people back and forth across the city to get their food and go to clinics. There are also people who are struggling very difficult and very difficult environments to get the message out in North Carolina and Alabama and parts of Michigan and Detroit. People are trying with no resources using radio, using posters that they print themselves to get the message out. Help those people get the message out. Your credibility on a local

level goes a lot further than anything that's going to come out of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta or out of Washington. You have a following, you have a listenership. If you pick up this message, it will be believed. John Edwards, Executive Director of the National Minority AIDS Council. Black journalists in this country have a tremendous responsibility of informing the black community concerning the AIDS epidemic. Joe Davidson with the Wall Street Journal at his Washington, D.C. Bureau, where he covers the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Education gives his ideals on how black journalists can better inform our communities. I'm going to have one complain about the way we cover AIDS and then I'm going to do something a little bit different in terms of encouraging us to do the job better. One of the things you'll often see about the way black folks are covered in newspapers and on television is if there is a problem, it's identified as a particular black problem as opposed to a problem that is peculiar to a group of people who have certain characteristics

such as low income, a little education. We often see that when it relates to education, we see that by the year 2000, most of our large cities will have a majority black student population. Therefore, we need so many more programs for disadvantaged students as if by definition black children are disadvantaged. We see that same kind of thing as it relates to AIDS. What I want to do though is rather than lament that as I could for all of my five minutes, I want to do something just a bit different and ask all of you to raise your hands if you have a beat of any type. Whatever your education, health, whatever it is, what is your beat? Black community, someone else, what's your beat? City Hall. How about you, Johnty? City Council. Let me do a City Hall and City Council. What I'm trying to do is show you that on every beat you can develop an AIDS story. City Hall, City Council, you can look at the kinds of funds that are allocated to fight AIDS. You can look at how the City officials respond to pressure groups. You can look at divisions within the

City Council, within the City of Administration, to see how the AIDS battle is being fought within government. We do these kinds of stories in Washington all the time. For the black community, all of this I think relates to that specifically. What are black groups doing as it relates to AIDS? That kind of thing. Any other beats out here? Yes. The courts. In the courts, one of the things that often comes through is how people charged with sexual offenses are treated. Whether or not there is going to be a requirement for mandatory AIDS testing. How this relates to the constitutional rights, how is it administered? Are the tested administered fairly? Is everything confidential? The point of all is this on every single beat. There is an AIDS story. Entertainment, for example. How is the film industry dealing with AIDS? Sports. Our jocks who have been diagnosed HIV positive are being discriminated when it comes to sporting events, athletic teams, business beats. Not only some of the stories

that we've seen in the national press in particular, such as health insurance costs, how hospitals are coping. These are very important stories. But on a more human level, if someone is known to have AIDS, is this person discriminated against when going into a clothing store? Have to put on clothing. On the education beat, the controversy about what level should appropriate education or what is the appropriate level for education of young children when it comes to AIDS? On every single beat, you can develop an AIDS-related story, a story that will get the message across in a sensitive and intelligent way without hype, without sensationalism, but something that will let your readership know that this is a very serious problem that needs to be dealt with. I think later we can talk about specific stories in more depth and just how to approach them. Joe Davidson with the Wall Street Journal. Last but not least, is Robin Smith, mid-day co-anchor and news reporter with KMOV-TV4 in St. Louis.

Miss Smith tells of her first encounter with the AIDS story. The examine contains explicit language, listener discretion is advised. I have to tell you, though, despite all of my expertise in the area of journalism, that my first experience with AIDS had absolutely nothing, and I repeat absolutely nothing to do with the newsroom. It has to do with a phone call that I received from a friend of mine who I grown up with, and she in a very low tone of voice, and this is a woman who has a very commanding presence. Call me one evening about 10-11 o'clock and said, Rob and I need your help. I said, what's the problem? She said, well, quite simply, you know my brother, Joey. I said, yeah, how's he doing? Is he back in LA? She said, no, Joey's home. She says, he has something that they don't know what it is. This dates back better than five years ago. I said, well, what do you think it is? She says, I don't know. She says, is you know Joey's gay? And he lived in San Francisco, had numerous lovers in California, and Joey's very ill. To make a long story short,

as best I could figure out what Joey had was something that they were working on in an experimental program at Washington University. I then linked my girlfriend and her brother Joey with a physician who I know, who managed to get him into a research program at Washington University. He was one of the first people in the state of Missouri to die of AIDS. I then went to the office and started talking about this thing called AIDS and everybody in the room started going, you got some of those friends, huh? Then it evolved into our medical and science reporter actually approaching it and saying, I had heard about the program at Washington University's medical school. I'm thinking about doing a story on it. Again, it was in its infancy. And you have to, I use that story for a sound reason. And that is that in everyday living as journalists, we should be on the cutting edge. We should not be following headlines. We should not be running around saying, I heard about and read about and then covering it. You have to be on the cutting edge. You have to be the people to initiate new ideas. You have to be the people to walk up into your newsroom

and say, we are going to do this story. I have already researched the story. And this is the prime example of who I'm going to use. Of course, like any other city we've had our experiences with children not being able to sit in the same classroom in public schools. My first experience was with a five-year-old hemophilia act. And parents stood and looked at me right in the eye and said, my child is not going to school in any classroom with any kid with anything like that. And I put them on the air. But to counterbalance that, a physician who I grew up with happens to be black and happens to be one of the first physicians in this area ever to walk into a hospital and say, yeah, you got an AIDS patient. I'll treat him because none of the other physicians at that time would. He's also one of the people who volunteered to give free medical help to my friend, Joey. Since then, our newsroom has done what I consider to be a great series. We did a series on AIDS. We did it on the streets of North St. Louis. And for those of you who are not from St. Louis, I'm a proud product of North St. Louis. North St. Louis is synonymous with black and poor. We went on to the streets of North St. Louis. We gathered up both hookers and IV drug users.

We then took them into a quiet room with a physician. And we had the physicians and the nurses asked them questions. I didn't do this series. My colleague Russ Mitchell did. The bottom line on the series is we asked the hookers, do you use condoms with each of your Johns? The answer was no. We asked the IV drug users. Do you use the same needle with anybody else? The answer was yes. We asked them, did they understand that they were transmitting AIDS to each other in themselves? The answer was no. One of the most interesting sound clips was with a male prostitute who said that he didn't think he could get AIDS because he was having anal sex. And yes, we aired it. If you're afraid of using words like condom, penis, vagina on the air, if you get squeamish when you type it on a typewriter, then you ought to walk out of the newsroom and don't worry about covering AIDS because you got a lot more to learn than that. Miss Robin Smith with KMOV TV4 in St. Louis. Although there has been television specials on the AIDS crisis along with magazine articles and newspaper stories, many in the black community still do not understand the death of the problem this society face. If you have a question or comment, write us. Remember, views and opinions expressed on

this program do not reflect those of this station or the University of Texas at Austin. Until we meet again for In Black America's Technicoproducer Cliff Hargrove. I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing In Black America Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's In Black America Cassettes, Longhorn Radio Network, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the Center for Telecommunication Services, the University of Texas at Austin, this is

the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John Hansen. Join me this week on In Black America. I think the issue of AIDS has, the coverage of it has improved, improved substantially over the last several years. I think that's in part because the seriousness of the issue has been driven home. AIDS in the Black community this week on In Black America.