Having worked in agencies for years, the answers are complex and therefore most all answers are true even if sometimes contradictory.
Power dynamics affect male and female infection. Poor females and males are pressured to have unprotected sex for survival.
Women of color share more partners with other women, sometimes knowingly with females and with males ,less unknowingly, due to the inequality of male resources and education due to systematic racism. Women of color have historically been given more access to work than men but men are more prized. So men can "get away" with more in both straight and gay relationships. Work and resources inform and constructs identity, healthy identity builds internally, self confidence and from the external to the individual, self esteem. We have less self esteem so we wrestle with our external worth which leads to healthcare engagement.
People of color as a mass have less private insurance. Its not the quality here but the mentality of engaging the medical community.
I've had a private doctor for over a decade on the upper east side because I chose the better neighborhood assuming higher capita would ensure a better doctor. They regularly call me, ask me question, see me in 10 minutes of arrival, its a beautiful townhouse. It occurred to me to tell her pointedly of my work and sexuality a couple of years in because I read there were other tests etc for MSM that we might ignore or doctors didn't know to do. She took it in stride and promptly snapped on a glove and told me to bend over. I said to the mirrored wall, wow this is the first time this has been done to me on the upper east side. We laughed. She inserted her Asian finger.
I'm receiving rich/affluent medical care and a level of social acceptance that even me, someone out as a cloud has to remember to notify medical folk about. Most Black/Latino people don’t have their career alerting them and making them comfortable to broach medical topics, ask for special care or feel comfortable. People of color tend to distrust the medical field, doctors are quacks but want to be given magic pills instead of seeing doctors as learned employees who can only be good at their job based on your management and honesty with them and receptiveness to their advice.
MSM have a smaller network of sexual partners. Privilege and entitlement make it easier to cross as white men and women racial lines and not feel social, financial, emotional, racial pressure positive and negatively. So brown stays with brown but imagine this: 10 guys in a brown neighborhood over time without knowing each other will have accessed each others sexual network. A white man or a brown one dating all over the state and others, will dip into networks but the 1 in 10 for white and intrepid brown black is then 1 in 20 chance of infection on the merry go round will miss him more often....unless he's you know a super-whore or the wrong kind of lotto winner. Brown to brown odds are 1 in 4.
Brooklyn neighborhoods Bed Stuy and Brownsville have such a high HIV infection rate that it's only beat by sub Saharan Africa HIV II infections. The Bronx is no 60-70% full of HIV infected adults because HASA, the social services special division for benefits for the roughly 200,000 on their dole, only pays up to $999 for rent for a single person-----where are those rents cheapest? Bronx, bed stuy, Brownsville, Harlem so all of the HIV infected adults are herded into a tight geographic area.
I teach in workshops to ask where a man or woman lives in NYC because their address can intimate higher infection possibility.
A smaller community with less men/women sexually educated and liberated to explore outside of our immediate environments, we're more likely to catch a permanent"ride". Besides safe sex one of the best preventive measures, as counter intuitive as it sounds, is to fuck around, in bigger social circles.
Bigger kicker, systemic racism and discrimination like world war II when whites were able to take advantage of free college and mortgages, translated for minorities as 1200 college seats available for 100, 000 plus returning hence the doorman, train porter and hotel bellhop surge of black men in the 1950s thru 1970s.
But how does this affect black folk now? Being denied the uplift that millions of white folk got in education and property ownership affected their children and their grandchildren because there was no transferrable knowledge or material wealth to pass on in a very specific area---pensions. Disqualifying a group meant that they couldn't pull their sons or grandsons into pensioned jobs therefore each generation is starting from near scratch resource and intellectually if you fall into about 2/3 s of the less educated people of blacks, etc. Obama announced in 2009 that in order to make $15 or more in the 21st century you'd need a minimum of an associates degree, two years of college. Your granddaddy couldn't get a degree, your daddy didn't, how you going to know how, learning is a middle class skill.
Wait for it.
So you're young, black in NYC, basic high school education, gay, trans, bi, str8 and HASA pays $30,000 a year for life in rent, cash, food stamps, healthcare for a chronic, no longer terminal disease, that may or may not kill you in 27 years.
Instant pension, no matter your age and all you have to to be eligible is fuck, a lot, maybe even in your own neighborhood and then you get to do nothing, maybe work under the table for stores or bars or uber.
Sounds insane?
I have many a student and older adult client who've bug chased and purposefully gotten positive because its a lifetime lotto of on average $600,000 per person.
The infected don’t know or don’t care. Racism has created a fatalism to people of color, hence the above. The power of the church comes from the faith and blind hope that life will be better elsewhere, never here. In a broad way, racism and inequality pushes us to believe this earth is hell so it gives way for less health monitoring and self controls. Not being fully integrated into the world system of government we don’t both see and feel the impact of medical costs, pharmaceutical costs, lost resources lost workers, lost genius, lack of progress predicated on the existence of others....because racism has ironically taught us to devalue ourselves. Devalued people want sex pleasure but why practice safe sex if it is all unequal?
Racism sexualized us as a mass, the social reaction by the black and brown masses was a sexual conservatism internally within our communities. White people have Caitlyn Jenner (who I finally saw, heard, video of on Celebrity Apprentice ----officially hmmm wow and what the fuck?), now what Asian, Latino, black transgender has Diane Sawyer interviewed? Bruce Jenners fame has propelled attention but Jenner having been a white man affords him the privilege to drop being male in his SIXTIES and entitlement allows him, sitting in a dress, designer dresses on your huge magazines , full makeup, having had multiple children and multiple wives to look Ellen Lesbian DeGeneres in the face on national tv and say he opposes gay/same sex marriage. No, really. Blew her mind because she has never experienced white male power, privilege and entitlement wrapped in liberation so intensely before.
People of color, as wacky and hubristic as Jenner may be, we don't have the powerful of our communities exampling power, entitlement, privilege,liberation and identity control because our history is in direct opposition to such.
Caitlyn Jenner is a hero, gets an Espy, Dennis Rodman was just crazy. Because white male occupied sexuality, trans or gay (ala Matthew Sheppard) is to be taken seriously ----how about Rashawn Brazell. Same difference, neighborhood dude killed him, had known him for years, lured him into a pick up situation, killed him by hacking him pieces. We wont even talk about the visibly drugged Laotian brown boy who was running down the street naked that despite black neighbors protest was delivered back to his boyfriend...Jeffrey Dahmer.
White people, socially are in high school around sexuality, brown folk have some prodigies but en masse, we're graduating from elementary school to middle school. That gap means less sexual education about identity, experimentation, sexuality and therefore safe sex in our communities.
The church is fundamentally based on our oppressors ontology of reality. In order to have a church for other social needs we've had to take the mental and spiritual rape of the Bible to establish community in front of our oppressors. The church is therefore its own dialectic trying to appease and comfort while moving towards a center of humanism. That consistent spiritual dialectic keeps people of color not stuck but wandering around the mall parking lot, some in line, others not, some trying to escape the parking lot mentality. We're at a Juncture of about 40 years now out of oppression/slavery---we are master-less, rudderless, trying to build viable communities. the multitude of community needs, jobs, food, water, property rights, education, retirement plans, childcare, ending misogyny an d misandry, ending crime, domestic abuse, elder care, mental healthcare put HIV behind heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, when we run through major to minor issues.
HIV prevention isn't a big enough problem because it doesn't kill as fast, 5 years in rural places like Charlotte, 27 years life expectancy in Harlem, that time disparity lets all them other community maladies push it to the fringes so the community hasn't been able to respond as effectively as the white community. The white communities initial mass infection were what-----go to the Caitlyn Jenner image---white men who were raised to see their perspective as the center of the universe in entitlement, power and therefore demand with their greater financial and social resources, better attention, health care and research. People of color are still advocating about racism based on race----we're yelling in the parking lot, white gay men are in the mansion having tea then going into the other room and arguing for same sex marriage rights, inherent, historical institutional change before the Supreme Court....folk of color....could you let us beyond the lobby to start working on our grievances?
Please?
Pretty please?
Historically black, Latino , native and Asian value is connected to white decision of value. There's a famous story by Thurmann and recounted by Derrick Bell author of Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence Of Racism, of aliens coming to Earth offering cures for diseases, wealth, technology....all they want is all the black people.
There is no inherent value to blacks and others NOT being 8 times more infected to white people. The world, in the story, unites to round everyone darker than beige up.
As HIV parable say 50 to 75% of black folk died of HIV in the next 30 years, 50% latino-----what do you think say someone like Caitlyn Jenner, expressing a deep identity desire in a Dior gown, hair long and shiny, make up flawless, having been a white man for sixty years and now jumping fence but opposed to equal rights for all in historical institutions, after having indulged emotionally, social and financially benefited from said institutions historically, would do, say or feel about the minorities going poof?
More land. More resources. More jobs. More opportunity to structure the society and institutions to ego suit.
White men being blind and partially lacking profit from the survival of others, within America and other places is the fundamental reason why the World Health Organizations has forced countries to sign accords, over 120 so far, to keep a single, level pricing for HIV meds.
Smile, Kyle
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
KylePhoenixShow@Gmail.com
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