Two Nations
Swear ta god, And we're invisible.
There's liberty and justice…for y'all.
One of the reasons I obsess a bit over health care and pharmaceuticals and such is the relationship your typical Black person has with the medical industry.
Another reason is, we're far more likely to need it. Racism keeps Black folks constantly under stress (I don't need your assessment of the reality of the situation, and to be honest you ought know by now my positions can't be lightly dismissed). The kind of stress you get from just waiting for shit to start. Every Black person knows that sinking feeling in their gut you get when some racist (actually innocently, sometimes) nails you after you've let your guard down. So you keep your guard up, and your body responds like a car that idles too fast.
Patients With H.I.V. Seen as Separated by a Racial Divide
By LINDA VILLAROSA
Last January in Manhattan, at the memorial service of a colleague who died of an AIDS-related illness, Joseph Bostic lost feeling in his legs and had trouble standing. A friend, Keith Cylar, hailed a cab, crumpled some bills into the driver's palm and sent Mr. Bostic home to Brooklyn. Two months later, Mr. Bostic died of heart and kidney failure related to H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Within three weeks, Mr. Cylar, too, was dead of heart disease related to the virus.
The loss of these two men - both of them AIDS activists who had lived with H.I.V. for years - shocked many who had nearly forgotten the days when attending funerals and memorial services was a constant, unsettling ritual. In the United States, death rates from H.I.V./AIDS have sharply dropped in the past eight years as new medications have made the disease manageable for many patients.
But among African-Americans like Mr. Bostic and Mr. Cylar, AIDS is still a killer.
In 2002, almost twice as many blacks with AIDS died compared with whites, a gap that has been increasing since 1998. Researchers say the reasons include late diagnoses and inferior care, along with complications because blacks are more likely than whites to suffer from other illnesses.
As a result, health experts say, many blacks in the United States have far more in common with their counterparts in Africa than they do with white patients.
"The area my clinic's in is essentially a suburb of the third world," said Dr. Joseph C. Gathe Jr., an infectious-disease physician in Houston and director of a nonprofit AIDS clinic. "It's a shame no one seems to know that the problem in Africa looks like the problem in inner-city Houston, Chicago and New York."
Though African-Americans make up just over 12 percent of the United States population, they accounted for 54 percent of the 40,000 new diagnoses of H.I.V./AIDS in 2002, the most recent year for which statistics were available, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the estimated 385,000 people living with AIDS, 42 percent were African-American. For them, the disease leads disproportionately to death.
Among black men ages 25 to 44, the death rate from H.I.V./AIDS was more than six times greater than for whites. For black women in the same age group, the numbers are even more startling: the death rate is more than 13 times greater than for whites. The most common method of transmission has been from infected sexual partners, followed by transmission through injected drugs.
