Authorizing Neglect: A Critical Analysis of Newsweek Representation of African Americans with HIV/AIDS Joss Greene, Student, Scripps College
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n 2009 the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced that they would be collaborating with fourteen leading African American organizations to create “Act Against AIDS,” an education and prevention program that addresses the disproportionate impact of HIV/AIDS on African Americans. The CDC’s website contextualizes the program as a response to the results of their 2006 study which found that while African Americans only compose 13 percent of the United States population, they account for 49 percent of new HIV infections.1 African Americans are eight times more likely than white Americans to become infected with HIV, and HIV-positive African Americans in New York City have an age-adjusted death rate that is 2.5 times higher than HIV-positive white Americans living in the same city.2 The CDC data also shows that AIDS is the leading cause of death for African American women between 25 and 34 years of age and the second leading cause of death for African American men between 35 and 44 years of age.3 These statistics demonstrate the immediate need for education, prevention and treatment programs that specifically reach out to African Americans, but current media coverage denies the history and longevity of this need. For the past five or six years, mainstream media outlets like CNN and Newsweek have begun to run stories about HIV/AIDS within communities of color as “the new epidemic,” an illusory framework. Communities of color have fought HIV and its social consequences since the 1980’s, organizing on a grassroots
community basis and crafting national organizations.4 These organizations were founded in response to the fact that, since the beginning of the epidemic, people of color have accounted for new HIV infections at a rate far exceeding their percent of the United States population. From 1981 to 1986, while black people were only 12 percent of the United States population, they accounted for 26 percent of new infections. By the late 1990s, black women accounted for 72 percent of women diagnosed with AIDS, though they comprised only 17 percent of women in the United States.5 If HIV is seen as newly affecting people of color, it is because of new institutional recognition of HIV’s impact on communities of color, not because of a new impact. When we recognize the media’s central role in drawing attention and resources to an issue, mainstream news outlets seem less like the hero uncovering a neglected issue and more like an actor complicit in the prior neglect. And yet the presence of representation does not necessarily correlate to positive political outcomes. In this essay I will show how coverage of African Americans with HIV/ AIDS reflects a larger discourse about race and citizenship in the United States and how this coverage reinforces the narrative of African American self-destruction and failure to capitalize on the opportunities of a post-racial, color-blind society. Policies like the War on Drugs or the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which concretized inequalities in resource allocation, bodily surveillance, and paternal rights, are 114