Disclaimer: this will me scrambled. A sketchbook of reflections and recent memories.
I find myself in a place where few people give me their real, birth-given names.
“Call me Z,” someone says.
This statement means: you cannot pronounce my real name because it is too exotic for your tongue.
But I find myself meeting more numbers than people.
Statistics, statistics, statistics. Over fifty percent of the women in the US who are infected with HIV/AIDS are African American Women. Thirteen percent of the US population identifies itself as African American. The leading mode of transmission for HIV in African American men is sex with other men, followed by drug injection. For African American women, the virus is most often transmitted during heterosexual activity.
The ability to conceptualize and think abstractly develops, for most of us, in late adolescence. How are you piecing together this information? How do demographics occupy a visual space in your head? Do you see a pie graph? Do you see circles with stems sprouting more circles, extending into a web to limn the idea of epidemic?
Men having sex with men and then having sex with their wives—women who think they are in a safe, monogamous relationship with no reason to protect themselves. Men raving at those wives who dare to pull out a condom, to imply that they’re—the husbands—are cheating. A wall of blackness because the complexity of human behavior perplexes in its resistance to generality.
In a video I watched at the UN Women’s Tribunal on Poverty (hosted by the Feminist Task Force and the Global Campaign Against Poverty), a young activist painted a grim portrait of the future where a museum exhibit consists of wax figures of people of African descent. “What’s that?” Someone will ask. “Oh. That’s a black person. They went extinct thousands of years ago from AIDS.”
This is the first time I have seriously contemplated HIV/AIDS since I was a kid—since being approached with heavy-handed anti-drug messages. This is the first time I have been exposed to the first-hand anger and frustration of women of color who are fighting to teach prevention to high-risk communities (NYC is above the national average for people infected with the virus); a simultaneous battle with racism and violence against women.
At the Public Health Library on 1st Ave, an elderly woman who reminded us that she is not an expert, showed pictures of communities she has visited all over the world. During the question and answer session, litanies of misdirected hostility paradoxically united the theater of people. A black woman acknowledged the good intentions of the presenter before berating her for not stepping aside to let women of color help women of color, to research women of color, to explicate and unpack the correlations, to highlight the ways in which we must tackle and abolish racism, poverty, sexism . . .
Yes. The white women nodded their heads. We agree. Why do we get the funding? Why do we get jobs in Brooklyn and the Bronx? Why do we travel the world and give other communities the tools they need to tackle the problems they have largely because we created those very problems for them?
Yes. From behind the podium, the woman, whose signs of age were seemingly vaporized under the stage lights, nodded. This woman, a contemporary Mary Henrietta Kingsley.
I am spending a year of relative privilege by serving a community I am not yet familiar with and that did not previously and directly contribute to my growth and development. I have multiple justifications for my decision: it is important to embrace diversity, it is important to stand up for the disenfranchised who represent no part of my personal identity, but contain the same palpitating viscera . . .
It is important to constantly question my motivations. It is important to defend myself against an existential crisis and the crushing carapace of cynicism.
Another training. Another cheesy certificate in a cheap, plastic frame.
“Latin American and African American men are the least likely to get liver transplants.”
“Why?”
Wide, dark-circled, intimidating eyes steer my way, “Racism.”
This word is said with an intonation of condescension: “Racism, of course. I know you want to cover your face from this issue, but you cannot ignore it.”
However, in the midst of discussing public health, breaking it down into specific demographics, confronting racism as a major cause of gross disparities in health care, there are intersperses of another kind of fear of confrontation, one that is not immediately recognized.
“Our young women today don’t know how to stand up for themselves. To be independent. To believe that they can be happy without a man constantly in their lives. They have a problem saying, ‘no’—articulating precisely what they want when they want it. We need to counsel them in better self-esteem.”
Another consensus. The nodding of heads.
“A woman needs to know when to be subservient to a man. She has to let him be the provider. She needs to take care of herself—to be the source of her own happiness—but she needs to know when to say when. She needs to be the woman and she needs to let the man be the man. Only then can she be a True Woman.”
Gender and race issues have been colliding in inextricable ways all around me. The main point: inextricability. These things cannot be prioritized; they must be addressed simultaneously.
Audre Lorde walked to the neighborhood in Harlem where I currently live to buy comic books with her sisters. She tasted women in the Lower East Side. She pondered the layers of oppression that accompany blackness, a body-quivering love for women, as well as being generally female. She thought about her blackness in lesbian bars in the Village.
We continue to have these conversations over half a century later—conversations about intersecting, complex identities. But, it seems to me, most people don’t have these conversations: it crosses their mind, their eyes glaze, they are afraid to be caught in a snare . . .
A transgendered woman, male to female, handed out a survey.
How long have you known that you are heterosexual? Would you like to seek therapy to change that?
“How can people expect me not to judge them, when they are confused about their own sexuality?”
“Men who have sex with men are gay. How could they be anything else?”
If the transgendered woman, male to female, loved women, she would be a lesbian.
“Things are just so complicated now.”
But, really, things have always been like this.
In the training on adolescent sexuality, the quick sand topic was sexual orientation. Three men sat in the audience—the largest number ever recorded. Three men dominated the conversation; interrupted the presentations.
In the training about HIV/AIDS education and prevention, the focus became spirituality
“He had a plan. He made us in a particular way. There is no reason for a baby to be born HIV positive. A baby sheds its mother’s immune system. Someone is looking out for us.”
In the training that wasn’t about older women and sexuality:
The grandmother, the Corinthians love-message pusher:
“The condom was stuck inside me. I couldn’t get it out. I tugged and pulled. I cried. And then, the next night, I was lying in my bed and it just shot out—without me having to do anything.”
