AIDS among blacks in the 1990s

In the black community, many health indicators are going in the wrong direction. Black life expectancy is going down. Our middle class is growing but our poor are growing also. It is no longer even jarring to talk about black males as an endangered species. Black women are groaning under family responsibilities. Too many of our young people are better armed than the police and kill each other for "diss'in," ie, he was disrespecting me. It is appropriate that AIDS be responded to as a crisis, but we also have a weighty, preexisting set of long-standing and equally lethal health and social ills. The infrastructure we build in response to AIDS and the lessons we learn from this disease must be developed with this broader view in mind.