Doing It to Death: Blacks and AIDS

“Your revolution will not happen between these thighs.” — Sarah Jones

The Black Church is a sleeping old slave.

Can I get an amen? I didn’t think so.

No one wants to talk about the ineffectiveness of the Black Church in awakening black folks to the ignorance of passing AIDS among ourselves. We do so as casually as we pass collection plates on Sunday morning.

Those sermons about loving one another and doing unto others as we would have it done unto ourselves are tired when we’re doing it to each other to death. Black ministers need to be real. Your congregation is sick.

I remember when ministers were the cornerstone of black neighborhoods and of the black community at large.

They shaped our collective consciousness.

That changed when the world grew evil almost beyond recognition. Blame that on crack and a generation immune to the work ethic their parents employed. Blame the change on black folks — newly wealthy and estranged from one another — mired in complacency, fat and falling asleep.

Church, the building and the ideal, became the New Negro’s Country Club. It was a place to hang out once a week, a place to measure our individual successes against our neighbors on the pew. And what church we belonged to became as important as what we drove, what we wore and where we worked. It was fun and hip to go to church, and no longer sobering.

Suddenly, Jesus was the icon. Sermons were no longer salves and directives but speeches fraught with appeasement and old-school rhyme schemes.

Sundays were little more than two-hour showers. And, oh, what we lost once we crossed the threshold and walked back into the skins of our old, street selves.

Meanwhile, the people we assumed were “safe” because they occupied the same seats Sunday in and out were dying. They were depressed, in loveless marriages with uncontrollable children. Women were degraded by husbands who walked around in a haze of anger, hostility and frustration as they succumbed to the weaknesses of the flesh.

And yet black folks continue to slip knowingly into the hellishness of AIDS in pursuit of instant gratification. Black ministers, preoccupied by economic development and building more churches, are blind to the weaknesses of a philandering flock. What can you build when your workers are so weak and depraved?

But, alas, there is pacification.

The annual Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS is approaching. (See a guide to events on page 16.) It’s probably a good idea, if not a little passive/aggressive. It’s like cleaning up a hooptie for sale and not telling the new owner the odometer has been rolled back.

Black folks are in hiding from the garish relationship between us, AIDS and death.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Harvard AIDS Institute, more than half of the estimated 40,000 annual new AIDS infections occur among blacks. In 1998, black women accounted for 64 percent of new female AIDS cases and black men accounted for 50 percent of new male AIDS cases. AIDS is the leading cause of death among 25- to 44-year-old black adults. One in 50 black men is HIV positive, while one in 160 black women is HIV positive.

Those are the numbers. They’re empty if you’re a woman who is having unprotected sex with a man you know is promiscuous, has sex with men or is a needle-using drug addict and vice versa.

Why are black ministers so squeamish to break it down in the pulpit? Send the children to Children’s Church and have an adult conversation with the grown-ups.

Black folks are living foul and are in denial when it comes to AIDS, plain and simple. Like when our brothers come out of jail — they might have had unprotected sex with another man. Or like when our husbands come home from business trips — they might have had unprotected sex with a strange woman from the hotel bar or whom they ordered up like room service.

Sisters, stop subjugating yourselves at the risk of killing yourselves. When we lay down with each other, mortality needs to be as strong a thought as climaxing

And just like churches form committees for the building fund and the pastor’s anniversary, every Black Church — from the storefront to the three-service campus — should have an arm of education whose sole purpose is to address the health issues that are killing us softly.

And you snot-blowing, forehead-wiping, jack-legged ministers paying off your luxury cars and time shares in the Smokey Mountains with money you should be using to pay AIDS educators to come and help deliver your flock, shame on you. Rest assured a day of reckoning has been reserved in your name.

As for the Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, pray on. I, too, believe that prayer changes things. But when you get up off your knees, do something.

And while you’re praying for the ones dying from AIDS, send one up for yourself. Because only you, God and your partner know what you did last night.

This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2001.