CHICAGO MEDIA
RETURN TO IF NOT HERE, IS THE PROBLEM THERE?
How could I live so close to a major city where AIDS was a very real problem, and receive no education or insight as to how to help? What I do know about Chicago’s problems concerning AIDS was greatly influenced by my father, who feared that growing up in a bubble had severely inhibited my perception of the “real world.” Chicago, a city of neighborhoods that spanned the socioeconomic was a great place to learn. Leaving me daily article clippings and sitting me down to glance through the Sun-Times, I began to pick up on public health debates and passing media coverage on the drug and homeless problems prevalent in the city. In a five-year span that began with the onset of my eighth grade year, the Sun-Times printed more than 3000 articles with AIDS in the title. However, the majority of these stories centered around issues outside of American borders, with titles such as “To Fight AIDS in Africa” or even, “A Fairy-Tail failure: The Bush administration put all its money on sexual abstinence in Uganda – and now AIDS is on the rise.” Unlike the abundance of flyers I witnessed in my sole visit to the gay community, AIDS in the news was most often recognized as a serious national and global problem and largely ignored on a city level. While such focuses were no doubt important, I continued to see AIDS impacting impoverished masses while remaining entirely uncertain of the local AIDS problem.
But
I do remember a few articles buried at the bottom of the paper that
began to emphasize this lack of local concern. One article, entitled,
“Why help needy in Africa but ignore Chicago’s plight?” (3)
touched upon the relative ease to associate AIDS with “vulnerable kids a
half a world away than those in my own city.” It now seemed Chicago was
just as fearful of being stigmatized as a gay or a drug user (5)
as the parents were in my conservative hometown. Gays, blacks and drug
users were most commonly associated with AIDS in the editorials
and special news briefs in earlier publications. While blacks account
for just 37 percent of the Chicago population (Appendix
F), there were
twice as many cases of blacks living with HIV and AIDS than whites (2/Appendix
D).
In
one editorial entitled: “AIDS is a conspiracy, and blacks are in on it”
(4) a black man states that even if AIDS
was started by some crazy white scientists, he still speaks angrily
against the lack of attention the African American population has given
to AIDS. No black-media institutions initiated “discussions; no civil
rights organizations marched or called on policy makers to take action;
No black celebrities sponsored relief concerts,” (4)
because no one cared. In a 2001 publication, Martha Irvine addressed the
same sense of denial found in the West side ward of Austin in the
article, “Gay, black and HIV-positive.” (6)
Austin has a cumulative rate of 887 cases per 100,000 people (Appendix
E)- one of the areas with the highest rates in Chicago. With ninety
percent of the black population earning on average $ 33,663 a year (Appendix
E), Austin is a poor, black community. Poor blacks don’t openly
address AIDS because they are “worried about being tied to the most
common forms of transmission- gay male sex and intravenous drug use” (6).
The resulting factor is the spread of this pandemic to new populations
of females, with heterosexual transmission now accounting for 41 percent of contraction among
black women in Chicago (2/Appendix
D).
Four articles demanding awareness and local attention over six years is simply not enough. While I was not a consistent or passionate reader of the Chicago Sun-Times, my skewed judgment of AIDS in my community resided in the emphasis of a global issue, not of a local and immediate problem. Defining AIDS with unavailable health care in impoverished nations, or stereotyping victims to overtly gay white males, or even blaming black men for spreading AIDS to women, only displaces the issue at hand. No community has been left untouched by this pandemic, including my own. The dearth of media attention and lack of a human element has only led me to believe that denial is an underlying cause of this pandemic, consuming us in such a way that we do not bother, nor care, to get involved.
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