Not content to make HIV out to be largely the fault of men (gay ones in particular), some in the media seem to need to paint it as a "black" disease and in particular, a "black woman's disease". A "mere" gynocentric observation when talking about sub-Saharan Africa, HIV infection rates in African women have come to be a staple of discussions about Africa's health. But in this article, they're talking about America!
Even, it seems, in the case of devastating pandemics, the media cannot resist the urge to gender and/or ethnicify pretty much anything. Right from the get-go, the article starts with: Battling a Black Epidemic
At home: AIDS now threatens tens of thousands of African-Americans, many of them women, in big cities and small towns alike. A community in peril tries to save itself. Nowhere in this article does the author seem to suggest that maybe, just maybe, anyone who engages in known high-risk behavior for HIV transmission ought to be taking a wee bit more responsibility for their own actions-- regardless of their sex or ethnicity. Precautionary measures are well-known and widely available in America, yet some folks, even when they know their likelihood of contracting HIV is high, just seem to think the law of probability doesn't apply to them.
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