AIDS is among the three top causes of death for black women ages 35 to 44.
He was, Precious Jackson said, a very fine black man.He was 6 feet 2 inches tall with an almond-milk complexion, dreamy darkeyes and a deep voice. During their nearly two years together in LosAngeles, he was the sunshine of her life, even though he had a habit oflanding in jail and refused to use a condom when they made love.
“I didn’t ask him any questions,” Jackson said in arecent interview. “I didn’t ask him about his sexual history. I askedhim if he had been tested, and he said one test came back positive butanother one came back negative. I was excited to have this man in mylife, because I felt I needed this man to validate who I was.”
The man is now Jackson’s ex-lover, but the two are forever attached bythe AIDS virus she contracted from him, becoming, in the process, apart of the nation’s fastest-growing group of people with HIV — blackwomen.
That development, epidemiologists say, isattributable to socioeconomic and demographic conditions specific tomany African American communities. Black neighborhoods, they say, aremore likely to be plagued by joblessness, poverty, drug use and a highratio of women to men, a significant portion of whom cycle in and outof a prison system where the rate of HIV infection is estimated to beas much as 10 times higher than in the general population.
For black women, the result has been devastating,said Debra Fraser-Howze, founding president and CEO of the NationalBlack Leadership Commission on AIDS.
“We should be very afraid,” she said. “We should beafraid and we should be planning. What are we going to do when thesewomen get sick? Most of these women don’t even know they’reHIV-positive. What are we going to do with these children? When womenget sick, there is no one left to take care of the family.”