National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day
Portland, OR | February 7th, 2017
A Message From CAP’s Executive Director
Understanding and acceptance of our identity is a lifelong journey, one of which I admit I struggled with for many years. Today, as we observe the 17th annual National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, I stand a confident and proud Black, openly HIV positive man who daily urges the community to wake up to the harsh reality of the epidemic among us. Higher risk of HIV infection among Black communities does not stem from higher levels of risk behavior. Rather, our disproportionate risk of HIV can be traced to poorer access to health services and coverage, racism, transphobia, homophobia and a higher prevalence of sexually transmitted infection.
It is alarming that Black people in the U.S. continue to be the most at risk racial or ethnic group in the country, with one in 20 men and one in 48 women facing an HIV diagnosis within their lifetime. Projecting that half of all Black gay men and a quarter of Latino gay men will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetime is just one of the latest examples of how the public health community and our larger social, political, and economic structures continue to fail the most vulnerable communities in our society.
For all of us in the HIV community this means that now more than ever, when civil rights, the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals and a woman’s rights to make choices for their own body are being challenged, we have a responsibility to make sure that we do everything we can to advocate for the importance of our safety net programs and ensure that information is available about how to access them.
At CAP, that means all of us working together to correct social injustices and strengthen the often-broken systems throughout the communities we serve. Moving forward, CAP will be even more intentional about this focus, I have made an organizational commitment and investment into integrating the Black Lives Matter movement at our staff level. This does not mean that other lives (e.g, Latino, Asian, White, etc.) don’t matter. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. However, at this moment in time, police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, and major disparities within public health have converged to create a perfect storm of inequality for Black people that we must begin to address differently than we have in the past.
As our work continues, CAP will be re-imagining our approaches, messaging, everyday work, functions, policies and activities, including core trainings for all staff on power and privilege in healthcare and historical trauma and stigma within Black communities. In the months ahead, CAP will be hiring external consultants to bring expertise from outside of the organization with the intent of improving affirming practices across the organization, both for internal policies and work culture as well as external service work. The culmination of this work will be a new strategic plan that will better allow CAP to monitor organizational benchmarks around our program and service outcomes and engagement of Black communities.
Bottom line – Given everything we know about HIV and how to prevent it after more than 30 years of fighting the disease, it’s just unacceptable that our community continues to become infected at such high rates. We must respond to this health crisis with the urgency it warrants.
Sincerely,
Tyler TerMeer