AIDS: The black plague

What we talked about was the fact that so often when black people talk to white people, they experience the white people being so overly cautious and running over what they're thinking before they say, and self-censoring themselves. He agreed that being on the black end of that was very patronizing and not very trustworthy. When you speak to someone who's holding back, it's kind of unnerving -- you feel like they're privately judging you. From my end, as a white person, why would I ever want to be in a relationship with someone I really can't say anything of substance to? By engaging in that way, what I got was serious engagement back.

Was there a difference in talking to someone like Bob, a professor, versus talking to someone like Sarah [another character], who has little experience dealing with whites?

In a way, not so much. That was something I had to overcome. Obviously me and Bob, you know -- we've gone to the same schools, and he's taught at some of my schools, so we're speaking the same kind of economic and emotional language in some ways. But what I found was, with Sara or Desiree or other people I interviewed, when I assumed a level of emotional complexity with their experience, what I got was extremely sophisticated and powerful emotional material.

At the same time, for instance with Desiree, she's coming out of this church world, and this life in Oakland that was totally different from mine -- the fact that I engaged like that didn't mean I was always right. In fact, you're wrong a lot of the time. I don't want to give the idea that I presumed all this insight and what I got was constant affirmation. But I was willing to be wrong, saying, "I don't understand. You say the fact you were raped wasn't a big deal, but explain to me why you didn't react differently," instead of just accepting her answers and saying, "Well, of course, she's just so different than me. I just have to accept it and write it that way." What I invited were serious answers. And what I got was insight.

How do you think this book would be different written by a black author?

I really would hesitate to presume how it would have been written by someone in the black community. What Mindy [Fullilove] told me from the beginning was, "I am saddled with a segregation consciousness. There are things I can't see freshly."

She said to me, "You're going to be able to see this; you're not saddled with so much stuff." And that allowed me to in some ways engage very deeply but also keep some emotional distance. I didn't carry the burden of the race on my shoulders. I'm not saying that every black person necessarily would have, and I definitely wouldn't say that my perspective is better -- it's just different.

Yet any time an outsider writes about another community, you risk being patronizing. Did you encounter that problem?

I certainly think I'm up against that. I think that is going to set off alarms with people; it has all the way through. I think when people see my face and my name, some people are simply not going to read the book because of that. A friend of mine, when the book was being shopped, just by coincidence was living with an editor. She saw the book proposal on the table, and this editor was black, and she said, "This white boy is not going to be writing this book for me."

You are going to get that. But what I've heard from black people -- and this isn't a scientific sample -- is that there's nothing patronizing in this book, nothing stereotypical. For me, I would've been bored out of my mind writing a book that was patronizing -- which for me means reducing people to either to victimhood or elevating them to heroism, or simply reducing their story to one of AIDS and disease and suffering without painting them in some kind of complexity and really investigating them. To me, that investigation means respect.

One of the things I feel strongly about is that we need in this country to start engaging in serious and substantive ways with each other -- blacks and whites and members of all groups. When we disengage, that's when a huge segment of American society suddenly becomes invisible. Things like AIDS come out of that, things like crack cocaine and violence come out of that.

The chronology of the book ends in 2002. Since then, has the state of the epidemic improved?

It doesn't seem to be so. The CDC has been estimating pretty consistently for the last few years that 40,000 people are getting infected annually, and pretty consistently the proportion that's black has been increasing. I certainly think there have been major inroads made with heroin and needle-exchange programs in various communities. The amount of money, generally, that the Congressional Black Caucus has won for communities of color and AIDS has grown. And there are people on the ground who are doing incredible work and doing work to mobilize black America.

But what I'm more struck by is that after that initial burst of interest, the issue then faded from the public consciousness. It really doesn't seem to be considered a national problem, but a problem for black America and black Americans to deal with, not something that you or I should be concerned about: We should feel bad, but it's not our job to engage or think about it seriously.

But AIDS is really just the tip of this far more complex and rich iceberg. In some way AIDS is a dramatic symptom of a whole series of other forces that we're not dealing with as a society. In that sense, AIDS has tremendous potential to open up discussion and conversation, in ways that will be painful but also exciting and freeing. AIDS doesn't just intersect these issues, it crystallizes them. To see it just disappear from the consciousness is troubling. It feels not only like a public health tragedy but a missed opportunity.

People try to alert the country by saying the disease is threatening to break out of black America and it's just a matter of time. But it's really that the issues that intersect with the epidemic absolutely have broken out of black America. The story becomes about society as whole, a window into all these different problems and conditions that affect us all.

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