HIVAIDS and The Streets: The Relationship Between HIVAIDS and Heterosexual Street Life Oriented Blac

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HIV/AIDS and The Streets The Relationship
Between HIV/AIDS and Heterosexual Street Life
Oriented Black Men

• Yasser Arafat Payne
• University of Delaware
• Hanaa Anwar Hamdi
• University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey

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What does Street Life Mean?

• Ideology
• (1) The ideology has been passed on by older
  Black male generation and (2) the more connected
  to the code or the better a person understands
  the ideology the more resilient a person is
  considered (by himself as well as his immediate
  community) (R. Lincoln Keiser, 1967)
• Set of Activities
• Street life is a spectrum of networking behaviors
  that can be captured through two sets of
  activities (1) bonding activities that extends
  to joking, playing the dozens, hanging on the
  corner or block, rhyming (or rapping),
  playing basketball amongst each other to name a
  few activities and (2) illegal activities (e. g.
  robbing, selling drugs, committing violent acts,
  etc.) generally employed to confront the effects
  of racism and inner city economic impoverishment.
  

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Theoretical Framing

• (1) Womanism (Macmillan-Thomson, 2003 Walker,
  1983)
• (2) Sites of Resiliency (Payne, 2005, 2006)

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Theoretical FramingWomanism Alice Walker
(1983) In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens

• Womanist theology is a form of feminism that
  focuses on the specific concerns of women of
  African heritage. It centers around their
  relationship with God, their commitment to the
  moral flourishing of their communities, and their
  past, present, and future struggles for justice
  Although the term originates in the African
  diaspora, others find the emphasis on communal
  wellbeing and empowerment relevant to their own
  cultural contexts. Although womanism situates
  itself within a theological context, forays into
  intersections of science and religion tend to
  focus on issues of healthcare within African
  American communities, HIV/AIDS, the effects of
  biogenetic engineering on the poor, environmental
  racism, and shifting paradigms of dominance and
  control
• Womanist Theology." Encyclopedia of Science and
  Religion. Ed. Ray Abruzzi and Michael J. McGandy.
  Macmillan-Thomson Gale, 2003. eNotes.com. 2006.
  22 Jan, 2008 lthttp//www.enotes.com/science-religi
  on-encyclopedia/

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Sites of Resiliency (Payne, 2005 Payne Brown,
in press)

• Psychological Dimension
• A psychological site of resiliency represents
  the code, ideology and/or value system imbued
  within the physical space. It is important to
  note that the street code is accepted by these
  men, to be a baseline understanding that provides
  strategies, rules and guidance for the multiple
  negotiations and interactions that may occur
  within a street lifestyle. Resiliency, for these
  men, is often equated to how well one masters or
  understands the code of the streets.
• Physical Dimension
• A physical site of resiliency represents those
  geographically bonded and diasporic places or
  spaces where, in the case of the streets, men
  congregate to bolster personal or group levels of
  resiliency (e. g. the block, street corner,
  basketball court, barber shop, your boys crib,
  etc.).

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Sites of Resiliency Theoretical Model(Payne
Brown, in press Payne, 2005)
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Traditional Conceptualizations of Resiliency for
Black Men

• (1) Middle-class and upper middle class
  orientation
• (2) Ahistorical stance
• (3) Individualized perspective that often holds
  the person solely responsible for the development
  of his resiliency and
• (4) Refusal to consider the overall social
  structural impact of economic conditions in the
  lived experiences of Black men and/or the larger
  Black community.

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Non Traditional Assumptions

• (1) Race and racism
• (2) Socio-historical patterns
• (3) Intersection of concentrated economic poverty
  (capitalism) and resiliency and
• (4) Phenomenological based analysis to understand
  personal constructions of resiliency.

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Race/ethnicity of persons (including children)
with HIV/AIDS diagnosed during 2005
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HIV/AIDS Racial/Ethnic Disparity

• (1) 35.5 per 100,000 Blacks
• (2) 10.9 per 100, 000 Hispanics
• (3) 2.3 per 100, 000 Asians/Pacific Islanders
  and
• (4) 1.1 per 100, 000 Whites

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Race/Ethnicity of Adults and Adolescents Living
with HIV/AIDS in 2005
Note. Based on data from 33 states with
long-term, confidential name-based HIV reporting.
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Dominant Transmission Categories for Black Male
Adults and Adolescents Living with HIV/AIDS at
the end of 2005

• (1) Male to Male Sexual Contact 48
• (2) Injection Drug Use 23 and
• (3) High Risk Heterosexual Contact 22

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Dominant Transmission Categories for Black Male
Adults and Adolescents Living with AIDS at the
end of 2004

• (1) Injection Drug Use 29.2 and
• (2) High Risk Heterosexual Contact 18.1

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What is High-Risk Heterosexual Contact?

• (1) Sex During Menstrual Cycle
• (2) Anal Sex
• (3) Exposure to Broken or Bleeding Mucous
  Membrane Tissue, (i. e., vaginal and oral sex)

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Dominant Arguments

• (1) Hypersexual
• (2) Down Low Thesis
• (3) Infection of Black women from Black men
  formerly released from prison and
• (4) Homophobia in the Black Community

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Traditional Conceptualizations of Black
Masculinity

• Pre-Occupation with Black Male Sexuality
  (Bennett, 1961/1993 Blassingame, 1979 Dubois,
  1935/1998 Lemman, 1991 Patterson, 1998).

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Kardiner Ovessy (1951)

• Part of this street life pattern is the result
  of sheer boredom and the irrelevancy of
  education. Hence, they cannot be attentive at
  school or get the feeling that they are engaged
  in a meaningful and ego-enhancing activity. Many
  of these high school boys have been to bed with
  women the age of their female teachers and the
  disciplines and obligations of school life make
  no sense to them. In consequence, school is
  treated as a meaningless routine. The street, on
  the other hand, offers adventure, struggle for
  dominance, mock and real hostilities. It is in
  other words, a better training for lifeaccording
  to their sightsthan education (p. 311).

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The Down Low
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Tenets of Street Masculinity
(Boyd-Franklin Franklin, 2000 Burton,
Obeidallah, and Allison, 1996 2000 Dopson,
2007 Franklin, 2004 Payne, 2006)

• (1) Community/Localized Street Identity
• (2) Accelerate/Bypass Adolescence
• (3) Respect
• (4) Loyalty
• (5) Protector and
• (6) Provider

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Younger Street life Oriented Black Men
Economic Survival/Provider

• Killer (17, 10th grade) Like some niggas, they
  really do need it (the option of street life)
  Couple of niggas I know, they really have
  nothing. Their mother and father is crack heads,
  so theyre uncles are selling drugs, so they be
  like Im a get down with my uncles and them...
  Im a try to get some money. I dont feel like
  asking everybody for a dollar to get something to
  eat ... Or to buy me some sneakers.

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Younger Street life Oriented Black MenEconomic
Survival/Provider

• Iceberg (16, 9th grade) You start selling drugs
  and you see all this money and stuff, you're like
  damn, now I've got it. Feel me. I dont got to
  ask nobody for nothing. You feel like a man.
  Feel me. Because you can support yourself. You
  can support anybody else. Feel me. You can do
  whatever you want to do with your money. You
  don't got to ask nobody, can I borrow fifty
  dollars and get some sneakers?, I mean, I dont
  even need groceries for my house, nothing like
  that. You got it all.
• Wah Benz (17, 11th grade) Sometimes everybody
  parents aint able to raise their kids, so he
  the street life oriented Black boy goes to the
  people on the street for the help So they got to
  pay the bills and stuff like that. So, they
  aint got no choice but to go into that game
  street life because they cant get no real job
  at fourteen, fifteen years old. So thats what
  they got to do.

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Community Attitudes Toward HIV/AIDS How do
African Americans view the epidemic themselves?

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Study Many Blacks Cite AIDS Conspiracy
Prevention Efforts Hurt, Activists Say

• By Darryl Fears
• Washington Post Staff WriterTuesday, January 25,
  2005 Page A02

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Prison, Black Men and Sexuality

• (1) little empirical evidence to support that men
  are contracting the virus inside state and
  federal prisons
• (2) most Black men who are infected in prison
  were infected before incarceration

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What is Participatory Action Research?

• Participatory Action Research (PAR) involves
  directly including on the research team, members
  of the population and/or community of interest.
  Once such members are identified, they then are
  offered the opportunity to participate in all
  phases of the research project (e. g. theoretical
  framing, methodological design, analysis,
  publication, formal presentation, monetary
  compensation, etc.). The general idea behind
  including community members on the research team
  is so that the community (in part) can play a
  direct role in guiding the development,
  documentation and/or shaping of information
  regarding itself (Fine et al., 2004 McIntyre,
  2000 Potvin et al., 2003 Wakeford, 2004)

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The L. I. F. E. R. S. (2004)Ending the Culture
of Street CrimePrison Journal, 84, (4), 48 68.

• .. It is unrealistic to think that any serious
  efforts to address the problem of drug addiction
  could be successful while simultaneously
  excluding drug users, who consume illegal
  substances and drug dealers, who market them,
  from such efforts. It is logically inconsistent,
  therefore, to expect a reduction in crime simply
  by galvanizing law enforcement, legislators, and
  a few select community groups, while excluding
  those deemed to be criminal elements from the
  process (274).

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Thanks!!!!