Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair

by Sarah Schulman

For example, in the US, the racist assumption for years has been that the reasons for such astronomically high rates of HIV infection among men who have sex with men is because Black men don’t have safe sex. A great deal of theorizing and planning has been done rooted in this assumption. There was an assumed lack of information, an assumed lack of self-esteem, clichés about Black masculinity, and an assumed impact of alcoholism and substance abuse, all leading to the presumption of unsafe sex. However, Greg Millett, the White House’s senior policy advisor on AIDS, released a report in 2015 revealing that, in fact, Black gay men have safe sex three times as often as white gay men. In other words, Black gay men are three times more accountable, aware, and proactive around safe sex than white gay men. So why the high rates? Because Black men are much more likely to have HIV