The Danger in Stereotyping Individuals | Eastern North Carolina Now

    People died and nobody paid attention because the mass media did not like covering stories about homosexuals and was especially skittish about stories that involved gay sexuality. Newspapers and television largely avoided discussion of the disease until the death toll was too high to ignore and the casualties were no longer just the outcasts. Without the media to fulfill its role as public guardian, everyone else was left to deal - and not deal - with AIDS as they saw fit.

    In those years, the federal government viewed AIDS as a budget problem, local public health officials saw it as a political problem, gay leaders considered AIDS a public relations problem, and the news media regarded it as a homosexual problem that wouldn't interest anybody else. Consequently, few confronted AIDS for what it was - a profoundly threatening medical crisis.

    Fighting against this institutional indifference were a handful of heroes from disparate callings. Isolated teams of scientists in research centers in America and Europe risked their reputations and often their jobs to pioneer early research on AIDS. There were doctors and nurses who went far beyond the call of duty to care for its victims. Some public health officials struggled valiantly to have the epidemic addressed in earnest. A handful of gay leaders withstood vilification to argue forcefully for a sane community response to the epidemic and to lobby for the funds that provided the first breakthroughs in research. And there were many victims of the epidemic who fought rejection, fear, isolation, and their own deadly prognoses to make people understand and to make people care.

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    Because of their efforts, the story of politics, people, and the AIDS epidemic is, ultimately, a tale of courage as well as cowardice, compassion as well as bigotry, inspiration as well as venality, and redemption as well as despair. It is a tale that bears telling so that it will never happen again, to any people anywhere."

    Randy Stilts, pictured above, was the first openly-gay reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. In 1985, he found out that he had was HIV-positive, and in 1992, he contracted pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. He passed away on February 17, 1994.

    References:

    Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856) - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/60/393/

    Randy Stilts, AND THE BAND PLAYED ON: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, St. Martin's Griffin, New York, 1987.

    Laura Green, "Negative Racial Stereotypes and Their Effect on Attitudes Toward African-Americans," Virginia Commonwealth University. Referenced at: https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/links/essays/vcu.htm
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( March 28th, 2022 @ 5:55 pm )
 
Thanks so much Stan
( March 28th, 2022 @ 5:44 pm )
 
This post by Diane Rufino is a must read for those of us who know we need to know the truth well enough to fight for its existence, while exhibiting perfect humility through continual kindness.



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