When Silence Is a Sin

By Jack E. White

The Rev. Eugene F. Rivers III, pastor of Boston's Azusa Christian Community church, is my kind of preacher: a former gang member with a Harvard education who has devoted himself to keeping ghetto kids out of trouble. He also believes it's his Christian duty to verbally slap the black establishment upside the head when it's falling down on its job. In 1992, for example, he infuriated black intellectuals by accusing them of endlessly debating "Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, Jameson, Bourdieu, Lukacs, Habermas, and Marx" instead of trying to find solutions to inner-city crime and drug abuse. Three years later, he excoriated them for romanticizing "cynically anti-Semitic, mean-spirited, and simply incompetent" demagogues such as Louis Farrakhan while the underclass plunged into misery.

Now the 49-year-old minister is at it again, blasting most of what passes for black leadership nowadays for failing to speak up about the AIDS epidemic in Africa. As Rivers inquired earlier this month in an open letter to African-American thinkers, clergymen and politicians, "What verdict will our descendants render upon their ancestors who stood silently by as a generation of African children was reduced to a biological underclass by this sexual holocaust?"

Good question. By any rational standard, AIDS is the most profound threat to Africa's survival since slavery. Left unchecked, it will decimate the continent. According to the United Nations, 23.3 million Africans are infected by the AIDS virus, more than twice as many as in the rest of the world combined. Nearly 14 million Africans have died from the disease. The number of African children left orphaned by AIDS will soar to 13 million by 2001, a catastrophic burden in poor nations that for the most part lack even a semblance of Western-style social-welfare agencies. Millions will die sooner than they have to because they cannot afford expensive drug therapy.

In recent years, civil rights leaders have awakened belatedly to the toll of AIDS among black Americans, who now account for more than half of the new cases of HIV infection in the U.S. But for all their kente-cloth shawls and lavish Kwanza celebrations, only a handful of African-American leaders, such as Julian Bond of the N.A.A.C.P., philosopher Cornel West and former Congressman Ron Dellums, along with a few church and charitable organizations, have aggressively addressed the disaster in Africa. As Rivers says, it's long past time for black leaders "to come from under the shroud of denial and apathy" and make fighting the African AIDS crisis a front-burner issue in next year's presidential campaign. In other words, to transform our professed love for our Motherland into more than Afrocentric lip service.

Suppose, for example, that the black intellectuals who have been burning up the Internet to castigate the alleged shortcomings of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s television series Wonders of the African World were to devote an equal amount of brainpower to publicizing the AIDS epidemic. They might come up with ways to make drugs more available to impoverished Africans or to build support in Congress for California Democrat Barbara C. Lee's proposal for an anti-AIDS "Marshall Plan." They might develop strategies for changing the promiscuous sexual behavior that allows the disease to spread so rapidly. At the very least, they could make sure that the world does not turn its back on the unfolding tragedy. To stand by silently would be a sin.

To help fight AIDS, contact Africare at 202-462-3614 or visit africare.org