"By the late 1980s, medical journals and news media referred to several classes of the HIV-infected. There was early and frequent reference to "innocent victims of AIDS", which intimated the existence of other, presumably "guilty" victims. The innocent included infected children such as Ryan White and such sympathetic exemplars as Kimberly Bergalis.
What they had in common, is besides media sympathy, was white skin and virginity. Ryan White was a 10-year-old boy who had been cast out of his school because of his HIV status and whose family had been persecuted by fearful neighbors. This sad tale of cruel discrimination against the sick child was narrated by newspapers and television everywhere and was punctuated by frequent reminders of his "innocent" status. He had not contracted HIV from a sexual encounter or injected drug use; neither had Kimberly Bergalis, another innocent victim who had been infected by a dentist implicated in the possibly intentional infections of several other patients- patients we never saw- before his demise from HIV disease.
Bergalis was constantly profiled, and her courage, religious faith, and ravaged youth made it impossible not to sympathize with her plight. Her virginity, which certified her status as an innocent victim, was mentioned in a high percentage of the news stories describing her plight. But the demographics of HIV infections began to change as HIV preyed upon the marginalized, the Africans and, in this country, the poor and Black.
Early newspaper stories on the shifting demographics were given little prominence; neither will reports that the rural South was emerging as an epicenter of infection. But by 1997, a sea change had taken place and news reports and formed us the HIV affected a much larger percent of Blacks than whites, that it had become the chief killer of young African Americans, and that most children with HIV were Black and/or Hispanic. First in the minds many Americans and finally in grim reality, as certified by CDC statistics, AIDS had became a Black disease."
Chapter 13- Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington
*And before someone says "AKSHUALLY it was a gay disease first", reminder that 1) people can be Black, Hispanic, and gay at the same time, 2) Harriet does discuss gay white men in the chapter, and 3) AIDS' affected populations is discussed over two decades. This is just One Quote.
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