AIDS prevention strategies must advance beyond hip-hop-themed messages and an insistence on abstinence, because these “ain’t working,” the Rev. Richard Curry told the recent Deadra Green AIDS Summit in Jacksonville.

Poor, predominantly black communities are lacking the cultural and economic infrastructures that could remove the “crutches” of drug dependency and self-destructive behaviors, said Curry, the founder of Jacksonville’s Minority AIDS Coalition.

Emile Commodore, director of the Florida Department of Health’s Office of Minority Health, told the gathering that blacks make up 15 percent of the state’s population but 49 percent of its AIDS cases.

Curry said more frank communication and less judgment are needed in order for young women to prize their own self-preservation over the illusion of love and thus to insist that their partners use condoms.

Back to other news for February 2008

Search the Newsroom archive