Here is an interesting piece that I came across recently:
More than 20 years after the AIDS epidemic arrived in the United States, 15 percent of African-Americans embrace the theory that government scientists created the disease to control or wipe out their communities, according to a study by Rand Corp. and Oregon State University.
More than one-quarter said they believed AIDS was produced in a government lab, and 12 percent believed it was created and spread by the CIA.
A slight majority said they believe a cure is being withheld from the poor. Forty-four percent said people who take new medicines for HIV are government guinea pigs, and 15 percent said AIDS is a form of genocide against black people. (more...)
Quite a few reports left out the following from the actual press release:
Significant numbers of African Americans believe in conspiracy theories about AIDS, and black men with such beliefs are less likely to use condoms as a precaution against spreading the HIV virus…(more…),
As the title suggests, the basic translation of this statistic/survey is simply that a good percentage of blacks today still do not trust most white people and government. For those of us that are in the over 30 crowd, we have witnessed such suspicious tragedies as the Tuskegee syphilis project, the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. , Malcolm X, and the Jim Crow laws of the south. More recently, the dismissal of 4 LAPD officers of charges for the senseless beating of a black motorist did very little to improve are trust of white people or “the system†(better known as the government). [Hey, let’s not forget if you were one of those that saw the movie Rosewood right before or during a work week. 
].
There is one other element to this anti-trust mixture that I think is very important to mention. Many of our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc. have also contributed to this negative trend as well. As a child, I remember all the stories I would hear various family members that would recall all of the times a white person did them wrong. As the stories were being told, I can remember my aunts in the room shaking their head while saying “um – um – um.†The men in the room would just say something like “see there! That’s why… (you fill in the blank)â€Â.
To this very day, when I am telling a story about something that happened to me, I still have friends that will inquire weather or not the people that I am talking about were white or black as if the outcome would have been drastically different if it had been a white person (trust me, its is a hard habit to break 
).
Whites on the other hand are guilty as well in this “lack of trust†conflict. One obvious place you will see this is when a black person enters into an environment and is not dressed like everyone else (who happens to be white). Regardless, when you compare the two groups, it is my belief that we as black people tip the scale in this game of distrust. I believe that one of the biggest issues that place us over the top is made up of two words: Affirmative Action.
Once a much needed plan to even the playing field in America, affirmative action has now turned iinto a vice that is used to further divide us as a nation (In short, affirmative action says two-fold: to whites it says that you can never be trusted to be fair to people of color. To blacks, it says that white people and/or the government are innately flawed when it comes to allowing us to have equal opportunities. In other words, “once a racist, always a racist“. In short, affirmative action can be seen as institutionalized distrust.
As I have said many times before, like anywhere else America may not be perfect, but it has certainly come a long way. Otherwise, I do not think that many of our brothers and sisters from Africa and other people of color would be still coming to this country to make a living.
The political “playas†that stand on the corner of Unending Black Struggle and Injustice Ave. would want to keep us in an unending state of distrust of white people so that they can more easily reap the spoils of white guilt while at the same time embolden their image as a so-called leader of black people.
I am not proposing some kind of great love fest between blacks and whites. Instead, what I realize is that at some point we are going to have to start trusting white people on a much greater scale than we have been in the past. Otherwise we will see ourselves once again at the back of the bus – this time , of the global economy.
“Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran tells us, ‘Race plays a part of everything in America.’ Whites, guilty. Blacks, innocent. Whites, bad. Blacks, good. A white woman clutches her purse when a black guy gets on an elevator. Racism! As a black lawyer enters a courtroom, someone mistakes him for a defendant. Racism! Cochran tells blacks, ‘remain hyper-sensitive. Turn these slights into assaults.” (excerpt from the book The Ten Things You Can’t Say in America by Larry Elder)
Score One For Abstinence
Telling people to use protection during sex is much more productive than teaching abstinence, right? Unless of course you’re stuffing the most vulnerable demographic full of paranoid nonsense that AIDS is developed by white people and spread by t…
Conspiracy theories about AIDS do little to help. I will not encourage anyone to hold onto such ‘strange views’ as AIDS being developed to eliminate blacks. Two years ago, I did a bit of research in order to try to understand the origin of the HIV virus.
In the scientific community, there is still no consensus on the origin of the virus. Of all theories put forward (that I’ve come across), the one I find most plausible is that put forward by Mr. Edward Hooper in his book “The River – A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS.†This theory states that HIV likely resulted from Polio vaccine trials in Belgian-Congo (present day Congo-Kinshasa in Africa) in the 50s. In other words, since vaccines were made using the livers and kidneys of monkeys and chimpanzees, the virus crossed over from the simian specie to man in poorly prepared samples. Was it intentional? No. The same vaccines used to inoculate African children were also used on American and European children. But, initial trials were carried out in Belgian-Congo.
The best protective methods against HIV are abstinence and condoms and very much in that order. Having multiple sexual partners even with the use of condoms is risky. These, in my opinion, are the type of messages that need to be drummed around. Abstinence is hardly mentioned because condom manufacturers need to make a profit and are involved in funding HIV prevention programs. Also, abstinence is often linked with religious groups, which need not be the case.