Listening to Opera

"I'm sittin' in the phantom, listening to opera gun is my bodyguard call me Kevin Costner" Well I'm not really sitting in a phantom, I'm actually sitting at the mazda dealership waiting for them to finish working on my car. There was a woman in the waiting room with her kid,-- I think the kid was retarded..or should i say 'mentally challenged'. The kid couldn't formulate a full sentence to save his life but he was full of meaningless interjections.

Anyway, I have to venture home in a few weeks, a journey I am none to thrilled about. I suppose it'll be nice to see the family, I just hate those damn tolls. But what are you going to do? These things are expected of you, right. Its the price we pay to be part of any social construct whether it be a family, a school, job etc.

Hmmmmm ok, lets write about something semi important today, no?

I got in a recent argument with one of my black female friends about this whole down low brother issue. It seems to be flaring up in the media a lot, I hear about it on the net, people gossip about it, of course I never hear it through the venues I should, just behind closed doors. My white roommate even made a joke about it...so I suppose this topic is far widespread by now. So I've got two major issues with this whole concept. Firstly, its being used to blame the rising number of HIV cases in black women even though we've got no statistical evidence that their is a correlation between the two AND the same thing is going on in the white community (except these men are being caught in mall bathrooms and a lot of these guys have been very high profile), yet we have no derogatory term for white men who do the same thing nor does the white community completely destroy these men. The senator that got caught (can't remember his name) still has his wife, still has his kids and might have been able to save his job had he denied the scenario from the get go. But I digress, lets get back to the HIV issue.

From what I can gather there is no statistical data on any correlation between down low men and the rise of new HIV cases. People too often assume that because something 'sounds right' or appears to 'make sense' that it must be the case. In general people hate homosexuals, especially the black community, the stigma that HIV is a homosexual disease has largely dissipated however people still feel this disease is their (the homosexual community's) fault. This faulty logic follows as such, we've got black men who are lying and are really bisexual, these black men are really lying to themselves and others and are really just homosexual, they are responsible for the HIV epidemic because they are gay, since they sleep with men who clearly spread the disease and also sleep with women they must be the link between those that would have the disease (gay men) and those that normally wouldn't have the disease (straight women). Whether you want to admit this rationalization or not, more than likely this is how many of people, especially those in the black community think. My problem...where the fuck is the evidence? Could it quite possibly be just another thing other communities are using to further divide us, to pit us against each other. For some reason this issue is funny to everyone else and no one has enough sense to start questioning who coined this derogatory biased term for an action that has occurred since the birth of the human race. Why was the term coined, why single out on black men, where is the statistical data? Where are the facts. We can't even figure out if the earth is getting warmer or colder and its not like the earth is on the down low, but somehow we've established 'well known facts' about a group of people we know nothing about because unlike global warming we don't have handful of dedicated scientists researching this topic. But what I find so remarkable is that if you were to ask people in the black community what the leading factors in the rise of HIV amongst black women, many of them would probably point the finger at brothers in prison OR on the downlow. This phenomenon has become widely accepted without any factual data, however we actually have factual data for global warming (even though it still has determined anything, btw i'm neither for or against this global warming thing its all for the sake of argument) and if you were to ask the same people about global warming you'd get a bunch of mixed answers. Do you see the connection?

I guess this really all comes back to the fact that black males have enough stigma surrounding them already. If we really don't have any statistical data to back it up why take speculation as the truth. Just know its possible maybe even probable but until we know for sure we shouldn't let speculation influence judgement.