Op-Ed from Chip Arndt: Science is not the Enemy We are

BY CHIP ARNDT, in response to "South Florida Haitians decry HIV report"

As a gay man who came to adulthood through the "Dark Ages" of AIDS in the United States, who has lost loved ones to its cruelties, and worked in a variety of ways to combat it such as participating in four fundraising events this year, I am deeply sympathetic to the painful memories and anxieties that this study has triggered among some in the Haitian community. But I urge everyone to also remember that, throughout the history of the pandemic, the greatest threat to our survival has not been the disease itself but ignorance. Initially, ignorance that a new disease even existed. Ignorance among those who didn’t know they had it and, thus, unintentionally passed it to others. Ignorance about how it was spread. Ignorance about what caused it. Was it bacteria, a virus, or something people were doing such as having a poor diet or abuse of drugs that was impacting their immune systems? And, from that, how to treat its symptoms?

But even before science had answered many of those questions, societal ignorance and bigotry essentially joined hands with the disease to accelerate its death toll. Gay men were already pariahs in the U.S. and most parts of the world when their association with the disease inflamed homophobia and homo-hatred to unprecedented levels. Individuals were physically attacked, gay patients were denied medical treatment, lost jobs, and were abandoned by their own families, and, in many ways, by their own government. One U.S. Congressman suggested rounding up everyone with AIDS and forcibly putting them on a remote island. A famous and much-lauded conservative writer suggested tattooing us and REPEATED THE SAME IDEA JUST TWO YEARS AGO.

The number of cases among Haitians made them victims of similar social and political atrocities, amplified by racism and classism. And hemophiliacs like teenager Ryan White were also ostracized and demonized; White barred from going to school, physically threatened, called “queer,” and generally treated as a contagious leper even after it was medically accepted that transmission could not occur from casual contact. Ignorance was often as resistant to cure as the disease itself.
Therefore, it’s extremely disappointing that some leaders of the Miami Dade Haitian community have chosen to unnecessarily attack this research without any evidence that it is motivated by anything other than the attempt to increase our knowledge of everything related to the disease that we might come closer to its eradication and minimize further infection in the interim. It is no more an attack on Haitians, nor intended to “blame” them for aids than a weatherman’s description of a hurricane’s path through the Caribbean to south Florida is an attempt to blame Haitians for bad weather.

This past spring, the Haitian Red Cross conducted a huge HIV/AIDS education and prevention campaign there called "Together We Can." Those three words summarize our personal and collective power and our mutual responsibility, particularly in south Florida where the rate of new HIV infections is so disproportionately high. When we, gays and nongays, people of all races and nationalities, work together to fight ignorance and intolerance, the only outcasts will, and should be, those who don’t join us. We must never again aid AIDS in its continuing efforts to destroy us by turning our backs on each other or knowledge itself.

Chip Arndt
President Freedom Democrats – State Registered GLBT Democratic Miami Dade
Co-Winner of The Amazing Race