The first I’d heard about an alternative lifestyle called “down low” was when Dr. Monica Sweeney spoke about it at the Health Crisis meeting called by Congressman Major Owens. She explained that “life on the down low” meant that there are men who are married or otherwise connected to a female partner who have sex with other men unbeknownst to their female partners.
Where did this kind of behavior come from, this “down low” lifestyle of men sleeping with men? Provocatively featured in the New York Times Magazine, this behavior that Dr. Sweeney warned us about is spreading HIV/AIDS throughout African-American communities to devastating effects. “It comes from the prison system,” said a caller to WBAI (99.5FM), and her words rang true. Of course the prison system would play a part in this. After all, that’s where the unbelted pants and untied shoes come from. And sex in prisons is a long-known worldwide phenomenon that comes from incarcerating men for long periods of time. The race of the person has nothing to do with it.
But here in the United States, we have a situation, where blacks, while only 13 percent of the U.S. population, are 50 percent of all prison inmates. In fact, the Justice Policy Institute notes, “Between 1980 and 2000, it is estimated that African-American men were added to the prison system at three times the rate they were added to colleges. During that period 21,800 African-American men were estimated to have been added to the prison system and 7,247 were added to colleges. In 2000, one out of three young black men was either locked up, on probation, or on parole.” This explains how Medger Evers College in Brooklyn has an enrollment that is 78 percent female, mirroring the situation we find at historically black colleges across the country.
In New York, these men come mostly from neighborhoods here in the city. If you live in central Brooklyn, then “behind the prison wall” is really the room in the next building. And when men are released from a punitive rather than rehabilitating environment, from an environment that does not allow them to learn, to grow and to come to their senses, and they are dropped off on the street by bus or subway directly from the prison door without being phased into society, the behavior they were practicing in prison is transferred to the next block or around the corner.
Taking Dr. Wilson's admonitions to heart we ask: what is the social role, function and benefits of this behavior, and who profits?
If you look at the net effect of this reported "downlow" culture, it has to be acknowledged as being a White supremacist's favorite dream. Black men removing themselves from sexual competition for females, and when they do compete in the heterosexual market they spread HIV/AIDS, a highly communicable and deadly disease. The disease is very profitable for pharmaceutical and health care industries and at the same time destroys the African American community, making it easier here in Brooklyn for Whites to buy or "gentrify," as these system beneficiaries innocently call it when they smilingly move in up the block.
Referring to what is needed to cure the current conditions of Africans in America Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood, of East New York's St. Paul Community Baptist Church, says that "when 'our' masses begin acknowledging and purging the pain of the past, profound political, social and economic change is inevitable." Toward that end, for the last nine years St. Paul has hosted a "Commemoration of the MAAFA," a Kiswali term encompassing the experience of millions of Africans during the Middle Passage, when they were bought to the Americas for enslavement. In workshops and seminars led by experts in their field, the Commemoration seeks to reveal the African-American situation and that, “the way out is back through."
In that knowledge we have the key to stopping unhealthy, self-destructive and community-degrading behavior. We have to also remember that in a very real way, it is an old spirit that will help us to rebuild.
Brought together by technology and the conditions of African people worldwide, there is a new excitement around Pan-Africanism, the work of the African Union and the tantalizing promise of the synergy of the AU's proposed "Region Six,” comprised of the Diaspora with all of its economic and political potential. If we can stop the violence, stop the disease, and exercise the right to vote as diligently as we do the right to shop then there is a world of promise ahead.
