To reach young people with the message of HIV prevention, entertainers like Lil’ Wayne are incorporating warnings in their body of work. “My cyberspace friends don’t care about HIV or AIDS,” says Deniece Kinash, a young multi- racial female volunteer who does HIV outreach on the popular internet social network Myspace (200,000,000 plus members). She said by filling out a simple on-line application, she has unprecedented access  to millions of young members of the  popular cyberspace social networks like Facebook and Myspace. Creating pages that reflect each member’s individual personality is only part of the teenage fad.
Finding compatible members and adding them to your friends is the other part.  Some Myspace stars have hundred of thousands of friends on their pages. Many members play on-line games like ‘Mafia Wars’.
This game  allows you to become a  cyberspace gangsta who can lead your crime family into selling drugs,  prostitution and  any criminal activity you desire. The object is to make cyberspace money. You can shoot and kill other players to further this goal.
The mayhem plays out with the background music of popular hip hop and metal bands.  Is this art representing life or life representing art? Does the cyberspace violence fuel the increased Black on Black youth violence in poor Black communities?
That is a story for another time.  The point here is when you question Black youth about HIV you will see that they are not clear on how HIV is transmitted or how to use condoms to protect themselves. And many don’t care. They “tune it out,” says Deniece.
This is surprising in view of the Kaiser Family Foundation report that found Blacks are six times more likely to be very concerned about becoming infected with HIV than Whites. Apparently, the  concern doesn’t mean that the Black youth are educated about HIV and AIDS.  A study  from the University of Chicago a few months back found that Black youth are not getting the HIV message. (Parker, Chi-Town Daily News, 2/2/09).
The researchers looked at seven focus groups that totaled about 50 college-age youth including Blacks, Hispanics and Whites of both sexes. They used a 30-minute public service announcement as an example of  traditional messages. The message failed to resonate with Blacks in particular said Anjanette Chan Tack, a doctoral student who worked on the study.
Inner city youth  didn’t listen to most HIV Public Service Announcements. Children’s Place  funded the study and  said that one of the most interesting findings was Blacks’ distrust of traditional means of disseminating HIV and AIDS awareness messages. “There’s been a disconnect between government and health institutions in the Black community.”
According to the study, many PSA’s are “bookended by sexually suggestive programming.” They were saying, ‘OK, sure, you’ve got this flash on the screen for 30 seconds ... but this [is] in a sea of music videos where people are engaging in sex’.   Tack added, “You don’t see people using protection; all this stuff is glamorized, and in the middle there is a commercial telling you to protect yourself.”
Some young people believe that getting tested for HIV is an admission of guilt for having sex.  While others, Black women in particular, do not feel empowered  to demand a Black man use a condom.  To deal with the misinformation, some small community based organizations around the US have rolled out high tech HIV awareness initiatives. One group texts safe sex information to teenage cell phone users. And BET Entertainment has one of the most successful safe sex Public Service message campaign in the US: “Rap It Up.”
President Obama’s new HIV initiative called “Act Against AIDS” and the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS’s “National Call to Action” will address this problem with a stepped up HIV multimedia awareness initiative targeting inner city communities across the US. This is a great start  to put the HIV epidemic back on the US public radar and begin to correct the misinformation about HIV and AIDS.
HIV awareness messages and the way they are targeted to inner city youth must be revisited. It’s time for  us to double down on HIV messages to inner city youth. Let’s put more young  Black stars giving HIV awareness messages  in heavy rotation on popular TV shows like “106 and Park” and the Black cable series like “Lincoln Heights.”
Let’s embrace the youth culture. Young people text or twitter messages on their cell phone rather than talk. The new safe sex messages must be culturally appropriate, age specific, and text or twitter friendly.  Hip Hop is still immensely popular with inner city youth.  Check out Lil Wayne’s “Get Informed, Not Infected,” PSA on Youtube. Let us get internet smart about explaining to Black inner city youth how to use a condom and target some of the  HIV awareness messages to Black internet entertainment Web sites. In the words of young people,  “Lets get BZ.”
Dennis Levy is Executive Director of the Black And Latino HIV Internet Initiative (Blac NY). He is a free lance writer and public speaker who has addressed HIV and AIDS in the Black and Latino Communities.. For more information go to http://www.myspace.com/blac_ny or E mail Levicobx@yahoo.com