Abstract
This book explains how The Balm in Gilead, a religious community-based organization established in Harlem in 1993, redefined how the black church understood AIDS. Angelique Harris describes how The Balm moved the black church in New York City away from ignorance and disregard to active community engagement around HIV prevention and care. Grounded in ethnographic, interview, and analysis of texts produced by The Balm and the churches it partnered with, Harris offers a clear and complete accounting of the important role The Balm had in reshaping the black church’s response to AIDS.
Much of the work on AIDS organizations has examined groups like ACT UP, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, and others that arose from the gay community. While the African American population has nearly the same numbers of HIV-positive as the gay population, studies of organizations originating from the black community are few and far between. For this reason, AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church offers an important corrective by making visible the invisibility of the black community’s response to AIDS. This invisibility has been a “fact” taken for granted after the publication of Cathy Cohen’s The Boundaries of Blackness (1999), a book that explained the absence of black community organizations combatting HIV, especially when compared to the gay community. Cohen argued that the lack of community response originated in internal fragmentation, a history of black leaders, national political organizations, and churches marginalizing HIV-positive segments of the black community, the practice of churches which linked AIDS to sin, homophobia, and the contentious politics about which issues are “black” issues. The gravity of Cohen’s findings drew scholars’ attention away from those AIDS organizations that have successfully navigated this complicated terrain. By studying The Balm of Gilead, one of the most visible organizations serving the black HIV-positive community, Harris’ book fills a much needed gap in our understanding of AIDS in the black community, complementing the work of Cohen and others.
From its early days, The Balm in Gilead sought to change how the black church in New York City defined and understood AIDS. Rather than viewing AIDS as a stigmatized disease of sinners, they pushed a view that AIDS was a public health problem for the black community. In so doing, The Balm reminded churches of their role as community and cultural organizations devoted to improving the lives of their parishioners—a role that made an improvement in the community’s health and the lives of those affected by HIV. Harris gives a careful account of how leaders in The Balm and the black churches struggled to work within the complex web of meanings around drug-use, homosexuality, and sexuality broadly. The core lesson here is how organizations can work within meaning systems, rather than against them, with great success.
Harris’ story is an account of how The Balm in Gilead combatted understandings of AIDS within the black church through the dissemination of AIDS “facts.” Harris is careful to acknowledge the constructed nature of facts and how they are mobilized by The Balm in Gilead to frame and advance their interests, by enveloping HIV prevention tips from the CDC in language that would be more appealing to black churches. For instance, in one passage a leader of The Balm translates the clinical language of condom promotion into a message that church leaders would accept by cloaking it in messages about abstinence and “God’s special gift of lovemaking.” This strategy enabled The Balm to communicate public health messages to the community though the trusted source of the black church without raising red flags for church leadership. The issue of trust is especially important in this case. The black community’s mistrust of medical establishments in the shadow of the Tuskegee Experiment made the church an important site for combating myths and urban legends around AIDS. By reconciling medical knowledge of AIDS with religious knowledge, it appears The Balm borrowed the power of the altar to great effect.
Beyond her discussion of the reframing of AIDS for the black community, Harris also discusses the form through which these messages were disseminated. The Balm drew on social marketing techniques to communicate their message more effectively. Practitioners of health communication would find this chapter to be particularly helpful for their work.
Ultimately this is solid, although not especially groundbreaking, research. While Harris brings a series of literatures to bear on this topic (e.g., social movements, social problems, sexuality, religion, social construction, framing, health and medicine, science and technology studies, and health communication), it was less clear to me how she was making contributions to these varied fields beyond introducing an understudied case. The book also left a number of questions unanswered. While it seems that The Balm was effective in communicating information about AIDS, did The Balm challenge the stigmatizing associations of AIDS with homosexuality, drug use, and sin, or merely circumvent them? In addition their rise seemed largely trouble-free in Harris’ accounting. Were there framing failures and institutional roadblocks on the way to their success? Social movement scholars and practitioners can learn from The Balm in Gilead: with so few scholarly accounts of effective AIDS organizations in the black community, seeing how The Balm in Gilead struggled might have offered deeper insight into what made them unique. Despite these minor concerns, AIDS, Sexuality, and the Black Church: Making the Wounded Whole offers scholars of HIV/AIDS an important glimpse into this critical organization.