Why Django Doesn't Matter

Why Django Doesn’t Matter

            Listening to the voice on the other end of the phone I stood in disbelief as I heard my sister tell me that my 20 year old nephew was killed. The ‘what happened’ were followed by the ‘whys’ as she shared what little she knew of the situation. Although she didn’t know much at the moment, she knew that my nephew was a victim of a break-in and probably surprising the person, who was entering the home, was shot in the chest.

            It was ironic as just several days ago I had posted on my Facebook page how we shouldn’t be discussing the movie Django Unchained but instead talking about the murder rate in Chicago of 505 people killed mostly by guns and the victims being mostly black and Latino. How we should redirected the intelligent conversations of black intellects who wanted to dissect a movie rather than having a conversation of dissecting why men of color were dropping like flies by guns, killed by their own.

            And I will admit to myself that even in sharing the high body count from Chicago I like others probably felt removed from what was happening as I was in New York City. But after knowing how my nephew died I saw it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my nephew was far removed himself as he was in Oklahoma City. It didn’t matter that he as a young African American male didn’t have a police record and was on winter break from college. It didn’t matter that young black men like him are being murdered every single days in numbers that eclipse the mass shooting that have made the headlines. Not to compare the terrible tragedies but to show the magnitude. Yet my Facebook feed and other articles pertaining to the black community today is dominated by the discussion of Django Unchained and the cinema representation of slavery by a white man.

            For me Django doesn’t matter.

           

            In retrospect this time next year the movie will be a distant memory while this day next year will have brought back the pain and agony of the loss of my nephew. We won’t be talking about Spike Lee voicing his opinion about a movie. We will have instead moved on from our discussion of how many times the ‘N’ word was used in the film and whether or not Tarantino has the race license to put this on celluloid. But it seems that what we won’t be talking about is the high numbers of Blacks being killed by firearms in this country. I make that prediction as not only are we not talking about it now, I can’t recall any conversation of gun violence in black communities that match the level we’re giving to Django during the past years.

            I had to hold my tongue when a co-worker reported that she was offended by dolls that were made from the likeness of characters from the movie Django and being sold. I wanted to spurt out that I’m offended that the life of my nephew who was only twenty and had a full life ahead of him had his life taken senselessly by the act of a gun. I’m offended that we want to sit around the fire in Kumbaya moments and distill what the white man has done to us yet we don’t want to acknowledge how little we have done for each other. I’m offended that the life of a black person holds less weight than a movie that I can buy bootleg on 125^th street for five dollars.

          

          I feel the black community itself needs to become unchained.

             

           We need to remove the shackles of oppression we have placed on ourselves and each other in the community. Our feet and hands have to become unchained as it won’t take just table talk of society ills and theory’s why black men are killing each other.

            We already know why they’re killing each other. They’re killing each other because we want to take the easy way out and talk about a movie instead of taking the necessary ‘actions’ of fostering our young black men and guiding them to futures that young men of other races are afforded. And the word action is in parentheses to highlight that action and not talk is what’s needed in order to stop this senseless gun violence and disregard for each other. No more usage of ten letter words to affirm the letters one has behind their names or the expunging of Wikipedia facts of why blacks kill each other. We need action in the form of men and women talking and caring about young black men whose pants are sagging or hanging on the corner smoking blunts. We need to do this despite the fact they are strangers and we have no relations to them. In our actions we must make them visible and valid. Most importantly reminding them despite who they are and their circumstances that they still matter. We give them what has been often denied to us, hope.

            Django doesn’t matter and it never will. Anthony Hartfield Jr. Age 20, promising basketball star, college student and the older brother of a sister and a younger brother. That’s what matters. That’s what I want to talk about.            

   

The New Doctor

         Today was my first visit to a new medical provider. My usual doctor had left awhile ago and the new one that took his place I just never connected with. Maybe it was him and his bedside manner which was different from my previous doctor that I found disarming. Maybe it was me. Maybe I expected him to be like my previous doctor and so my expectations were set unreasonably high. It was turning out to be a bad relationship where I eventually said to him the infamous break up line, “It’s Not You, it’s Me”. And like that a clinic that I have been visiting for the last ten years of my status, I was no longer a patient. Whatever the reason I knew that I had to make a change as I just wasn't connecting with him.

            In my look for another doctor I quickly discovered it was going to be about the same difficulty as looking to find someone to be in a committed relationship in New York City. I used the dating comparison as searching for a new doctor is akin to looking for a new relationship. For example you want to make sure that you find someone that you're comfortable and compatible with. Of course you're not going to bed with that person but until the union end this person will know every intimate detail about you. They literally will see your scars and all as you both work on making yourself as healthy as you can. You won’t whisper sweet nothings but you will, hopefully, be sharing private and sometimes embarrassing ailments, things you don’t even share with yourself. Since it involves your health of course you want to make sure you feel comfortable as proper health advice can not be dispensed with half information.
            I thought my search was going to be as simple as Googling, "who is  a good HIV doctor" and figuring the first one that popped up was going to be the best because Google always put the best search result at the top right? I was proven wrong as going through the results was now becoming complicated as I discovered many medical providers had limited hours and saw clients only on a particular day of the week. Some made you go through endless electronically phone prompts just to get to the receptionist and sometimes when you finally got to the receptionist you knew that person could benefit in Customer service 101, 102 and 103. Some didn’t accept my insurance or were based in locations that would be to difficult to get to without using a passport.
            In my circumstances I was in a unique position denied to others based on the health care system in this country. Being insured I had a choice between a clinic and a private doctor. Both I feel have their benefits as well as drawbacks. Coming from a clinic setting where everything you need is under one roof, I felt that maybe at my stage I would be ready for a private. The clinic I had been attending suddenly seemed to change on me. Where before you felt the doctor was giving you the time you needed, it now felt as if I were on a conveyor belt and the clinic's mission was less about the patients and more about how many they could get through the door in order to bill. The nurses that used to be so jovial and seemed to like their job now looked stressed as they tried to keep up with the pace. You know something is wrong when you’re coming for medical services and on each visit the nurses while waiting for the doctor uses your visit as a therapy session for themselves. Thinking to myself, who do I send my bill to?
            There were some moments when I thought I had found a new provider only to again not have that moment of connect. I even wondered why they don’t have the ten minute dating routine with a room full of doctors so you can quickly find out who you’ll relate to as you move down the row of tables and make quick introductions. Maybe I’m onto a great new idea!

            After several hit and misses I accessed my situation and figured since I was feeling well I didn’t need a provider. That as long as my old doctor would give me refills I could just manage my own care. And it was easy to get refills from the old clinic as it never dawned on them that I had moved on so getting refills was simply a matter of going online and filling out the form. The growing disconnects between doctor and patient became as evident as the introduction of the new technology was similar to how people have started to relate on Facebook. Why interact with you in person when we can do it on Facebook? Isn’t online wonderful? What I was doing though wasn’t such a good thing and although managing my own health saved me time, I was also setting myself up.

            Because I had been a person with who rarely got sick if ever, I found comfort in the fact that I didn’t need to share with a doctor. I never stopped to connect the dots that the reason I was feeling so well was because I did have a relationship with a doctor. My visits were not simply a time to just chat with the doctor but also we were being preventive and going after things that looked like it would be a problem down the line. How you look at a doctor is so crucial to health especially if you walk in telling yourself you’re being proactive rather than reactive. For a lot of us we’re in that reactive stage where we’re waiting for something to feel wrong but by then it may be too late or options of treatment are lessened because a visit was delayed.

            This New Year I finally found a doctor I felt comfortable with. He was someone who listened and didn’t look down at their watch. It felt reassuring to know that I wasn’t going to play around with my health and doing research makes a difference as not all doctors come from the same cloth. And another thing that one has to look at is the receptionist area and how they treat you and make you feel. I can’t tell you how many good doctors I probably would have been a patient of if only they didn’t have an unskilled or overworked receptionist area. It makes a difference.

            So hello new doctor and I know we’re in the honeymoon phase but you complete me as I now have all the needed elements to manage my HIV. Here’s to the first date and for many more to come.

More Than HIV

              I had the most interesting dialogue with a co-worker who expressed to me that he was carrying guilt. He shared with me with tears in his eyes something that has been on his mind for awhile. He was carrying guilt that he just had to share with someone. His guilt stemmed from the fact that he was HIV negative and most of his friends were HIV positive. In sharing this he was asking himself what was wrong with him as if he didn’t know whether to take it as a curse or as a blessing.

            Immediately I wanted to say to him “are you crazy!” but I have a feeling my face was already registering that look as I couldn’t comprehend how he could feel that way. Before I passed judgment I listened to him fully explain his reasoning and from it he shared how he just lost a close friend who had AIDS. He shared how he felt helpless as he couldn’t do anything for him. He knew that he could be there as a friend to comfort him but he didn’t have it within his power to take the virus away and heal him.    

            After his statement he finished it with a remark that was sad to hear but I knew where he was coming from. He shared that as gay black man wasn’t he predestined to get HIV? And why does his friend have it but not him? And that brought on my “Wow” moment as in a surreal way I knew what he spoke of. It was something that I had heard before from different lips and now stuck in a moment when I was hearing it again. How did such a feeling get ingrained in the psyche of my friend, enough to make him guilty of being healthy?

            His sentiments were the same as others who felt in that if you’re black and gay, it’s not a matter of ‘if’ but more a matter of ‘when’ you will get HIV/AIDS. This message seems to come from the knowledge that if it pertains to anything black and gay the message is one of HIV/AIDS. As if the only visibility gay black men have is when it’s in the context of HIV. Even in the dialogue of gay marriage, equality or any other predominate issues the mainstream gay community is discussing, we’re left out of the conversation. But when talk turns to HIV/AIDS, then suddenly we have a room at the table. It’s at that moment we’re part of the conversations and our voice has a value.  

            Within the last few months we have been inundated with repeated statistical information that says how infected we are. We’re overwhelmed with the only images we see of ourselves as we hold up a condom or pose next to a huge bottle of protease inhibitors. I’ll admit as a person who was featured in one of those HIV ads, I even drunk the Kool-Aid and in making monies from the ad, I never once stopped to think how I was contributing to the images of gay black men only seen as having HIV. Yes there’s that value of having someone to relate to but the machine that produces one dimensional skewered images of gay black men as contagious beings only reaffirms my friend’s shame in being healthy.

            It seems that since we’re so predestined to get HIV does it create a mindset that cause a person to think, why should I be safe when I’m going to get it anyway? I personally know of a young man who had the crazy thought that if I’m destined to get it, I rather be the one who chooses when I get it rather than loose any sense of control and let someone else determine my fate. In this view he expresses his ownership of his power which has been diluted for centuries, yet instead of affirming it’s used to confirm on how we see those who are gay and black.

            I know it sounds crazy, but here I was having a conversation with a friend who was carrying the same guilt of ‘why not me’ instead of saying ‘thank God it’s not me’.

I truly feel that dialogue has to be restated and recreated for gay black men to let them know that they are not simply vessels for this virus and that their worth far exceeds a three letter acronym. We have to stop reducing them to a statistical number and bring value to them that can not simply be put in an Excel graph. We have to create our own visibility if need be and not be hidden in the shadow of a media campaign that has us in the weighted darkness of a condom. We have to let folks know that I am recognized by the organ in my head rather than the organ that lies in my pants. I’m more than that!

            I left my friend with the message that despite what he thought he was blessed and having the virus myself, I wouldn’t wish it on him. He had to know and start believing that his negative status was a blessing and not a curse. And he had to know that his negative status was not a matter of chance. That he is not a lottery ticket whose number had yet to be called. Recognizing he lives in a world where the views of HIV/AIDS is shifting where they see negative as a negative and positive as a positive.

That he has accepted the fact that he is more than HIV.