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America’s Shadows: HIV Risk in Black and Latino Youth

Published on July 15, 2009

Interview: A new film examines the need for new comprehensive approaches for tackling HIV’s ravaging effects on black and Latino youth in the US.

By Jamilah King, via WireTap Magazine

Like many well-intentioned HIV/AIDS activists, Tchaiko Omawale started her fight against the epidemic by focusing on sub-Saharan Africa. The New York-based, Jamaican-born filmmaker grew up in several African countries, including Sierra Leone and Mozambique, while her father worked for UNICEF. She saw the continent’s fight against the epidemic as a potential catalyst for demystifying Africa to the West.

It wasn’t until she was in college at Columbia University that she began to notice the epidemic’s ravaging effects in her own backyard of New York City. While working on an article for a college internship, she came across some startling statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC): 50 percent of all new HIV infections occur in youth between the ages of 15 and 25, and over 80 percent of these new cases are youth of color.

Soon after, she began work on America’s Shadows, a documentary that follows four youth of color in New York City and examines the risk factors associated with contracting HIV.

Youth of color are still at a significantly higher risk of HIV/AIDS infections than older, more privileged populations. Among other topics, the film explores how America, unlike many other countries caught in the throes of the epidemic, lacks a comprehensive HIV prevention program focusing on the intersection of poverty, racial inequality and risk.

Omawale spoke with WireTap about the making of the film, her intentions and the impact she hopes it will have around the country.

Why was it important for you to make this film?

When I started making this film I think it was close to the 20-year anniversary of when people started being very aware of HIV as an epidemic. It was just shocking to me that the rate for young people getting infected is largely the same from the beginning of the epidemic to 2000—[and] even to now, 2009.

I’d seen all these MTV specials, you see posters around and all these peer education programs, but yet with all of that, the rate was still the same. I felt like there was something that was missing.

When I started getting into HIV, my focus [was] in sub-Saharan Africa. So I really studied a lot about the comprehensive prevention programs in international organizations. When I started focusing on the situation in the U.S. with young people, I realized that there wasn’t a comprehensive approach to dealing with HIV and young people. My film really focuses on the social and economic conditions so as to try to present another angle [from] which you look at HIV, and through that, figure out different methods of prevention.

Can you describe the process of making the film? What role did the youth you profiled play in the actual filmmaking and editing?

When I first started, the intention was to make it only about young people who were positive…. However, all of [the] young people who were positive, except for Jessica, had to conceal their faces. So, it just wasn’t working for me to make a film in that way and still have it be engaging.

That’s when it changed to looking at risk factors, and getting young people who are at risk to be a part of the film. My ideal was that we would all make the film together, all shoot the footage, and during the editing process, all be a part of it. But a lot of the young people who were in the film had really unstable living situations, so it just wasn’t very consistent.

Some of the young people that were in the film, and some who were behind the scenes would get together and talk about HIV risk factors. I got a grant and we traveled to Jamaica and Atlanta. Using the raw footage that I’d had at that moment, we did peer education workshops with the young people [there].

Three out of four of the young people [profiled] were involved in peer education programs, and I was really disappointed with the level of critical understanding of the situation. I felt like they were being taught to just go out in the street, hand out condoms, tell people [to] wear condoms and get tested. But what was missing was an actual deeper understanding of their personal role in the epidemic and the way their community was structured. So a lot of our time together, which was over a period of three or four years, was us having discussions and bring[ing] about a more critical understanding of the epidemic.

Can you describe those comprehensive approaches?

When you’re dealing with HIV prevention, you have to do sex education in school, but then you also have to make sure that young people have this education point blank so that they can compete in the world, have a chance to make a living [and] can take care of themselves. You need to address housing situations, because if a young person is jumping around from house to house because their mother or their parents can’t pay the rent, that instability leads them to being more susceptible to putting themselves at risk for HIV.

On a more personal basis, how do people feel about their sexuality, their self-esteem. HIV is this disease that’s horrible and scary, but the flip side is that it can be a real opportunity to transform the whole of society. People become susceptible to it when there are these cracks in society. If you can address the cracks, then I think you really have this comprehensive HIV prevention program.

Are all the subjects queer? Or do they not all identify that way?

No. There are four main subjects in the film, and then each portrait of these subjects has a montage of other young people. One of the subjects is transgender—male to female—and is HIV positive. Another young man is straight, and he’s negative but he’s at risk. Then there’s a straight woman who’s also negative, but at risk. Then there’s a young woman who was actually born with HIV so she has a diagnosis of AIDS.

In between each portrait there’s a segment where you hear the community’s voices on homophobia. So there will be a lot of queer young people in that montage talking about being kicked out of their homes. Then another section where it might be people talking about prison and they’re largely straight. I tried to give a cross-section of young people so that when I’m presenting it to a youth audience, there’s room for discussion of each group.

In the film’s trailer, one of the young people mentions that communities of color are more homophobic than white communities. In the LGBTQ community, I know there’s been a lot of controversy over this perception. Can you talk about how you tried to balance this tension in the film?

This is what was really hard for me as a filmmaker and it’s still hard when I watch my film because I feel like there’s room for people to say that I’m vilifying certain groups. But I really had to let go of that—I was just interviewing young people and hearing what they had to say. Because I was only dealing with black and Latino youth, that was what came across in the film. During the editing process, I was very passionate about making it clear that in the black and Latino communities we have so much homophobia, and my editors had to reel me back in because I was being a little bit too preachy.

There’s a section where I cringe when I watch the film: Shamika, who is the young woman who had two kids when she was a teenager. I can see how, if I was screening this film at a college, I would totally be criticized for presenting this young black woman as a welfare queen.” Maybe that’s a valid point. But I also just felt like there’s a reason why young black women are at such a high risk for HIV. There’s a reason for all this stuff, and I just felt like I had to step out and say it, and it’s really harsh in some parts. As a filmmaker and as an artist, you kind of have to—and this is maybe different from people who are political activists—I don’t censor myself. I try to learn as much as I can and then make the work. Then other people can critique it and, through that critique, there’s more conversation around the issue.

What are the next steps?

I’m trying to figure that out. I have a friend who does some work with education programs in New York, where they have access to 20,000 kids. We’re trying to see if there’s a way that the film could be used in their programs to start a discussion. My ultimate goal was that I would finish making the film and have nothing more to do with it—I’d give it away and have different youth programs make their own workshops around the film. The film becomes a jumping-off point to discuss whatever inequity there is in their community. Because it all totally has to do with HIV.

I’m going to send it to film festivals—so that’s one area where people get to come out and screen it. I was trying to see if I could get college screenings, because then I could raise money to give the film away in New York City and other places. Then, hopefully, those colleges would do stuff with communities around their schools and they can use that film for youth groups and [in] other places.

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Watch the trailer for America’s Shadows:

Jamilah King is the associate editor of WireTap.

Provided by WireTap. Wiretap is an independent news and culture web magazine that generates and amplifies daily content by young people from diverse backgrounds.

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