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Abstract
This essay examines the efforts of Rashidah Hassan (now Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer) and the organization she co-founded Blacks Educating Blacks About Sexual Health Issues (BEBASHI) in early path-breaking harm reduction efforts in Philadelphia. Within a context in which the city and gay advocacy organizations ignored the disproportionate impact of HIV-AIDS on the city’s Black communities Hassan extended a legacy of Black health activism in the context of the new epidemiological and social conditions of the late twentieth century. Under her directorship, BEBASHI created new interventions that combined practical harm reduction information to help people avoid new infections with a political analysis of the relationship between Black women’s social vulnerability and their susceptibility to HIV.
About the Author
J. T. Roane is assistant professor of African and African American Studies in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Roane is broadly concerned about matters of geography, ecologies, sexuality, and religion in relation to Black communities. He is at work on a manuscript under contract with NYU Press titled “Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia.” He serves as senior editor for Black Perspectives, the digital platform of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS).
Notes
1 In the mid and late twentieth century, drinking taverns formed a central nexus between Black social life in ghettoized communities such as those in North Philadelphia and the city’s politics. As the bedrocks of the fundraising campaigns of democrat block captains they were central to Democratic party machine into the 1960s. They were also viewed by city officials, especially in the aftermath of the 1964 Columbia Avenue “Riots” as dangerous anti-social spaces that fueled Black rebellion. See Lenora E. Berson, Case Study of a Riot : The Philadelphia Story (New York: Institute of Human Relations Press, 1966); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
2 Aaliyah I. Abdur-Rahman, “The Black Ecstatic,” GLQ 24, no. 2–3 (2018): 343–65.
3 On the proximity between death and vitality in Black queer culture in the post AIDS era, see Dagwami Woubshet, The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality, and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2015); on the cultural renaissance the era inspired see Darius Bost, Evidence of Being: The Black Gay Cultural Renaissance and the Politics of Violence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
4 The Smart Place closed at least temporarily in 1986. This reflects the ephemerality of spaces for Black queer nightlife where many of the promoters and planners do not own the real estate their bars or night clubs draw so much value to. https://www.phila.gov/HumanRelations/PDF/Coalition%20on%20Lesbian-Gay%20Bar%20Policies%20Report%201986.pdf
5 Vanessa Williams, “Among Black People, AIDS Is Taking a Heavier Toll,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 11, 1986: A1.
6 For example, see David France’s white washed documentary How to Survive a Plague (2011).
7 Michelle Cochrane, When AIDS Began: San Francisco and the Making of an Epidemic (New York: Routledge, 2004); Wende Elizabeth Marshall, “AIDS, Race and the Limits of Science,” Social Science and Medicine, 60: 2515–25.
8 Part of this was also shaped by Black conservatism. When the PATF did attempt to create its first posters for SEPTA (the city’s public transit system) that included Black men in 1984, the organization was met with vehement reaction from Black callers who protested the notion that there were Black people who had contracted the disease and who denied the possibility of Black queer existence. Vanessa Williams, “Among Black People, AIDS Is Taking a Heavier Toll, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 11, 1986: A1.
9 This dynamic was shaped largely by what Cathy Cohen describes as the “invisibility” of Black victims to the federal, state, and local agencies in the emerging epidemiological profile of the virus, the national media’s portrayal of the disease as white and gay, Black communal and political conservatism in relation to sexuality and sexual health.
10 Working on behalf of the Phipps Institute and the University of Pennsylvania, Sadie Tanner Mossell (Alexander) produced a critical study of tuberculosis in Black Philadelphia in 1923. See, Sadie Tanner Mossell, A Study of the Negro Tuberculosis Problem in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1923); David McBride, Integrating the City of Medicine: Black in Philadelphia Health Care, 1910-1965 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Vanessa Northington Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves: The Black Hospital Movement, 1920-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Samuel K. Roberts, Jr. Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).
11 Avery Rome, “Faith and Hope,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 8, 1990.
12 For an account of her work in relation to other Muslim women in response to HIV-AIDS see, Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajajé, “In honour of the leadership of US-born African-American/African-Caribbean/African-Latin@ Muslim women in responding to HIV/AIDS,” The Feminist Wire, August 4, 2012, <https://thefeministwire.com/2012/08/in-honour-of-the-leadership-of-us-born-african-americanafrican-caribbeanafrican-latin-muslim-women-in-responding-to-hivaids/> (accessed March 26, 2019); For Rashidah Abdul-Khabeer’s larger life history listen to and read the transcript of her interview with historian Dan Royles taken April 11, 2012. It is available digitally. <http://dpanther03new.fiu.edu/omeka-s/s/african-american-aids-history-project/item/2549> (accessed February 1, 2019).
13 Meilissa Weiner, “Issues on Minority Gays Discussed,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 15, 1986: B2.
14 Carolette Norwood, “Mapping the Intersections of Violence on Black Women's Sexual Health within the Jim Crow Geographies of Cincinnati Neighborhoods,” Frontiers, 39, no. 2 (2018): 97–135.
15 Rashidah Hassan, “Malcolm X Speech,” (1986), Philadelphia Candlelight AIDS Walk. Digitized at African American AIDS History Project, http://dpanther03new.fiu.edu/omeka-s/s/african-american-aids-history-project/item/762 (accessed February 1, 2019).
16 On June 8, 1988 Hassan Testified about BEBASHI’s efforts in Philadelphia, outlining its outreach efforts to reach a broad audience of Black and Latino communities as well as more targeted efforts to reach populations especially at risk, including drug users and men engaged in sexual activity with other men. The group also created a youth outreach program to spread broad information within the foster system and among other vulnerable youth. “Coordinating the Government Response to AIDS: Health Care and Education,” Hearings Before the Committee on Governmental Affairs of the U.S. Senate—Senate Hearing 100–859.
17 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–99.
18 “Bebashi Films,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaxGoZqhYtE&t=875s (accessed March 15, 2019).
19 Ibid.
20 Adaora A. Adimora and Victor J. Schoenbach, “Social Context, Sexual Networks, and Racial Disparities in Rates of Sexually Transmitted Infections,” The Journal of Infectious Diseases 191(2005): 115–22; R. Wallace, “A Synergism of Plagues: ‘Planned Shrinkage,’ Contagious Housing Destruction, and AIDS in the Bronx,” Environment Resources 47, no. 1: 1–33; Rashad Shabazz, Spatializing Blackness: Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015): 55–120; Marlon M. Bailey and Rashad Shabazz, “Gender and Sexual Geographies of Blackness: New Black Cartographies of Resistance and Survival (Part 2),” Gender, Place, and Culture 21, no. 4 (2013): 449–52; Marlon M. Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013).