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By: RICHARD J. ROSENDALL
COMMENTS
 
THE PROBLEMS PLAGUING the District’s HIV/AIDS Administration have made headlines
for months, but the supposed roots of those woes might surprise you.
Lydia Watts, HAA’s director, testified before a June 23 hearing by the
D.C. Council that the real reason behind the agency’s failure to stem
HIV’s rapid growth in D.C. is the invisibility of African Americans.
The narrator of Ralph Ellison’s classic 1952 novel, “Invisible
Man,” was “rendered invisible because of other people’s stereotypes,
their indifference and their fear,” Watts claimed at the hearing. “Fifty-three
years later, the problems, the struggles and the communities that Ellison so
poignantly wrote about are still invisible.”
“In fact,” she said, “we have public policy that pays to
make poverty disappear, to make disease disappear and to make people disappear.
… Right here in the District of Columbia, people are dying from a political
disease — a disease based on capital gain despite human loss and suffering.”
It’s bizarre for the head of the city’s AIDS office to bemoan heartless
public policies as if she were a mere observer. Her seriousness in seeking justice
must be questioned if she can’t acknowledge the progress that has already
been made.
After three decades of home rule — congressional meddling notwithstanding
— it is time for the District’s well-paid political leaders and
agency heads to stop deflecting blame onto others. Watts’ own claim of
responsibility would be more convincing if she did not hedge it with racial
insinuations.
David Catania, the Council’s Health Committee chair, pressed for answers
behind the hyperbole, as to the status of unspent local and federal health dollars
and the steps to be taken by HAA to ensure they are spent in a timely fashion.
PLAYING THE RACE card is not a new tactic for Watts, who was hired by the District
last year. In the 1990s, she was director of contracts for Chicago’s AIDS
office.
Dan Bigg, executive director of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, told the Blade
last fall that Watts publicly called clean needle exchange programs part of
a “racial parlor trick” to keep poor black residents addicted to
drugs.
At the hearing last week, Watts condemned as demeaning a claim from an unnamed
journalist that, “HAA must be kept on a short leash.” The quotation
was from a Washington Blade editorial. Here we see a public official trying
to divert attention by manufacturing an offense out of an innocent figure of
speech.
Allow me to phrase it more felicitously: A health agency that fails to spend
millions of allocated dollars for people with HIV and AIDS, and thereby endangers
future funding, needs to be watched closely. A health agency that fails to do
the required site visits to monitor those organizations that receive its funding,
needs to be watched closely.
The people harmed the most by HAA’s failures are those with HIV and AIDS,
a majority of whom — including at Whitman-Walker Clinic, which some officials
have tried to scapegoat — are those invisible African Americans.
IN REFRESHING CONTRAST to the racial drama staged by Watts, there has been
extensive agreement across city government on the need for further reform at
HAA and the Department of Health.
Catania has shown what aggressive oversight looks like. He has been aided by
councilmembers who are themselves former HIV service providers (Jim Graham and
Vincent Gray), and a longtime AIDS activist (Carol Schwartz).
There has been remarkable unanimity of criticism from those out there in the
streets providing HIV services, even though they’ve avoided speaking out
in the past lest they be blackballed.
DOH director Gregg A. Pane should be credited with speeding up invoice payments
by eliminating red tape.
The new era of accountability ushered in by Catania’s committee is shining
some sorely needed light on our public health care dollars and how they are
spent. That is good news for the District’s at-risk residents —
invisible or not.
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