The disproportionate amount of young, African American students who are effected by the disturbing trends in sexual activity raise alarming concerns among Higher Education administrators. However, there seems to be a lack of publicity around sexual awareness for minority students. Philander Smith University's President, Dr. Walter Kimbrough, has created an initiative to inform students of the implications of "risky behavior" and titled it "Sex Week". This program (taken from a model used at Yale University) provides young adults on college campuses with a comprehensive series of programs that help reinforce safe behavior, and healthy attitudes. Given the alarming rhetoric that suggests that nearly half of all new cases of HIV are attributed to African Americans, and that 72% of African American children are born out of wedlock, how can administrators on all campuses (Community Colleges, Predominantly White Institutions, HBCU's, HSI's...etc) create intervention tools and co-curricular programming models that help to solve this widespread issue?
Link to article: http://diverseeducation.com/article/14752/hbcu-president-brings-sex-and-health-education-to-the-campus.html">href="http://>
Great article.
ReplyDeleteAs a counseling psychologist, part of my professional development and identity is to address social inequality and act as an ambassador for underserved/represented groups. Social justice is a corner stone of my field, and this article (along with various topics of this course) seems to speak to my recent doctoral training experiences.
Many of my fellow counseling psych students provide extensive prevention and intervention programming on campus around health and mental health issues, especially for students of color. I was intrigued by this article because of the way the stats are presented and ‘who’ constitutes the black populations written about in this article.
Often, I forget that we live in a SMALL SMALL bubble in HE. The academic realm is small. The representativeness and portion of students of color in HE is even more narrow. So, do nation wide statistics regarding sexual heath for black folk mirror that of rates and prevalence of black students in HE? I think not. Is it important to recognize the trends and context from which students come from? Most definitely, without question. So, when developing programming and providing preventative services, such as the efforts describe in this article, it is important to keep the facts accurate regarding the HE population, which I am sure differ from the nation as a whole.
More intriguing to me, however, is the challenges HBCUs face in addressing topics like sex education, given the conservative nature (religion, administration, donors, etc) of many HBCUs. I found that aspect of the article to be enlightening.
I agree; this was a great article. I was surprised to learn that many schools have "sex week" and use it mostly for "fun and talks about sex toys," according to Dr. Kimbrough. There is definitely a place for a fun approach to engage students in dialogues about sexual issues. However, there is clearly a compelling need for more serious discussions, based on the alarming statistics presented in the article:
ReplyDelete"...African-Americans account for nearly half of all new cases of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Although only 12 percent of the population, Blacks surpass Whites in the number of abortions they have. About 72 percent of Black children are born out of wedlock. And young African-Americans are more likely to contract sexually transmitted diseases, especially chlamydia and syphilis, compared to their White or Hispanic counterparts."
I would love to see the UofI bring together resources from several units - McKinley Health Center, the Counseling Center, the African-American Cultural Center, La Casa Cultural Latina, the Asian-American Cultural Center, the Women's Center, and the LGBT Center, and various student organizations - to develop a week of programming on these issues.
This article was very interesting. The statistics were surprising. This education of "sex week" should be emulated at other insititutions, not just HBCUs. Everyone can learn from this, not just one population. I was not surprised about it being a topic not discussed in the African American community as much. Religion does seem to be something deeply embedded in the African American community. However, the information about sexual health not being talked about can be compared to LGBT not being talked about either. It is good that the president of that university is doing something about it. Hopefully, other presidents can follow his program. This would help to educate everyone. I just hope this does not turn into a stereotype that is in people's minds about African Americans. I wish there were other statistics shown about other ethnic groups because some people do believe they are invisible to these diseases and this would show that these things do happen in other communities.
ReplyDeleteI think it was Homer Simpson who once said, “Facts are meaningless. They can be used to prove anything.” While Homer isn’t exactly the authority on logic, he may have a point here. For African-Americans, the statistics on STD’s, abortions, and other tragic likelihoods are typically blasted off in a rain of rapid fire by the media and government agencies. People are so fearful, so busy dodging bullets, that no one dares peer through the smoke. As John points out in his post, it is extremely important not to obscure the actual conditions of collegiate African-Americans by basing initiatives on the all-encompassing categories of black statistics. Formulating programming in this way could actually work to veil the real sexual attitudes, experiences and circumstances of this particular demographic. The issue with “factual” statistics is that without context, as Homer reminds us, they can in actuality be rather meaningless. One might wonder, for example, if a higher abortion rate among African-American women is a sign of promiscuity and ignorance or representative of greater willingness to complete the procedure. Concurrently, many questions begin to materialize when reflecting analytically upon the 70 percent out-of-wedlock birth rate for African-Americans. Some critics go into more detail on this: (http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2009/02/the-math-on-black-out-of-wedlock-births/6738/). If these trends are simply equated to the general unawareness, immorality, or depravity of African-Americans, initiatives may never really breach the core of such topics. I certainly commend Dr. Walter Kimbrough for taking a valiant first step in bringing “Sex Week” to his campus. However, I believe that in order to receive the full benefit of such programming, issues must be encountered with a critical eye and open-mindedness that extends beyond the typical rhetoric.
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