The Assembly

I don’t have anything profound enough to say (or even profound, to begin with) that matches the caliber of this post. All I can say is I was born in 1984 in Atlanta. I was 10 in 1994, and, at the moment, I don’t quite remember when we covered AIDS in my suburban south-of-Atlanta elementary school, but it was likely either 4th or 5th grade when one teacher or another kind of covered what HIV was and what it actually does to its victim in our little health education segment of our school year. It was probably fifth grade, when we were reading out of these little books detailing each dangerous disease, drug and drug addiction there was out there that they wanted to warn us about. We had our first sex education class near the end of our fifth grade year, when they had separated us by sex, and all of the girls went to one teacher’s classroom and the boys went to the other, and without much detail, went into how babies are made, without, you know, the actual SEX part (it was pre-Olympics Atlanta, when my county Clayton was still predominantly white and the whites all over metro Atlanta were still voting Democratic, though barely — compared to other suburbs, Morrow, et al were the more liberal parts of town, but not by much — it was still GEORGIA, at the end of the day). We had separate, co-ed health classes covering sexual reproduction in the vaguest of terms still, but with more detail, in middle school and high school.

Our middle and high schools’ educational material consisted of teachers (a lot of them from the P.E. department) warning us to use condoms if we MUST have sex, but emphasized abstinence above all else, and all of these old AIDS movies with Dionne Warwick’s That’s What Friends Are For playing on them and a lot of Don’t Say No stuff from the ’80s. I think it might have been either middle school or high school that we watched some movie that briefly mentioned the AIDS quilt, we watched a movie that mentioned that boy who caught HIV from his blood transfusion, including Arthur Ashe, so there was some emphasis as well about the multiple ways of getting HIV, and I learned what AIDS was and all in the most unoffensive yet perfunctory way possible. My high school health class, taught by one of our female coaches (rumored by our more judgmental classmates to be gay — “I don’t wanna be on HER team! She’ll stare at me in the shower!”), emphasized the most that you primarily catch HIV by sexual exchange of bodily fluids or by significant blood contact — she told us we had to swallow a gallon of saliva before we could get infected by that means. Ultimately, the only AIDS-anything that had made an everlasting impression on me without hiding facts, talking down to me for being a little black kid, or with having to deal with the consequences of other suburban politics was seeing Philadelphia on Showtime at home. I had to learn what actual sex was from reading an old health encyclopedia at home and trying to watch some of my dad’s bad porn, because for little old unsocialized, hermit-ized me whose mom never let me sleep over at her friends’ daughters’ homes, never mind really have friends at school, this was the only way I could even have an idea of what sex actually was without actually trying to have it, myself.

I don’t think it was right that your teachers imposed that depressing video on you guys without any explanation of the context of the situation, but even back in the supposedly PC, liberal ’90s, they were being vague as hell about what AIDS actually was, and I can only wonder, seeing as everything nowadays seems to be regressing even further back race-politics-wise than even the ’70s, seeing as how all of the black family sitcoms I got to watch back when I was a kid seem to be an absolute rarity nowadays, what kids are learning *now.* But, who knows? It was probably the times, when there was still some major panic about it and when AIDS was still a new condition that made things turn out that way. On the other hand, I’m sure what I dealt with was just our in-the-middle school system running scared of any religious or “family” group who would make a fuss if they were to give us actual, blatant facts about what we were learning about, kind of like how (silly comparison, perhaps) the Canadian dubbers of Sailor Moon ran scared of American “family” groups so they overdid it and took out anything remotely Japanese about the show (and they certainly warped and erased the gay characters, too!) in the name of not offending anyone.

Thank you for your post. And that included family tree graphic by Chitra Ganesh was awesome, too.

My high school had an incident like that when I was there in the mid-90′s, though on the topic of drug addiction rather than AIDS. The school had gotten one of those recovered-addict motivational speakers to come in and give his speech about how drug addiction had ruined his life, and of course none of the adults bothered to prepare the kids beforehand. It was a combined junior/senior high school, starting at grade 7, and the younger kids got their own special assembly to listen to the guy, and as it happened a few of them had the idea in their heads that when someone says, “My name is X, and I’m a drug addict,” you’re supposed to clap.

The reasoning given after the fact was, I believe, that they’d seen scenes on TV where the drug addict admits to his or her addiction for the first time, and is applauded for taking this vital first step towards recovery. So the speaker delivered his “I’m a drug addict” line, the vast majority of the kids sat there wondering how the hell they were supposed to react to that, a few started clapping, and then, predictably, lots of the others assumed that those few who were clapping must be the experienced ones who knew the right thing to do in such a situation, and joined in the applause.

I don’t recall if anyone was actually punished, but the speaker reacted much the way your Ms. Cooperman did.