A Million Man March Against STDs?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


According to a new CDC study, 1 in 4 American teens has an STD. Specifically, reports CNN, they have one of these: “human papillomavirus, or HPV, which can cause cervical cancer and affected 18 percent of girls studied; chlamydia, which affected 4 percent; trichomoniasis, 2.5 percent; and herpes simplex virus, 2 percent.”

As unsettling as this news is, it’s downright mindbending that black girls’ infection rates are more than double those for whites and Mexican Americans; nearly half had at least one STD. It’s hard to figure out how to grapple with these numbers; they implicate religious repression, ingrained patriarchy, lack of basic sex ed, pathetic AIDS awareness, nihilism, and childhoods interrupted much too soon. Not just by the STD, but also by the poorly thought out sex that likely caused it.

Nearly half of black teenaged girls has an STD. My daughter will be a teen in only nine years, my son in only six. This is the reality they’ll be facing?I wonder how long it will take the usual suspects to make this, too, a conversation about racism. That’s a hell of a lot easier than tackling such an intractable problem head on. Especially since the conversation that we should have can’t be had without calling black men on the carpet.

We converged on Jena, Louisiana. We converged for the Million Man March. Will we converge on the local high school, or even more daringly, the local Baptist Church, and take care of our children? I’m betting on a resounding silence.

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate