Scholar Says U.S. May Face
AIDS Epidemic Like Africa
Robert Stacy McCain
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
July 12, 2000

Citing U.N. data on HIV infection rates, J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario whose studies of race, behavior and genetics have been attacked by left-wing academics, told a Washington press conference yesterday that blacks in the United States and Canada "are on the brink of an AIDS epidemic" comparable to the crisis in Africa.

A "taboo on discussing the evidence" of racial differences in sexual behavior "tragically . . . is killing people," Mr. Rushton said.

"Right now, about 2 percent of U.S. blacks are living with HIV/AIDS," Mr. Rushton said at the National Press Club. "That was the level of AIDS infection in Africa just 15 years ago. Now African rates are between 8 percent and 20 percent." If the HIV infection rates for U.S. blacks continue to mirror the spread of the virus among blacks in Africa, Mr. Rushton said, "we are faced with the threat of an African AIDS epidemic within large sections of the black population of the United States, and also in the Caribbean."

As early as 1989, Mr. Rushton said, he "predicted the very situation [of HIV infection among U.S. blacks] we've got today."

The warning came as U.S. health officials convening in South Africa - which has seen an exploding rate of HIV infection in recent years - warned of the global consequences of the AIDS epidemic.

Last month, Health and Human Services Secretary Donna E. Shalala announced the formation of Crisis Response Teams "to help combat the spread of HIV/AIDS among racial and ethnic minority populations."

AIDS is the leading cause of death for black men ages 25-44 in the United States, according to the federal Office of Public Health and Science, while the disease is also the country's third-leading cause of death for black women ages 25-44.

Mr. Rushton's research has been attacked as "academic Nazism" and "racial pornography" by Hampton (Va.) University sociologist Steven J. Rosenthal.

"Rushton is dead wrong," John Moore, chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Florida, said in 1997.

Rutgers University's Transaction Publishers, citing protests, has stopped distribution and destroyed 55,000 copies of a special abridged edition of Mr. Rushton's 1995 book, "Race, Evolution, and Behavior," after review copies of the 106-page booklet had been mailed to scholars around the country.

One chapter of that booklet - titled "Sex, Hormones, and AIDS" - addressed behavior-related racial disparities in rates of infection for sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), which Mr. Rushton attributes to genetic differences.

"Race differences in sexual behavior have results in real life," Mr. Rushton wrote in the booklet, noting that "the 1997 syphilis rate among blacks was 24 times the white rate. . . . Racial differences also show in the current AIDS crisis."

Although he is hesitant to suggest how public policy might apply his findings - "my job is to get the truth out there," he says - Mr. Rushton suggested, "I would have thought the greater threat of AIDS to blacks [would lead to] targeting treatment to the populations that are most at-risk" for infection.

Robert A. Gordon, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University who joined Mr. Rushton and others at yesterday's press conference, said efforts to suppress Mr. Rushton's research are the result of "a dogmatic egalitarianism in the social sciences."
© 2000 News World Communications, Inc.

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