This post originally appeared on POZ Blogs. 

The infographic below shows the stark reality of HIV in Black America. The statistics are mind numbing. At current rates of infection, 50% of black gay men will have HIV by the time they are 35 (8% of white gay men are infected). I’ve been accused of caring more for the black community then I do for my own people. I love being Asian and I will always be concerned about my community, but the numbers don’t lie. As an Asian gay man, I am fighting for black gay men because it’s the right thing to do. I am fighting for black gay men because like the civil rights movement, it’s going to take a rainbow of people fighting together to make a difference.

February 7 is National Black AIDS/HIV Awareness Day. We come together to once again draw attention to HIV’s devastation of America’s black community. How many more awareness days do we need in order to understand that we’ve failed black gay men? Nowhere in the world are there communities with a 50% infection rate. We have also failed African American women when they are 20 times more likely to be HIV infected then white women.

In the fight against HIV over the last 30 plus years, the statistics for the black community were always known. The social determinants of health are often sited as the reason for the big difference. According to the CDC, “The social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work, and age, as well as the systems put in place to deal with illness. These circumstances are in turn shaped by a wider set of forces: economics, social policies, and politics.” America has poor people of all ethnicities, so why aren’t the rates of poverty equivalent by race? The color of your skin should not determine your health outcome, yet all the indicators reveal the opposite.