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The Coldest Winter Ever Analysis

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Media Portrayal of HIV/AIDS
The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah is a novel that tells the coming of age story of a young African-American woman named Winter Santiaga. Sister Souljah highlights the challenges faced by inner city African American communities, such as drugs, violence and incarceration. The novel also addresses the all-around destruction caused by AIDS. In doing so, Sister Souljah clears up misconceptions surrounding the virus. Likewise, “Hope’s Hospice: And Other Poems” by Kwame Dawes also addresses misunderstandings about the disease. Dawes offers a glimpse into the lives of people who are HIV positive. Both The Coldest Winter Ever and “Hope’s Hospice and Other Poems” help to reduce stigma surrounding HIV because both pieces …show more content…

In the poem, “News,” the narrator became infected with the virus after having heterosexual sex. In it, the narrator states “But people talk and you heard. Hannah dead of AIDS. You remember Hannah, her legs over your shoulder, and the way she laughed, dear God!” (Dawes 25). This demonstrates that HIV is non discriminant of the sexual orientation of the individuals it chooses to infect.
Sister Souljah also demonstrates that HIV does not only infect gay men. In the novel, the character, Sistah Souljah speaks with HIV positive women in jail (Souljah 260). Though not indicated how the women contracted the disease, it is clear that they are not a part of the presumed demographic that was typically targeted in the news.
Moreover, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic exploded, there was misconception among the general public about how the disease was transmitted. The US Center for Disease Control explicitly ruled out any possible transmission through casual contact in 1983. Nonetheless, news headlines such as, “It’s Spreading Like Wildfire” and “AIDS: Bubonic Plague of the 21st Century?” suggested that the virus could spread through casual contact. Although, HIV/AIDS was becoming more understood, some media continued to rectify fallacies about the disease. “Fear and misunderstanding was at work but so was the willingness to disregard basic facts about the knowledge that HIV/AIDS was not readily transmissible”

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