Several years ago, in a Los Angeles hospice, I met a Latina mother caring for her eighteen-year-old son, who was dying of AIDS. The family's first child to complete high school, he was her pride and joy. Photos of his athletic triumphs crowded the windowsills and bookcases of his room. She told me how he'd gone down from 175 pounds to 115. Now, she said, she might be able to carry him like old times.

Scenes like this one are being repeated across the country, as AIDS increasingly devastates communities of color. Consider the trends: In the past ten years, the U.S. epidemic has expanded from one primarily affecting white gay men to one in which more than half of those diagnosed are people of color. Over the next five years, in New York City alone, AIDS will leave nearly 60,000 children motherless, 90 percent of whom will be African American or Latino.

Last year, African Americans and Latinos represented more than half of the men and three-quarters of the women with AIDS in the United States. And, although Native Americans and Asian Americans have been less affected thus far, they too are beginning to see alarming increases in HIV infection within their communities.

This issue of the Harvard AIDS Review attempts to capture some of the challenges our country faces in confronting these numbers. With this special report, the Institute seeks to present perspectives on HIV in communities of color through the voices of individuals within them. At the same time, the Institute strives to acknowledge that each group is actually a community of communities and that brief articles cannot hope to provide a comprehensive picture.

The Institute also tries to avoid perpetuating the belief that AIDS is about "high-risk groups." Communities of color are not at risk because of racial or ethnic identities, but because of a vulnerability that stems from factors such as poverty and racism. Moreover, this vulnerability has been compounded by the misperception of AIDS as an epidemic among white gay men alone.

As people of color, we must cast off the shackles of denial, homophobia, and fear. We must develop prevention messages that resonate. We must initiate and sustain dialogues that reach every part of our communities. And we must overcome the passivity of our leaders.

But communities of color should not bear this burden alone. We need to demand that health and political institutions across the country place communities of color at the top of their AIDS agendas. And, to ensure that prevention and care programs are most effective, AIDS service organizations, foundations, and all levels of government must turn resources over to the communities themselves.

With a concerted, comprehensive, and sustained effort, we can stop HIV from continuing to devastate communities of color. We can keep more parents from having to say goodbye to their children in hospices; we can keep more children from having to bury their parents far too early.