The Black future rests on how we face the facts of the AIDS pandemic. As such, AIDS is literally compelling us to redefine what it means to be Black in the new millennium. All of us, including this author, have become too comfortable within our skin and with what Blackness is and is not. To negotiate Black reality in the era of AIDS we must examine the Black community's internal ethical and cultural life. Such an examination suggests to this author that we need what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as a revolution of values.
Street culture is self-identified as a male macho domain.
To be a man in the streets means that one is neither female nor Gay. The streets cultivate and perfect the image of a mindless monster, the tough guy. The lone ranger in the ghetto. The code of the streets defines manhood in ways that desensitizes young men to their own humanity and that of their people. In this geography, the Black penis, and its various symbols, is the metaphor for Black manhood.