Black women were 52 per cent of the women diagnosed with HIV in the United States in 2024 while making up 13 per cent of the female population, and their diagnosis rate was 12 times that of white women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Debbie Allen, who directed television’s first major storyline about a Black woman living with HIV, says what stands between those numbers and help is the performance of being fine.
“I think it would show ignorance for me not to ask,” Allen said. “It would show weakness that I need everybody to think I’m so strong.”
Allen lived through the years when the diagnosis was a death sentence. “I lost so many of my boys. I had to bury so many of them,” she said. “I lost my leading man in my first Broadway show.” In 1991, she directed the “A Different World” episode “If I Should Die Before I Wake,” in which a Hillman student played by Tisha Campbell reveals she is living with HIV. The episode, Allen said, gave Black people and everybody else watching permission to say they needed help.
She is now attached to Your Hive of Whole Health, a support platform launched in September and sponsored by Merck. More than half of people in the United States diagnosed with HIV are now 50 or older.
“Nobody does it alone,” Allen said. “If you can think of yourself as part of a hive, then what is your hive?”
