Debbie Allen Wants Black Women To Know We Don’t Have To Do It Alone

For living legend Debbie Allen, HIV advocacy is deeply personal. Decades before joining Merck’s new Your Hive of Whole Health campaign, Allen watched HIV/AIDS devastate the people around her. 

Allen recalled working in “Fame” and death claiming many of her friends. “I lost so many of my boys. I had to bury so many of them,” Allen told HelloBeautiful. “In the early stages, it was always a death sentence. I lost my leading man in my first Broadway show.”

Allen’s history with the epidemic also shaped her work on “A Different World.” She directed the 1991 episode, “If I Should Die Before I Wake,” in which Hillman student, Josie Webb (played by Tisha Campbell) revealed that she was living with HIV, forcing her classmates to confront fear and misinformation around AIDS.

“It gave people Black people and everybody watching permission to say, ‘I need help. I’m HIV positive,’” Allen said. Looking back, Allen said she was proud to offer the space for the Black community to speak openly about their status and ask for support.

In thinking about the early years of HIV/AIDS, Allen shared that it was community that pulled everyone through “All we could do was try to be as close as we could, and be there and watch them go. There was nothing we could do. There wasn’t any help.” 

Over 30 years later, the medical landscape has changed dramatically. Effective antiretroviral treatment has transformed HIV from the crisis Allen witnessed into a manageable condition for many people, and more than half of people diagnosed with HIV in the U.S. are 50 or older.

Living well with HIV can involve mental health, social support, other health conditions and basic needs alongside medical care. That’s where Your Hive of Whole Health comes in. Launched by Merck in September, the initiative encourages people living with HIV to build a personalized “Hive” of health care providers, family, friends, advocates, and peers. 

“We have this amazing platform that Merck has created that brings awareness of what can help people that are living with HIV and AIDS to make them a full, healthy person. That means dealing with the mind, their body, their souls, so it’s personal,” Allen said. Your Hive of Whole Health is a place people living with HIV/AIDS can ask for help.

Alen shared, “They can go on this website, get information, get resources, create their own Hive, start to deal with their full self, not just the tracking of where they are with the virus, but where they are mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.”

That need for community carries particular weight for Black women. In 2024, Black women accounted for 52% of HIV diagnoses among females in the United States despite representing just 13% of the female population, according to the CDC. Our diagnosis rate was 12 times that of White women. 

This disparity exists alongside another familiar expectation: that Black women endure, overcome and keep moving, often without asking anyone to carry some of the weight. Allen knows that language of resilience intimately. She grew up, she said, “with glass ceilings and brick walls around,” barred from spaces because she was Black and raised by a mother, Vivian Ayers, who taught her how to push through them.

But Allen draws an important distinction between resilience and self-sufficiency.

“I think it would show ignorance for me not to ask,” she said of seeking answers or assistance. “It would show weakness that I need everybody to think I’m so strong. That itself is a weakness.”

Research among Black women living with HIV has similarly identified social support as an important part of building and sustaining resilience. For Allen, that idea is at the center of Your Hive of Whole Health.

“Nobody does it alone,” she said. “If you can think of yourself as part of a hive, then what is your hive? Ask the question. And then go seek them out and find them.”