Behind the vicious Trump-Vance attacks on Haitian immigrants is a long history of making the people of Haiti pay for the audacity of their revolution.
Republican presidential nominee former president Donald Trump and Republican vice presidential nominee US Senator JD Vance.(Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images)
I could tell you that the only ”evidence” for the baseless Republican claim that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, comes from an American-born woman charged with animal cruelty in Canton, Ohio. I could tell you that the Haitian immigrant community living in Ohio is made up largely of people who are in the country legally, under temporary protected status visas. I could tell you that Haitian immigrants, like those in all immigrant communities, are generally hard-working people who pay their taxes and commit fewer crimes, per capita, than native-born citizens.
But I can also tell you that none of these facts matter one jot to vile and racist Republicans like JD Vance and Donald Trump, who spread lies and misinformation about immigrants. The people pushing these falsehoods long ago abandoned any tether to facts or reality. The very online, white-wing MAGA movement has found another group of dark-skinned people to hurt. Today, it’s Haitians; yesterday it was Venezuelans, and tomorrow it will be some other group of Black or brown people.
The goal—their only goal—is to hurt people. It’s their kink. Hurting people of color titillates and excites them. It makes them feel powerful and important. When these small people see reports that Haitians in Springfield are afraid to send their children to school; when they read about the damage being done to immigrants’ property, it makes them feel strong. Imagine being able to contribute to a lynch mob raised against largely defenseless people from the comfort of your own home, simply by sharing a cat meme. That kind of power is intoxicating to some people, and what you see online is the real, honest thrill a racist experiences whenever they find someone to menace.
I hate to give these people the satisfaction of being hurt by them. I hate to acknowledge their lies and insults, and I’d like to pretend that I can’t even hear them. As a New Yorker of Haitian descent, I’d like to tell these people “Kou langett manman ou!” (which loosely translates to: “Have an inappropriate relationship with yourself, followed by your mother, posthaste”) and go about my day.
But the pain racist Republicans and their cult spokespeople are causing is too real to laugh away. It’s too familiar to ignore. And it’s entirely too consistent with how this country has always treated Haitians to pretend that it isn’t all happening again.
Haitians committed the greatest sin possible in the modern world: We took our freedom back from the white man. Haiti is the birthplace of the only successful slave-led revolt in the “New” or “Western” world. Like everywhere else in this hemisphere, enslaved Haitians asked for their freedom, agitated for it, and were willing to negotiate terms with the enslavers for their emancipation. Unlike everywhere else, when those negotiations and political dealings resulted in nothing more than the continuation of permanent chattel slavery, Haitians stopped talking and started rebelling—and by 1804 had liberated themselves from their suddenly-not-so-superior captors.
White people have never forgiven us for being free. The French demanded “reparations” from the Haitians for taking their property—that property being the formerly enslaved Haitians themselves—as the price for their freedom. And the Americans, under the presidency of inveterate slaver Thomas Jefferson, refused to recognize Haiti or its independence, and imposed a trade embargo on the fledgling nation. Remember that the next time someone calls Jefferson a lover of liberty: That man didn’t just enslave and rape Africans brought here against their will; he tried his best to snuff out the embers of freedom burning on his doorstep.
This may sound like 200-year-old history, but what a lot of Americans don’t get is that these policies toward Haiti had a lasting effect. The money “owed” to the French and the US embargo crippled Haiti’s economy and prevented the industrialization and infrastructure desperately needed on an island that is periodically buffeted by hurricanes and rocked by earthquakes. And US policy toward Haiti never improved. By the 1900s, America switched to an imperial model, forcibly occupying the country in the 1920s and ’30s and then continuing to meddle in Haiti’s internal politics by propping up regime after brutal regime. Haiti’s economic and political instability are largely the consequence of American policy toward the island.
All of this would have been vile enough, but the US has not merely been content to suck the life and opportunity out of Haiti. It’s also done everything in its power to bar Haitian immigrants fleeing the cruelty of its preferred dictators—and the fallout from its many imperial interventions—from entering the United States. It’s captured them on the high seas and sent them back to Haiti. It’s created detention centers to imprison them. It literally created the world’s first HIV penal colony—at Guantánamo Bay—just to keep asylum-seeking Haitians who’d tested positive for the virus out of the United States. And now, here we are.
For all this, the Haitian people persist. Haiti is, in a way, the birthplace of modernity. It was the first modern country to establish a government and society that was not based on race or status at birth. But you never hear Haiti talked about like that. Instead, when the conversation turns to Haiti it’s almost always about poverty, tragedy, disease, or violence. The country is broke and lacks political stability, and no white person in power ever wants you to forget that—even though white powers want you to forget their historical and ongoing role of keeping Haiti poor and unstable.
That’s because Haiti and Haitians, even after all this time, remain a threat to the essential narrative of white supremacy: it’s a country that exists without appeals to whiteness. It didn’t ask for white permission. It doesn’t exist because whites want it to. And so it’s very important for the white supremacist narrative for you to know that things are not going well. It’s critically important to them that Black Americans think of Haiti as a place of danger and despair. White folks need Black people to believe that a world without whites is a world of poverty and pain. Haiti is used as the cautionary tale for what happens when you don’t play by the white man’s rules.
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And so… Haitians must eat pets. And have AIDS. And practice strange sacrificial rituals. And it must be OK when international organizations leave behind cholera. Haiti must always be poor, yet still owe white people money. Haitians must always be treated as potentially violent immigrants, because, hey, we did once violently recapture the freedom white people stole from us.
JD Vance brought all of that pathological hatred of Haitians to bear when he accused Haitian immigrants, whom he considers a threat, of eating cats (the same cats he also considers a threat to white birth rates). The racists who participate in the anti-immigrant online mobs do the same. Not everybody who is piling on is aware of the deep and disgusting history of racism toward Haitians: After all, many online MAGAs have an aversion to knowing things about the other peoples of the world. But they know enough (that Haitians are Black and vulnerable in this country) to derive glee from participating in cruelty.
It hurts, of course. It always hurts when you are reminded of just how many white folks hate your people. It always stings to see a few other Black people or other supposed allies join in the denigration. I think the insult that Haitians are eating pets is doubled for me because I know for a fact that white Americans care more about their family pets than they do about Haitian immigrants being threatened and harassed right now. If all of Haiti were a nature preserve for cats and dogs, it would be protected at all costs. Since it is a home for free Black folks, its people are treated like dogs.
But being hurt and being defeated are two different things. White folks have been trying to strangle Haiti and Haitians into submission for over 200 years, and yet we are still here. What I can laugh about is this: The white supremacist forces multicultural America is trying to defeat in this election are forces little ol’ Haitians defeated literal centuries ago. America is still trying to get at our level.
Hopefully, one day, the United States will fully and finally defeat MAGA and the KKK and whatever the white wing calls itself next. And on that day, I look forward to Haitians and Americans being able to talk to each other as equals in the promise of modernity.
Elie MystalTwitterElie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and the host of its legal podcast, Contempt of Court. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, published by The New Press. Elie can be followed @ElieNYC.