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TRUMP’S ANTI-HAITIAN HATE HAS DEEP AMERICAN ROOTS  
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Jonathan M. Katz
September 16, 2024
The New Republic
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_ The former president’s grotesque demagoguery is just the latest
in a long line of vicious attacks on residents and immigrants from the
island nation. _

Donald Trump speaks while holding a document about illegal
immigration during a visit to the Livingston County Sheriff’s Office
in Howell, Michigan., Nic Antaya/Getty Images

 

Coming into Tuesday’s presidential debate, one question occupied my
mind above all others: _Is Trump going to say it? Is he going to
accuse people of eating cats and dogs?_

 
There’s no shame if you weren’t wondering the same thing. Knowing
what the former president had planned required you to have spent the
weeks before the debate ensconced in one of two niche circles: that of
people who keep tabs on far-right influencers, hate groups, and racist
memes; or that of Haitians, Haitian immigrants to the United
States—and people who care about both. As it happens, I spend a lot
of time in both circles, which put me in a somewhat unique position of
understanding both and how the intersection of the two created one of
the weirdest moments ever to occur in a presidential debate, as well
as a situation that’s escalated into real dangers for innocent
people.

To tell this story, we have to focus on two locations: Haiti, that
Caribbean island nation, home to nearly 12 million largely
impoverished people, and Springfield, Ohio, a small town nestled off
Interstate 70 between Dayton and Columbus. In some ways—size,
climate, language, terrain—the two places could not be more
different. But they are intimately connected, especially in terms of
economic history.

In the early to mid-twentieth century, Springfield was a bustling Rust
Belt town, home to two major factories: the enormous Crowell-Collier
publishing plant, which printed popular magazines like _Collier’s
_and _Woman’s Home Companion, _and an even larger plant owned by
International Harvester, the farm machinery giant. Those two plants
employed the bulk of a population that would swell to more than 82,000
in the 1960s. In the decades leading up to this boom period, you
wouldn’t mistake Springfield for a model of civic tranquility: A
series of lynchings and attacks by white mobs on Black houses and
buildings were recorded in the 1900s. In the 1920s the town became a
stronghold
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the revitalized Ku Klux Klan. But during the latter half of the
century, Springfield was prosperous—and growing.

The good times didn’t last. The Crowell-Collier plant closed in
1957. Two decades later the International Harvester Company went into
terminal decline, a victim of competition; attempts to wrestle away
hard-won benefits from workers, resulting in a protracted labor
strike; and ultimately the greed and shortsightedness of its owners
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In 1983, _Newsweek _magazine devoted an entire special edition
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to Springfield, as a symbol of the decline of the American dream. The
population would continue to decline for the next 40 years, falling to
roughly 58,000 in the 2020 census—just 70 percent of its 1960 peak.
(By contrast, the U.S. population nearly doubled in that time, from
179 million to over 331 million.) Manufacturing employment continued
to plunge, falling from 13,000 in the mid-1990s to 6,000 on the
pandemic’s eve.

In the 2010s, Springfield town officials and its Chamber of Commerce
embarked on a revitalization plan to attract new businesses to town.
It worked: New factories and businesses opened up, including a
Japanese auto-parts manufacturer and a microchip
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manufacturer. There were also expanded operations at a Dole
food-processing plant and metalworking plants, as well as the typical
food-service, health care, and bureaucratic jobs that crop up to serve
a new population.

But it wasn’t Ohioans who answered the call. Starting just before
and then increasing in the wake of the pandemic, thousands of Haitians
began moving to Springfield. They came slowly at first, then all at
once. According to city officials, between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian
immigrants have moved to Springfield. If accurate, that would have
nearly made up for the town’s population loss since 1970.

The Haitians who came were fleeing a series of disasters, both natural
and man-made, many of them exacerbated or caused by the government and
industries of the U.S. Like Springfield, Haiti had once been an
industrial giant, producing at its eighteenth-century height most of
the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe. But its enslaved workers
rebelled, overthrowing French domination and declaring themselves the
world’s first Black republic in 1804. Throughout the late-nineteenth
and twentieth centuries, and well into the twenty-first, the U.S.
played a dominant role in roiling Haiti, brutally occupying the
country from 1915 to 1934, bankrolling friendly dictators, and helping
overthrow governments that did not play ball. Haitian leaders who
refused to go along in full with plans for U.S. industrial
development, especially low-wage assembly plants designed to create
cheap clothes and other items for the U.S. market, were among those
most likely to end up in the crosshairs of economic hit men, serving
the interests of capital.

In 2010, a massive earthquake struck Haiti’s capital,
Port-au-Prince, killing 100,000 to 316,000 people. The international
response, led by the U.S. military and a U.N. peacekeeping force,
ignored reconstruction imperatives in favor of a misguided scheme to
build more assembly plants far from the quake zone. (U.N. troops also
introduced a devastating cholera epidemic
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that killed at least 10,000 people, mostly in the countryside.) Before
and after, a series of devastating hurricanes, strengthened by climate
change, ravaged a Haitian agriculture sector already weakened by
drought and decades of U.S. and International Monetary Fund–imposed
free trade schemes and competition from U.S. government–subsidized
growers (many of whom still used International Harvester machines,
often built in Springfield).

In 2021, the corrupt Haitian President Jovenel Moïse—whose party
owed its power to U.S. interference in a post-quake election—was
assassinated in his home above the Haitian capital. Ignoring a
Haitian-led plan for a transitional government and new elections, the
Biden administration stood by an incompetent caretaker prime minister
for nearly three years. Paramilitary groups and street gangs filled
the power vacuum as the U.S. put its diplomatic and financial muscle
behind yet another international invasion—this one outsourced by
both the U.S. and the U.N. to Kenya.

Understandably, almost any Haitian who could get away from this mess
tried to do so. Some moved to Brazil and Chile, only to find that
their host countries had also become inhospitable to dark-skinned
foreigners, especially during the presidency of the pro-Trump
Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro. By 2022, nearly 731,000 Haitian
immigrants—many of whom had braved dangerous seas and crossed
overland through drug cartel–controlled territories of Central
America and Mexico—were living in the U.S.

The American right wing has been obsessed with Haiti as a bogeyman—a
literal bête noire—since the Haitian Revolution. In the antebellum
South, fears of Haitian “contagion”—that Haitians would come and
spur an armed freedom movement among American slaves—motivated state
militia crackdowns and white vigilante mobs alike. (Indeed, various
early attempts at self-emancipation, from Black-led efforts to John
Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, were explicitly inspired by the
Haitian uprising.)

That future Haitians had fought alongside Continental forces during
the American Revolution, and that the defeat of Napoleon’s forces by
the Haitian General Jean-Jacques Dessalines paved the way for the
Louisiana Purchase and the expansion of the U.S., rarely factored into
American imaginations. Instead, Americans saw Haiti as a savage, alien
place—home to a strange religion, vodou, and terrifying folk tales,
particularly of the zombie, a Haitian creation that would be imported
into U.S. pop culture during the early twentieth-century occupation.

These deeply ingrained attitudes, many of them unconscious and
unexamined, were waiting for the Haitians in Springfield. At first,
the new arrivals were welcomed, said Vilès Dorsainvil, the head of
Springfield’s Haitian Community Help & Support Center—who himself
moved from Port-au-Prince to the Ohio town in early 2021. The Biden
administration’s immigration policy toward Haitians was
schizophrenic: deporting tens of thousands
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the U.S. policy–wracked country while granting hundreds of thousands
of others
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temporary legal residency and providing an opportunity to work and
contribute to the communities that hosted them. 

“We were just here working peacefully and caring about our family
and all of this. The community was OK. There was still a group of
people in Springfield who saw the coming of the Haitians as a threat.
But normally, generally, the community was so open with us,” he told
me.

Then, in 2023, tragedy struck. A Haitian man—who had moved to Brazil
in the aftermath of the earthquake, then came through Mexico in
2022—was driving through town when he crossed a median and plunged
into a school bus. Several students were injured, and 11-year-old
Aiden Clark was killed. School bus crashes are rare, but not unheard
of nationally: From 2013 to 2022, there were 976 crashes in the U.S.
involving school buses, killing a total of 1,082 people, according to
the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration
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But instead of being treated as a referendum on traffic or bus
safety—or a sign to spark an effort to make sure immigrants get the
proper training and licensing to drive (the Haitian driver, who has
been convicted of manslaughter and fourth-degree vehicular homicide,
had an Ohio ID card but a Mexican driver’s license)—Clark’s
death became a rallying point for nativists and xenophobes, inside
Springfield and out.

Springfield’s Haitian community began to earn the attention of
habitués of far-right message boards and anti-immigration spaces. The
town’s name became a specific talking point for J.D. Vance, Ohio’s
youngest senator and a protégé of the authoritarian internet
billionaire Peter Thiel. In July, Vance brought up Springfield in a
speech to the National Conservatism Conference, a far-right gathering
obsessed, as the journalist Sarah Jones observed
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with fertility, race, and the specter of a “post-white America.”
Vance held up the Ohio town and its struggles to house and care for
the new arrivals as evidence that immigration “has made our
societies poor, less safe, less prosperous, and less advanced.” This
was a classic white supremacist argument, as exemplified by the
notoriously racist French novel _The Camp of the Saints_:_ _If we
take in those seeking refuge from poorer places—even places made
poor by our own country’s heavy-handed policies and ruthless
exploitation—we will become like them, if not be destroyed by them,
ourselves.

Days later, Vance read a letter from Springfield’s city government
about the strain on city resources into the record during a Senate
Banking Committee hearing. Again, instead of using his office to, say,
demand more federal resources to support towns like Springfield in
welcoming their new arrivals and providing for their new
workforces—a demand put forward by the town’s leaders
themselves—he used the case as an opportunity for nativist talking
points, asking Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell why immigration
was the only solution to the ongoing U.S. labor shortage. (It’s part
of the answer, but not the whole answer, Powell replied.) Trump named
Vance his running mate shortly thereafter.

Vance’s focus on Springfield’s Haitian community catalyzed a
reaction from the most extreme elements of the right. In August, the
neo-Nazi faction Blood Tribe marched with guns and swastika flags
through a jazz and blues festival in downtown Springfield, terrifying
Haitian and other minority residents. The group’s leader appeared
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at a City Council meeting a few weeks later issuing a “word of
warning”: “Crime and savagery will only increase with every
Haitian you bring in, and with it, public frustration, threat and
anger.”

 
 
Around the same time, a rumor appeared on a private Facebook group
called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information.” The post, from a
Springfield resident named Erika Lee, claimed that a neighbor’s
daughter’s friend’s cat had been taken by unnamed Haitians and
“hung from a branch, like you’d do with a deer for butchering, &
they were carving it up to eat.” Lee further claimed that “rangers
& police” had told her that “they” had done the same with ducks
and geese at a local park. (The neighbor later further changed her
story, telling the blog NewsGuard that the alleged cat belonged to
“an acquaintance of a friend” and that they, in turn, had heard
the rumors about what happened to it from still someone else.)

Lee’s post was found and broadcast to the world by the X account
@EndWokeness—a disinformation pipeline with 2.4 million followers
that is often reposted by Elon Musk. (One online researcher has argued
that the account is secretly run by alt-right Pizzagate promoter Jack
Posobiec
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Soon the rest of the right-wing social web was adding to the noise.
The Malaysia-based far-right influencer Ian Miles Cheong posted a
video of a Black woman arrested for allegedly killing and eating a
cat, falsely claiming she was Haitian and implying it had happened in
Springfield. (In fact the clearly disturbed woman was born in Ohio
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with “no known connection to Haiti or any other foreign country,”
according to the Canton _Repository._ Canton, Ohio, where it happened,
is some 170 miles away.)

A.I.-generated memes of cats, some being rescued by Donald Trump from
savage-looking
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shirtless Black men, proliferated. The day before the debate, Trump
shared two on his Truth Social account: an A.I. image
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him surrounded by cats and ducks on a private plane and another of
rifle-toting cats
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dressed in paramilitary uniforms and black-and-red MAGA caps.

This sort of thing has a long pedigree. In the nineteenth century,
American cartoonists and xenophobes spread rumors of Chinese
immigrants eating rats and cats; in 1883, a customs collector deported
a longtime U.S. resident who was trying to visit his fiancée in San
Francisco, sending a poem to his attorney: “I’ve sent him back to
China / where he can eat his mice.” In the U.K., 20 years ago, the
trashy tabloid _The_ _Sun _printed false rumors
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that asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe were poaching and eating the
queen’s swans.

Food works as a wedge because it is a deeply personal cultural marker.
Some Jews and Muslims may look down on those who eat pork. Vegetarians
can look askance at people who eat any animals at all (and some vegans
look in horror at them). Most Americans think of rabbits and guinea
pigs as pets, but in Europe and parts of Latin America, they’re
dinner—and often a gourmet
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at that. It’s extremely rare, but some people in East Asia do eat
dogs and cats. (I was once at a group dinner in rural
southern China where stewed dog was served; I didn’t touch it for
the same reason I don’t eat pig.) In nearly four years of living in
Haiti and over a decade of traveling there, I heard jokes about cat
eating—generally constructed on class and rural-versus-urban
lines—but never saw or heard of anyone actually doing so. Still,
stranger things have happened: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
frequently ate dog
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their expedition to the Pacific, according to _National
Geographic. _And until 2018, it was legal to commercially slaughter
dogs and cats for human consumption
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everywhere in the U.S.

“We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are
fundamentally different—cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences,
and consciousness—but because our _perception_ of them is
different,” the social psychologist Melanie Joy wrote in a 2009
book. The Springfield conspiracy theory combined these often unspoken
taboos with another piece of racist agitprop: the blood libel—except
instead of medieval Christian children, this time the supposed victims
were household pets.

Vance again fanned the flames. On September 9, he boosted the
pet-eating conspiracy in a post on X. Springfield police responded
that Vance’s claim was false, saying “they have received no
reports related to pets being stolen and eaten,” according to the
_Springfield News-Sun_
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_A day later Vance came back with more: Repeating his claim that his
office “has received many inquiries from actual residents of
Springfield,” he admitted that “it’s possible, of course, that
all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

Then he significantly upped the ante, blaming “Haitian migrant[s]
who had no right to be here” for the murder of a Springfield child,
spreading diseases (including HIV), and raising rents so fast that
“many Springfield families” were being made homeless. These too
were lies: The HIV infection rate fell in Clark County, where
Springfield is the county seat, between 2018 and 2022, the last year
for which statistics were available, according to the Ohio Department
of Health. And while housing prices have risen 9.3 percent
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Springfield in the last year, according to the Zillow Home Values
Index, that is in line with other nearby cities, including Dayton (7.4
percent) and Troy (6.5 percent), and has largely followed statewide
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least 2016. (It’s worth noting that rising home prices are also good
for current homeowners, who make up nearly 70 percent of Clark
County’s households, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St.
Louis.)

Trump was reportedly supposed to employ Vance’s gambit. In a
postdebate write-up, _The_ _Guardian _reported he had been prepped
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to bring up the “pet-eating” lie, then—when inevitably
fact-checked by the moderators—use it to pivot into more insidious
calumnies about the immigrants in Springfield. As it was, he proved
too rattled by Kamala Harris and too undisciplined to pull it off.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter to the faithful. Baseless hatred
of immigrants has been the driving force of Trump’s campaigns since
he coasted down the golden escalator. They are the scapegoat for every
problem that MAGA world encounters, be it real or phantasmic: housing
prices, the labor market, health problems, bureaucratic dysfunction at
state and federal agencies. Rounding up as many as 20 million
people—the “largest mass deportation in American history,” as
Trump continually promises—some of whom would by the sheer
statistics have to be legal residents, if not U.S. citizens, is thus
the panacea. And it will be violent: “a bloody story,” he recently
vowed
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And Haitians—Black immigrants, the inheritors of a fierce tradition
of resistance against slavery and white supremacy—have often been a
special target
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of Trump’s ire
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Following the debate, Nathan Clark, Aiden’s father, issued an
impassioned plea to Trump, Vance, and other “morally bankrupt
politicians,” as he called them, to stop using his son’s name in
their efforts to “vomit
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hate against immigrants. But Trump’s rhetoric—funny and weird as
it was to most who saw it—threatens to unleash more unrest. One
white supremacist group reacted to Clark’s statement by saying,
“These parents should be executed.” On Thursday and Friday,
Springfield’s City Hall, several schools, and the Bureau of Motor
Vehicles were evacuated due to bomb threats. The city’s mayor called
for calm, condemning, in an interview
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with _The_ _New York Times,_ “when national politicians, on the
national stage, mischaracterize what is actually going on and
misrepresent our community.”

Dorsainvil, the community leader, acknowledged that while
Springfield’s Haitians are afraid, they are committed to staying.
“Haitians are not here to leave anytime soon,” he said. “So we
all have to work towards a peaceful community.” After enduring so
much already just to get there, it’s hard to imagine them abandoning
their new homes easily. Yet with Trump and the online right
intentionally escalating tensions in a desperate bid to retake power
over the nation, there is almost certainly another challenging road
ahead.

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Jonathan M. Katz [[link removed]]
@KatzOnEarth [[link removed]]

Jonathan M. Katz is the author of _Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley
Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s
Empire_ [[link removed]]. He won the
James Foley Medill Medal for Courage in Journalism for his coverage of
the 2010 Haiti earthquake. He now writes The Racket newsletter at
TheRacket.news [[link removed]].

* US Electons; Springfield
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* Ohio; JD Vance; Haiti; Haitian Americans; Trump;
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