The anti-Haitian utterances by the Republican presidential ticket unleashed an avalanche of racist memes and jokes about Haitians, Haitian migrants, and U.S. citizens of Haitian descent.
It began with Ohio senator and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance’s tweet claiming – falsely – that “Haitian illegal immigrants” were “draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” Vance continued the lie by asserting: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country.”
Donald Trump was quick to follow-up and double-down on Vance’s slanderous comments. In the televised presidential debate with his Democrat rival Kamala Harris, Trump insinuated that Haitian migrants were “eating the pets, eating the dogs, eating the cats” of Ohio’s citizens.
Soon, hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. and around the world gleefully joined in, contributing to a racist pile-on that has seen a violent backlash against Springfield’s Haitian population. Bomb threats have caused the closure of local schools, Springfield’s city hall, and other locations. Families have been attacked. Many Haitians have been afraid to leave their homes. Others have fled the small Ohio town. It did not matter that the story was fake: it had started when a racist white woman, Erika Lee, posted a false story about her friend’s Haitian neighbors supposedly stealing and eating cats, and was deliberately amplified by a Nazi group in Ohio in an effort to demonize Haitians.
The Nazi efforts to demonize Haitians clearly worked. And it worked, in part, because it was buoyed by a long-standing, everyday racist anti-Haitian ideology in the United States – and in the West. In fact, while Ohio’s Haitian migrants have since received sympathetic attention from the corporate media (which has run stories about Haitian migrants as ideal factory workers and dignified individuals with a proud history), it is more typical of this same media to attack, slander, and demonize Haiti and Haitian people.
With so many people expressing surprise and disdain about the racist vitriol against Haitian migrants in the U.S., one could be forgiven for not knowing that this is not the first, or second, or third time that Haitian migrants have been slandered with racist vitriol. Slandering Haiti has been a pastime for the white West since the late 1700s, when enslaved Africans rose up to fight their white enslavers and won, disrupting white supremacy and changing the definition of “freedom” and “human” in the process.
During the early years of Haiti’s existence, Haitians were disparaged as “barbaric,” “savages,” and “cannibals.” The New York Times was notorious for casting Haiti as a wasteland of Black savagery. During the first U.S. occupation of Haiti (1915-1934), it quoted the administrative commander of the U.S. Marines, H.S. Knapp who said: “if Haiti were now left to herself, there would be a slipping back into barbarism.” This is language describing Haiti from a 1915 editorial : “a weary list of toy kings, emperors, presidents, of revolutions, exiles, suicides, slaughters, corruption, a civilization…which has been sinking, and is brutal and permeated with magical rites.”
A Jan. 4, 1921 headline from that same “paper of record” shouted: “Natives in Haiti Ate a Marine Officer.” In a 1920 National Geographic article titled “Haiti and Its Regeneration by the United States,” the author writes of “the sacrifice of children and animals to the mumbo jumbos of local wizards.” And on and on.
Haitians’ vilification in the Western press, and from politicians and laypeople, has continued unabated. In the 1980s, Haitian migrants fleeing the U.S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship and arriving in South Florida were described as dirty “boat people,” a notorious stereotype that had an inordinate impact on Haitian migrant school children. In 1983, Haitian people were accused of being “HIV/AIDS carriers” and listed by Center for Disease Control (CDC) as the only racial/national group at risk of AIDS and part of the so-called “4-Hs”: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, hypodermic needle users, and Haitians. Indeed, in the early 1990s, the U.S. used this vicious lie that Haitians were AIDS carriers to turn its Guantanamo Bay naval base into an open air prison for Haitian asylum seekers while denying them due process.
In 1994, then-Congressman Joe Biden had this to say about Haiti: “If Haiti — a God-awful thing to say — if Haiti just quietly sank into the Caribbean or rose up 300 feet, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot to our interests.”
Over the years, some evangelicals have castigated Haitians for making a “deal with the devil” because their religious practices were supposedly responsible for the 2010 earthquake that killed many tens of thousands. Haitians were called “bandits” when fighting the first U.S. occupation of their country and “gangs” when protesting the Core Group-installed Prime Minister Ariel Henry from 2021 until his ouster in 2024. Haitians are now portrayed primarily as “gang members,” and, as recently as the spring of 2024, as “cannibals.” In a way, the current smear that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are “dog and cat eaters” pales in comparison to the Western media frenzy, over the past three years, around the claim that Haiti is a cesspool of violence with “gang” members cannibalizing people.
In today’s political environment, the outrage over the racist lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are stealing and eating people’s pets has been filtered through partisan presidential politics. All responses purportedly on behalf of Haitians have therefore focused on racism as a unique feature of the Republican party and white conservatives and fascists since it was JD Vance and Donald Trump that catapulted the “eating pets” lie into the national spotlight. As such, it is not surprising to see the corporate media conducting actual journalism – questioning the racist claims against Haitian migrants in Ohio, sending reporters to speak with local communities, etc.. Meanwhile, Democratic Party operatives have treated the racist charges against the Haitian migrants as a godsend, using the controversy to point to Republicans as the unrepentant white supremacists.
But what should we call Biden’s actions in September 2021? After right-wingers protested that the Texas-Mexico border was being “invaded” by “hordes” of Haitian asylum seekers, he deployed hundreds of agents from the Department of Homeland Security, the Coast Guard, and the Defense Department. Within days, the Biden administration deported thousands of these migrants without internationally mandated due process. This government reaction was so extreme that a reporter from the Jamaican newspaper The Gleaner called it “one of the swiftest, large-scale expulsions of migrants and refugees from the United States in decades.”
In fact, during his term, Biden has deported more Haitians than were expelled in the two terms of “deporter-in-chief” Obama and Trump’s one term. How is Biden’s record of deporting Haitian asylum seekers (often without due process) any less racist than the lie about Haitians eating pets? The pictures of Haitian asylum seekers’ dehumanizing treatment, such as being chased in Texas by white officers on horseback, should remain etched in our memories of the Biden presidency.
But what is the most racist and dehumanizing policy? Washington usurping Haitian sovereignty through non-stop meddling, intervention, and occupation.
As the Republicans are demonizing Haitians as “pet thieves” and “cat eaters,” the U.S., under the Democrat Biden’s regime, is devouring Haiti’s autonomy and sovereignty by leading a whole-scale foreign military invasion of the nation and planning for long term occupation. In the days since the pet-eating rumor surfaced, U.S. military planes flew in police and soldiers from Jamaica and Belize to add to the 380 Kenyan militarized police already in Haiti as the Black face cover for Washington’s invasion and occupation. This comes after the U.S. built a security perimeter around Port-au-Prince’s international airport, displacing thousands of families. At the same time, the U.S. has circulated a draft resolution to the UN Security Council about turning its mercenary mission in Haiti into a full-fledged UN “peacekeeping” operation. In other words, MINUSTAH 2.0.
Where is the outrage about the U.S. intensifying its occupation of Haiti with the collusion of vassal embassies, known as Haiti’s “Core Group;” over the Haitian state’s complete destruction only to be replaced by a puppet regime willing to do Washington’s bidding, including welcoming foreign military occupation in violation of Haiti’s Constitution; over a U.S.-led foreign invasion where the mercenaries brought to occupy the land have absolute immunity from prosecution; over the racist assumptions and tropes that Haitians are violent and dumb people, who cannot be allowed to rule themselves?
I argue that the lack of outrage – or even acknowledgment – of Washington’s illegal, continuing, violent occupation of Haiti results from many nations around the world accepting the U.S. logic that Haitian sovereignty can be dismissed or is undeserved.
For example, former Canadian minister and parliamentarian Denis Paradis, who participated in the 2003 “Ottawa Initiative” that led to the 2004 coup d’etat against Haiti’s democratically elected president, justified the West’s actions by asking: “Is state sovereignty immutable?” And, in 2003, the Organization of American States’ Assistant Secretary General, Luigi Einuadi, lamented before several witnesses that: “The real problem with Haiti is that the ‘International Community’ is so screwed up and divided that they are actually letting Haitians run Haiti.”
It is not only Vance, Trump, and their Republican allies who have been racist towards Haiti and Haitians. It is all the other people who – either by their silence or active complicity – have consented to the ongoing U.S. meddling and push for Haiti’s full occupation, who parrot the mainstream media’s racist descriptions about Haiti being ungovernable, who declare that “something has to be done” because of Haiti’s “gang problem.”
The problem is that some focus their vitriol on poor Black Haitians while remaining silent on Haiti’s non-Black oligarchs who collude with the U.S. and Core Group to fuel violence in the country. We must understand that Haiti’s crisis is created by US/Western imperialism, which are the real “gangsters” and “cannibals” terrorizing Latin America’s first nation.
The original version of this article was published in Black Agenda Report. Jemima Pierre is an editor and contributor to Black Agenda Report, the Haiti/Americas Co-Coordinator for the Black Alliance for Peace, and a professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
