By now readers are likely familiar with the claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating peoples’ pets. It goes without saying that these claims are, as the Springfield City Manager put it, “baseless.” A week after vice presidential candidate JD Vance tweeted about the conspiracy, his running mate, Donald Trump, used the presidential debate stage to describe US immigrants as trouble-makers and pet-eaters to attack President Joe Biden’s Humanitarian Parole Program for Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and yes, Haitians.
Notably, this isn’t the first time that Trump has attacked the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. In 2017, Edwidge Danticat explained in the New Yorker that he “reopened an old wound” by erroneously accusing Haitian migrants of being carriers of HIV/AIDS, and in 2018 he decried Haiti and several African nations as “shithole countries” whose people are undeserving of refuge.
Springfield’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has also blatantly rebuked these latest false claims, and made it abundantly clear that the city’s recent influx of nearly 15,000 Haitians (almost all of whom are documented) has contributed significantly to the city’s economic upturn. Tragically, this hasn’t stopped the recent arrival of far-right protestors and neo-Nazis seeking to “defend” the town.
Within a week, 33 bomb threats targeting Haitian citizens were made at local schools and colleges, leading administrators to temporarily shut down and move classes online. FBI investigations have proven that all 33 threats were made by overseas bots, raising concerns about foreign interference in the 2024 presidential election (it certainly wouldn’t be the first time, as evidenced from 2016). Remarkably, many other Springfield residents are pushing back, standing in solidarity with their new Haitian neighbors, and turning out in droves to support local Haitian restaurants.
Despite the rebuttals from Ohio leaders, Vance doubled down, telling CNN’s Dana Bash that the story was fabricated and declaring “[if I must] create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Later in the interview, he tried to pivot and reframe his comments, but the cat is out of the bag.
Let’s be clear: this is no ordinary anti-Blackness. It’s compounded anti-Blackness. Through innuendo, the mischaracterization of Vodou as America’s favorite racial slur, “voodoo,” reinforces stereotypic narratives of Black criminality and related efforts to exclude Blacks from authentic American citizenship. The upcoming presidential election makes Springfield’s new community of Haitian immigrants the perfect target for the Trump-Vance ticket’s rehearsed political strategies of Black disenfranchisement and “religious racism.” In fact, the anti-Haitianism exhibited here has deep roots in the history of White supremacist electoral politics in America and is often implicitly connected to Haitian Vodou.
Strategies of Black disenfranchisement
Even before the 15th Amendment granting voting rights to Black men was ratified on February 3, 1870, individual Whites (as well as organized White mobs) repeatedly committed heinous acts of violence and mass killings to deny Black men their right to vote, or to be voted into office.
In the wake of the amendment’s passage, countless examples exist of White political candidates creating and weaponizing racist mythologies that portrayed Blacks as an immediate danger to social order and a threat to the moral and democratic constitution of the American body politic. In order to eliminate the “danger” and safeguard White civil society, anti-Black violence has always been a justified measure. Race massacres often culminated in new state and municipal legislation that operated in open defiance of the Constitution. White supremacy was codified into laws that ensured Black disenfranchisement. The September 24-26, 1906 Atlanta race massacre readily comes to mind as a powerful playbook on how to disenfranchise Black voters and blame it on the “rapacious” character of Black men.
The November 10, 1898 Wilmington coup and race massacre is another prime example of extreme political repression targeting Blacks. Infuriated by the establishment of interracial governance and power-sharing between Blacks and Whites during Reconstruction, White supremacists launched the only successful coup d’état the United States has ever experienced* and replaced ousted elected officials with their own representatives. The brutal slaughter that ensued left between 60 and upwards of 300 Black persons dead and another 2,100 dispossessed and displaced. The rebels’ “White Declaration of Independence” proclaimed that “We, the undersigned citizens of the city of Wilmington . . . will never again be ruled by men of African origin.”
By 1900, voter suppression hid comfortably under the cover of the law. Democratic legislators strategically and coercively ensured that their constitutional amendment requiring all eligible voters to pay poll taxes and pass literacy tests would be adopted and deployed to prohibit Black citizens from voting. It worked masterfully. Not another Black representative held office in Wilmington until 1972, seven years after the passing of the Voting Rights Act.
To White supremacist politicians, it has never mattered whether the Blacks they sacrifice on the altar of voter suppression have been waves of Black migrants to Southern cities at the end of the nineteenth century, or recent waves of Black immigrants to northern cities like Springfield, Ohio at the beginning of the twenty-first. In the last half century alone, racist politicians, mostly Republicans, have repeatedly positioned the Black electorate as a debased and undeserving element in American politics. Many have weaponized the criminalization of Blacks to garner White votes. Unsurprisingly, Trump and Vance have accused Democrats of an open border policy that allows Black and Brown immigrants to cross into America and vote illegally in support of Democratic candidates (an accusation for which they have yet to provide proof).
From Ronald Reagan’s anti-Black rhetorical use of the “welfare queen” trope in 1976, to George H.W. Bush’s anti-Black advertisements about the Willie Horton case in 1988, to the plethora of racist ads and rhetoric in recent state and local contests, the Trump-Vance ticket has joined an expansive stage of political actors who love to play in the dark with overrepresentations of Black deviance and salacious anti-Black mythologies. Even without ever mentioning the words “Black” and “Haitian,” code words such as “immigrants,” “criminals,” and “illegal aliens” are indirect signifiers of Blacks, Haitians, Africans, and other targeted non-White groups.
Such racecraft speaks to a peculiar devotion to America’s most treasured civil religion—Whiteness. It’s little more than a twenty-first-century performance of America’s long legacy of Black voter suppression that reduces Blacks to convenient tropes and props to be deployed in service of menacing political ambitions.
The Trump-Vance ticket’s promotion of, what PBS News calls a “false racist rumor” is essentially an attempt to, “rally xenophobia in a very quick way,” as Sociology professor Anthony Ocampo put it. In fact, many are worried that we may begin to experience the kind of lethal violence we’ve seen rain down on Blacks across the nation during election seasons in earlier periods of American history. Commenting on the rumor, Staci Rhine, a political science professor based in Springfield, Ohio, told US News & World Report:
It’s really dangerous because I’m worried about violence here, because some people will believe that. And there are signs of people being harassed, including not even Haitians, but people who are perceived as Haitians … So there are real risks to real human beings here that are appalling.
Strategies of religious racism
Haitians’ revolutionary war for independence from the repressive French colonial regime between 1791-1804—a war fought by enslaved Africans, escaped maroons, and free people of color—incited colossal fear in the hearts of White plantation owners (and non-land-owners) across the Americas.
This was largely due to religious racism and the fear of Black self-emancipation. On August 14, 1791, a Pan-African congress and Vodou ceremony was held in Bwa Kayiman, Haiti to establish political solidarity and elicit support from the ancestors and spirits in the struggle for freedom. This liberatory Vodou ceremony has been referred to by Pat Robertson as a “pact with the devil,” which he outrageously blamed for the nation’s 7.0 magnitude earthquake of 2010. The only successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere produced a proud Black republic—the first in the West to abolish slavery at its founding—and yet, for Haiti “freedom came at a price,” an unimaginable one at that.
Haitian historians like Nathalie Frédéric Pierre have pointed out the irony of dogs being weaponized as anti-Haitian propaganda:
[It was] General [Jean-Baptiste] Rochambeau . . . who brought specially trained dogs to eat Black Haitians [as they warred against French colonialism]. Mr. Vance’s unintentional inversion of history reminds us that canine warfare was a tactic used both in the Haitian Revolution, and the US Civil Rights Movements to limit Black liberty.
Hundreds of years later in the 1980s, Haitians continued to bear the stigma of Black revolutionary freedom. Following waves of Haitians’ migration to the United States during the later years of François Duvalier’s reign of terror—and the regime’s overthrow in 1987—Haitians experienced tremendous racism in the United States. During this era, the Centers for Disease Control accused Haitians of being one of the 4 H’s (heroin substance abusers, hemophiliacs, “homosexuals,” and Haitians) and thus a prime carrier of HIV/AIDS.
The implication here was that, in the so-called orgies of Vodou ceremonies, devotees became high-risk carriers. To be clear, Haitian immigrants at the time were in no way overrepresented among persons infected with HIV or diagnosed with AIDS. In actuality, Westerners have become fixated on myths of hypersexuality in Vodou, which are unfounded and are more likely a consequence of repressed sexual expression in Christianity. Moreover, the late Paul Farmer and other researchers have demonstrated that it was actually Western foreigners traveling to Haiti for sex tourism that first introduced HIV/AIDS to the Caribbean nation.
This latest episode reveals a deep-seated Afrophobia, anti-Haitianism, and religious racism against custodians of nature-based African-heritage religions. We wonder if any of the Christians pushing this conspiracy theory are aware that second-century custodians of their precious faith were regularly accused of practicing incest and cannibalism by Roman imperial authorities.
Roman officials stigmatized Christians as religious and political criminals deserving of persecution and extermination. Religious repression can cut in many directions depending on the religious affiliation of those in power. We hope those perpetuating anti-Haitian rumors remember this history before they throw their next pile of Christian stones at Haitian immigrants.
*The storming of the capitol on Jan 6, 2021 has indeed been labeled a coup attempt by experts, but it was ultimately unsuccessful.
