Haitian hate/slander must stop
On the campus of a distinguished American university is a statue of a seated man on a pedestal that bears the inscription, ""
The statue has come to be called the "statue of three lies" because
Someday, in Springfield, Ohio, a statue should be erected to refute the lies directed at the city's Haitian immigrants on social media and by a former president of the United States.
"In Springfield they're eating dogs," Donald Trump said in the Sept. 10 debate with Vice President Kamala Harris. "They're eating the cats. They're eating ... the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country, and it's a shame."
Trump's racist dog whistle, later reiterated by his soulless running mate, J.D. Vance, was debunked by Springfield's city manager and police. Though the influx of thousands of new residents has strained Springfield, the city's website notes that Haitian immigrants are filling a substantial need for workers in local industries. And Haitians have opened 10 businesses, including restaurants and grocery stores.
Nonetheless, Trump doubled down on this lie — piling onto it by claiming that the immigrants are "illegal" when they are in Springfield legally under temporary protected status — which should tell you that the "legality" of Black and Latino immigrants matters as little as the truth to the man and minions pushing the lie of the stolen election.
Demonization is the point. As if on cue, bomb threats sparked by animus toward immigrants later led to the evacuation of Springfield City Hall and two schools.
Sadly, this is hardly the first scapegoating of Haitians in this nation.
"We're no stranger to smear campaigns," said Ruben Pierre-Louis of Henrico County, president of the nonprofit Adopt Haiti Project , which was established after the devastating 2010 earthquake on that island nation.
"Them saying that goes way beyond just them trying to get votes. It's a scare tactic. A scare tactic in saying 'Hey, Blacks are evil. Blacks will invade your home. Blacks will eat your pets. They'll eat you as human beings'" — characterizations specifically and unfairly placed upon Haitians, he said.
Pierre-Louis was born in Haiti and lived outside its capital of Port-au-Prince before immigrating to the U.S. at age 11. He lived in New York and Boston before landing in Richmond 18 years ago. He tries to use humor to ease the hurt of this situation, but doesn't take it lightly. It pains him that his parents have to experience this slander once again.
"They don't care about the violence it will create," he said of the politicians peddling this nonsense. "They don't care about the chaos it will create."
"It's nothing new. As Haitian people we have to fight to keep our reputation and dignity intact."
Nathalie Frédéric Pierre is an assistant professor in the history department at Howard University. In an email, she cited Haiti's shared history with the U.S. — and the irony of dogs being weaponized as anti-Haitian propaganda.
"The United States and Haiti were the first two colonies to sever ties with European empires, and were actively involved in each other's revolutions," she said. The revolutionary alliance between the U.S. and France, whose forces were led by Gen. Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, included Black soldiers from colonial Haiti who fought at the Battle of Savannah, Pierre said.
"Sadly, due to this idea that people could be property, Rochambeau's son would later on go to colonial Haiti to force a free people back into shackles. His goal was to annihilate the 'freedom dreams' of captive Africans living in what was then called Saint-Domingue. Dogs were a key weapon in his annihilation strategy," she said.
"In my recollection, it was General Rochambeau, the son, who brought specially trained dogs to eat Black Haitians. Mr. Vance's unintentional inversion of history reminds us that canine warfare was a tactic used both in the Haitian Revolution, and the U.S. Civil Rights Movements to limit Black liberty."
Haitians hold a special place in the annals of Black history as a people who overthrew French domination — a frightening example for enslaving nations. The United States and Europe imposed an economic embargo against the new Haitian republic, and France demanded reparations, saddling Haiti with debts into the 20th century. This history of exploitation and political instability includes an occupation by the U.S., from 1915 to 1934, primarily to protect our nation's commercial interests.
In the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the late Virginia Beach televangelist, the Rev. Pat Robertson, attributed the Haitian victory over the French — and their subsequent misfortune — to a pact with the devil that left the nation cursed.
Nerlande Nicolas, the daughter of Haitian immigrants, recalls Haitians being blamed for the AIDS epidemic during her childhood in New Jersey. So the Trump-Vance lies have a familiar ring.
"It's sad and it's frustrating, but my people are resilient people. And it's always something," said Nicolas, who moved to Richmond in 2014 to take a job as an assistant women's basketball coach at Virginia Commonwealth University. "So I think we've kind of learned to keep it moving, keep it pushing, keep uplifting each other."
Nicolas draws upon the Haitian pride instilled in her as a child — a pride that stems from "being the first to break the chains of slavery, standing on the back of that, and knowing that we're strong people and people are going to attack not just our culture and not just Haitians, but whoever they feel like they can get ahead by attacking."
She left VCU in 2019 to concentrate on her family — she has three young children and another on the way next month. "And we just keep making sure that they understand who they are and what it means to be Haitian," she said, "despite what they hear around them."
It wasn't easy for her parents to start anew in the U.S. Her father drove a cab; her mother worked the night shift packing food for airlines, and at a toy factory, before her English became proficient enough for her to work as a nurse's assistant prior to retirement.
The MAGA movement is built on the flimsy premise that conflates immigrants with criminality, an assertion unsupported by data. As the Springfield labor crunch demonstrates, our nation doesn't work without immigrants.
Trump's overtly political rejection of a largely GOP-crafted immigration deal proves that addressing the real problems plaguing immigration is not the point; the demonization of nonwhite immigrants is. Which is why he's repeatedly lying about Haitians in Ohio.
"It's to make them seem as different and as savage as we can make them, so that people don't want them here, so that people don't vote for the other party, when in reality we are so much more alike than we are different," Nicolas said.
"And these people, they have escaped a life of hell that's going on right now in Haiti, to be in the States to try and have a normal life. And just coming here to deal with more attacks, in just different ways, it's shameful. ... It's nonsense."
It's what happens when a political movement is built on a pedestal of lies.
Michael Paul Williams
(804) 649-6815
