For shame, Trump, for taking ‘Haitians eating pets’ slur to world stage
One of the most striking moments in that zinger of a debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump was the latter’s false claim immigrants are…eating cats and dogs.
(Watch the moment here, or rather, don’t…it’s not pretty or particularly edifying that a major party nominee for US president should use their massive platform to say such things.)
The ugly, unfair reference was to a baseless canard against some 15,000 Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.
The BBC has a jolly good explainer of how these dreadful slurs began to spread on social media — finally reaching the biggest public stage of them all, a globally televised debate between the two main candidates.
Suffice it to say that the BBC tracked down the start of the false claims to an August 27 meeting of Springfield’s city commission. There, a local resident who described himself as a social media influencer, made a speech against recent Haitian immigrants and alleged that they were killing the ducks in a public park for the family dinner table. There was also a Facebook claim about a cat allegedly killed by Haitian immigrants. There was a Reddit photo about a goose in another Ohio town, Columbus. And a Fox News report, which quoted “Gray News”, claimed that “an Ohio woman was arrested after she allegedly killed a cat and began eating the feline in front of her neighbors”. The incident is alleged to have occurred in yet another Ohio city, Canton.
A clear (if false) storyline began to emerge, right-wing commentators started to pump it out, Mr Trump’s running mate J D Vance jumped on it and now, Mr Trump.
There’s nothing new about this sort of vilification. I’m told that canard about Vietnamese refugees eating dogs in San Francisco was spread all over that city in the 1970s.
So, this trope is not new. The playbook is not new. But it’s still disgusting. And it’s shameful that a candidate for president of America should parade his bigotry on the world stage.
(Incidentally, Jonathan M Katz has an excellent post on the subject, with a Haitian perspective from Springfield, Ohio. Mr Katz used to be the AP correspondent in Haiti, leaving the country just a couple of months before I got there.)
Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com
