SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
");background-position:center;background-size:19px 19px;background-repeat:no-repeat;background-color:var(--button-bg-color);padding:0;width:var(--form-elem-height);height:var(--form-elem-height);font-size:0;}:is(.js-newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter_bar.newsletter-wrapper) .widget__body:has(.response:not(:empty)) :is(.widget__headline, .widget__subheadline, #mc_embed_signup .mc-field-group, #mc_embed_signup input[type="submit"]){display:none;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) #mce-responses:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-row:1 / -1;grid-column:1 / -1;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget__body > .snark-line:has(.response:not(:empty)){grid-column:1 / -1;}:is(.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper) :is(.newsletter-campaign:has(.response:not(:empty)), .newsletter-and-social:has(.response:not(:empty))){width:100%;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col{display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;justify-content:center;align-items:center;gap:8px 20px;margin:0 auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .text-element{display:flex;color:var(--shares-color);margin:0 !important;font-weight:400 !important;font-size:16px !important;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col .whitebar_social{display:flex;gap:12px;width:auto;}.newsletter-wrapper .newsletter_bar_col a{margin:0;background-color:#0000;padding:0;width:32px;height:32px;}.newsletter-wrapper .social_icon:after{display:none;}.newsletter-wrapper .widget article:before, .newsletter-wrapper .widget article:after{display:none;}#sFollow_Block_0_0_1_0_0_0_1{margin:0;}.donation_banner{position:relative;background:#000;}.donation_banner .posts-custom *, .donation_banner .posts-custom :after, .donation_banner .posts-custom :before{margin:0;}.donation_banner .posts-custom .widget{position:absolute;inset:0;}.donation_banner__wrapper{position:relative;z-index:2;pointer-events:none;}.donation_banner .donate_btn{position:relative;z-index:2;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_0{color:#fff;}#sSHARED_-_Support_Block_0_0_7_0_0_3_1_1{font-weight:normal;}.grey_newsblock .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper, .newsletter-wrapper.sidebar{background:linear-gradient(91deg, #005dc7 28%, #1d63b2 65%, #0353ae 85%);}
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
The ‘Haitians eat pets’ tale is the latest in a long line of anti-Haitian claims that goes back to the nation's slave revolt nearly 200 years ago—a struggle against slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy.
A crass new iteration of anti-Haitianism has recently received a remarkable amount of attention. This novel form of racism with deep anti-Black roots was even referenced in this week's U.S. presidential debate.
Recently racist and ignorant social media users have circulated the idea that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating pets. Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance greatly boosted the anti-Haitian claim with a post to X stating, “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country.”
Vance’s X post had over 11 million views with Donald Trump even referencing the claim in the presidential debate. This despite an absence of any evidence whatsoever. Springfield officials haven’t received any credible reports of Haitian immigrants abducting and eating pets.
The ‘Haitians eat pets’ tale is the latest in a long line of anti-Haitian claims. In the early 1980s Haitians were stigmatized as the originators of the HIV virus in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) labeled Haitians as a risk group, which gave rise to “The Four H’s” designation of Homosexuals, Hemophiliacs, Heroin addicts, and Haitians. At the time the Canadian Red Cross publicly identified Haitians as a “high-risk” group for AIDS, the only nationality singled out. In 1983 they called on homosexuals and bisexuals with multiple partners, intravenous drug users, hemophiliacs and recent immigrants from Haiti to voluntarily stop giving blood. A Canadian government pamphlet, which was distributed in shopping malls, also linked Haitians with AIDS. Again, this was despite a lack of evidence that the incidence of AIDS in Haiti was greater than in the U.S. By 1987 it was lower in Haiti than in the U.S. and other Caribbean nations.
But, as a result of the unfounded stigmatization, the country’s significant tourism basically collapsed overnight. Out of fear the virus may transmit through goods, some Haitian exports were even blocked from entering the U.S.
The Haitians are responsible for AIDS allegation still pops up. During an explosion of xenophobia against Haitian migrants in Guyana in 2019, reports focused on HIV/AIDS and Voodoo and in a 2016 radio outburst former Canadian Member of Parliament, André Arthur, labeled Haiti a “sexually deviant” country populated by thieves and prostitutes responsible for HIV/AIDS.
In another example of stigmatizing Haitians over disease, CDC incident manager for the Haiti cholera response, Jordan W. Tappero, blamed Haitian cultural norms for the 2010 cholera outbreak that caused tens of thousands of deaths. He told Associated Press journalist Jonathan Katz that Haitians don’t experience the “shame associated with open defecation.” As was then suspected and later confirmed, cholera was introduced to Haiti by UN forces who followed poor sanitation practices.
Ten months earlier influential U.S. pastor Pat Robertson suggested the terrible January 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas was due to a “deal made with Satan” two centuries earlier. Robertson claimed Haitians “were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever … And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French.’ True story. And so, the devil said, ‘OK, it’s a deal.’” Robertson added, “You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”
Canadian Protestant groups have promoted similar thinking about the August 1791 Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caïman) Vodou ceremony that helped launch the Haitian Revolution. In the book “Haiti’s Pact with the Devil?: Bwa Kayiman, Haitian Protestant Views of Vodou, and the Future of Haiti,” Bertin M. Louis points out that some Haitian Canadian Protestants believe Haiti was consecrated to the devil. Mainstream Canadian voices have repeatedly denigrated voodoo.
After the 2004 US/France/Canada coup the National Post published an editorial headlined “Voodoo is not enough”, arguing for “a coalition of the willing to permanently extract the country from the quagmire. A 1952 Globe and Mail story attempting to be sympathetic to the country began by noting, “Haiti’s principal export is not, as popularly supposed, Zombies.” One of the first books to expose North Americans to the voodoo zombie was Magic Island, a 1929 book by William Buehler Seabrook. The book sensationalized encounters with voodoo cults in Haiti and their resurrected thralls.
Voodoo has been demonized by white supremacist and Christian forces for over two centuries. Important for defeating slavery and securing Haitian independence, the religion offered spiritual/ideological strength to those who revolted against their slave masters in maybe the greatest example of liberation in the history of humanity.
The 1791-1804 Haitian Revolution was simultaneously a struggle against slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy. Defeating the French, British, and Spanish empires, it led to freedom for all people regardless of color, decades before this idea found traction in Europe or North America. The Haitian revolt rippled through the region and compelled the post-French Revolution government in Paris to abolish slavery in its Caribbean colonies. It also spurred London’s 1807 Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
The Haitian Revolution led to the world’s first and only successful large-scale slave revolution. “Arguably,” notes Peter Hallward, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.”
But, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution thousands of photos, articles and books denigrated Haiti, depicting the slaves as barbaric despite the fact 350,000 Africans were killed, versus 75,000 Europeans, over the 13-year revolt. Anti-Haitianism has deep roots.
It’s easy to mock those who claim Haitian immigrants are eating cats. But overt anti-Haitianism is also relayed by ‘sophisticated’ liberals. Their high-minded commentaries calling for foreign tutelage of the country appear regularly in the pages of the Globe and Mail and Boston Globe.
Anti-Haitianism flows out of and reinforces the country’s weakness, which is spurred by imperial domination. Technically “independent” for more than two centuries, outsiders have long shaped Haitian affairs. Through isolation, economic asphyxiation, debt dependence, gunboat diplomacy, occupation, foreign supported dictatorships, structural adjustment programs, “democracy promotion”, coups and rigged elections, Haiti is no stranger to the various forms of foreign political manipulation.
JD Vance’s anti-Haitian musings have deep roots in centuries of anti-Black racism and U.S. imperial ambitions. All those who fail to support real Haitian independence are tainted by this legacy and present-day reality.
The influx of immigrants in Springfield, Ohio is a success story, not a scandal.
When my dad moved to southwest Ohio in the early 1970s, the Dayton-Springfield area’s second city was home to over 80,000 people. When I was growing up nearby in the 1990s, it was 70,000. Today, it’s less than 60,000.
Springfield’s decline looks like an awful lot of Rust Belt cities and towns. And behind those numbers is a lot of human suffering.
Corporations engineered trade deals that made it cheaper to move jobs abroad, where they could pay workers less and pollute more with impunity. As the region’s secure blue collar jobs dried up, so did the local tax base—and as union membership dwindled, so did social cohesion.
Young people sought greener pastures elsewhere while those who remained nursed resentments, battled a flood of opioids, and gritted their teeth through empty promises from politicians.
It’s a sad chapter for countless American cities, but it hardly needs to be the last one. After all, the region’s affordable housing—and infrastructure built to support larger populations—can make it attractive for new arrivals looking to build a better life. And they in turn revitalize their new communities.
It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
So it was in Springfield, where between 15,000 and 20,000 Haitian migrants have settled in the last few years. “On Sunday afternoons, you could suddenly hear Creole mass wafting through downtown streets,” NPR reported. “Haitian restaurants started popping up.”
One migrant told the network he’d heard that “Ohio is the [best] place to come get a job easily.” He now works at a steel plant and as a Creole translator. Local employers have heaped praise on their Haitian American workers, while small businesses have reaped the benefits of new customers and wages have surged.
Reversing decades of population decline in a few short years is bound to cause some growing pains. But on balance, Springfield is a textbook case of how immigration can change a region’s luck for the better.
“Immigrants are good for this country,” my colleagues Lindsay Koshgarian and Alliyah Lusuegro have written. “They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses, and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?)… They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.”
In fact, it was earlier waves of migration—including African Americans from the South, poor whites from Appalachia, and immigrants from abroad—that fueled much of the industrial heartland’s earlier prosperity.
But some powerful people don’t want to share prosperity equally. So they lie.
“From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to white supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny workers’ rights,” Lindsay and Alliyah explain, “these people stoke fear about immigrants to divide us for their own gain.”
So it is with an absurd and dangerous lie — peddled recently by Donald Trump, JD Vance, Republican politicians, and a bunch of internet trolls—that Haitian Americans are fueling a crime wave in Springfield, abducting and eating people’s pets, and other racist nonsense.
“According to interviews with a dozen local, county, and officials as well as city police data,” Reuters reports, there’s been no “general rise in violent or property crime” or “reports or specific claims of pets being harmed” in Springfield. Instead, many of these lies appear to have originated with a local neo-Nazi group called “Blood Pride”—who are about as lovely as they sound.
“In reality, immigrants commit fewer crimes, pay more taxes and do critical jobs that most Americans don’t want,” Lindsay and Alliyah point out.
Politicians who want you to believe otherwise are covering for someone else—like the corporations who shipped jobs out of communities like Spingfield in the first place—all to win votes from pathetic white nationalists in need of a new hobby. It’s lies like these, not immigrants, who threaten the recovery of Rust Belt cities.
Springfield’s immigrant influx is a success story, not a scandal. And don’t let any desperate politicians tell you otherwise.
"Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose," said Nathan Clark.
A day after the Trump campaign saw fit to spread baseless lies about Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield, Ohio, a grieving father with a deep connection to the bigoted viral stories was forced to speak out.
Springfield resident Nathan Clark spoke at the City Commission meeting that was held shortly before former President Donald Trump faced Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday's debate.
Clark was there to speak on behalf of his son, Aiden, who was tragically killed in August 2023 when a man who had moved to Springfield after immigrating to the U.S. from Haiti accidentally drove into the school bus the boy was riding, sending it into a ditch.
On Monday, without notifying the family in advance or receiving their permission, the Trump campaign posted a photo of Aiden and blamed Harris for his death.
"Using Aiden as a political tool is, to say the least, reprehensible for any political purpose," Clark said Tuesday, adding that politicians who have spoken about his son while attacking immigrants are "morally bankrupt."
"They have spoken my son's name and used his death for political gain," he said.
The child's death was also mentioned by Vance on Monday in a lengthy post on the social media platform X, in which he repeated unverified rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield abducting residents' pets and eating them.
"It's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false," said the senator, before adding that "a child was murdered by a Haitian migrant who had no right to be here," and explicitly blaming immigrants for rising rates of communicable diseases like tuberculosis and HIV—claims that health authorities have said are false.
On Tuesday, Clark took Vance to task—along with Republican Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), and Trump—for using his son's name for political gain in their attacks on migrants.
The spiraling rumors, he said, had left him wishing that a "60-year-old white man" had caused his son's death.
"If that guy killed my 11-year-old son, the incessant group of hate spewing people would leave us alone," said Clark. "The last thing that we need is to have the worst day of our lives violently and constantly shoved in our faces. Even that's not good enough for them. They take it one step further. They make it seem as though our wonderful Aiden appreciates your hate, that we should follow their hate. And look what you've done to us. We have to get up here and beg them to stop."
Soon after Clark spoke out, Trump once again spread the lie about migrants eating pets in Springfield—which authorities in the city have said are false—at the presidential debate.
Clark suggested that he can't stop Republican politicians who "vomit all the hate they want" about immigration and "untrue claims about fluffy pets being ravaged and eaten by community members."
"However, they are not allowed, nor have they ever been allowed, to mention Aiden Clark from Springfield, Ohio," he said.
"In order to live like Aiden, you need to accept everyone, choose to shine, make the difference, lead the way and be the inspiration," Clark continued. "Did you know that he researched different cultures to better appreciate and understand people that he interacted with? Did you know that one of the worst feelings in the world is to not be able to protect your child? Even worse, we can't even protect his memory when he's gone."
"Please stop the hate," he said. "I said to Aiden that I would try to make a difference in his honor. This is it. Live like Aiden."