‘A very old political story’: America’s racist history behind Trump’s claim of eating Haitian pet

LIn more than half an hour of Tuesday’s presidential debate, former president Donald Trump sent an updated version of a century-old slur against immigrant communities: that immigrants eat other people’s pets and insects.

“They’re eating dogs, they’re eating people, they’re eating cats,” Trump said of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. In the past four years, 15,000 Haitians have settled in the city of nearly 60,000, most of them through a legal resettlement program for immigrants. “They are eating the pets of the people who live there, and this is what is happening in our country, and it is a shame.”

Although city officials confirmed they had received no such reports, and the baseless claims were quickly condemned, false claims about Haitians eating pets spread on right-wing social media, and were quickly picked up by conservative lawmakers. Ohio Senator and vice presidential candidate JD Vance wrote on X on Monday about reports of “illegal Haitian immigrants” kidnapping and eating pets and causing “general chaos” in Springfield.

People of Haitian descent say these xenophobic attacks are nothing new to their community, and experts say “dog-eat-dog” is a horror tactic that white politicians have long used against immigrants of color, especially those of Haitian descent. Asia.

“The way white Americans have positioned themselves as culturally and morally superior, this is the wrong fruit to mobilize xenophobia in such a rapid way,” said Anthony Ocampo, a sociology professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Criminalizing immigrants through lies about their diet is a political tactic that dates back to the late 19th century, at the height of anti-Chinese sentiment, said May-lee Chai, an author and professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Before the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign published business cards that featured cartoons of Chinese men eating rats, and painted his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, as a “Chinese presidential candidate”, according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History. .

“It’s a very old political way to denigrate male Chinese immigrants and portray them as a threat to the white working class of America,” Chai said. Chinese workers posed not only a “labor threat” to the restaurant industry but also a “civilizational threat”, he added, as one of the reasons for the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was that Chinese immigration would contribute to the “whitening of America”.

An urban legend claiming that Chinese restaurants sell dog, cat or rat meat dates back to the beginning of Chinese immigration to the United States. An editorial from a Mississippi newspaper in 1852, for example, laments that trade with China “is not what it should be”, then states, “and besides, the Chinese still eat dog’s bread”.

Chinese people may have been the first immigrant group to be widely referred to as “dog eaters,” but the gossip soon spread to other Asian communities, said Robert Ku, author of Dubious Gastronomy: The Cultural Politics of Eating Asian in the USA.

In the world exhibition of 1904 in St. Louis, organizers reportedly forced Indigenous Igorots from the Philippines to slaughter and eat dogs for entertainment — an event that reinforced anti-Filipino stereotypes. By the late 20th century, Ku said, groups including Koreans, Filipinos and Cambodians were “typically dog ​​eaters”.

More recently, in 2016, Oregon county commissioner and US Senate candidate Faye Stewart accused Vietnamese refugees of “harvesting” dogs and cats for food. And last May, false claims that a Laotian and Thai restaurant in California served dog meat led to months of harassment and eventually the closure of the business.

The “Asian eat dog” narrative has gone on for so long, Ku said, that Trump targeted Asian immigrants instead of Haitians, public outrage may have been more muted. “The fact that the gossip was directed at Haitians somehow confused a lot of people,” Ku said, “because Haitians, as far as I know, have never been thought of as dog eaters.”

Since animals such as dogs and cats are considered “respectable human beings” in the United States, Ku said, vulgar words such as “neither dog” or “neither cat” have serious consequences. In presenting immigrants as a threat to domestic animals, he said, Trump “was actually portraying immigrants as the perpetrators of the cruelest or worst humanly possible act – cannibalism”.

The perception of Haitians as cannibals could lead to increased racial violence, experts say. In Springfield this week, bomb threats led to the closure of city hall and schools. Republicans have also rallied around the death of an 11-year-old boy — who was on a bus that was hit by a minivan driven by a Haitian immigrant — to further demonize the community. Nathan Clark, the boy’s father, asked Trump and Vance to stop using his son’s name for “political gain”.

“If you make it look like a group is barbaric or uncivilized, it makes it easier to punish and legislate against [them],” Ocampo said.