An Anti-Black Lie And A Villain’s Push For A Red Summer In Ohio
The recent racist lies about Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio signals a dark turn in political rhetoric that harkens back to the Red Summer. And media outlets aren’t seeing it.
It’s a full week since we started seeing Republican politicians — including the current Vice Presidential nominee, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — begin to parrot a brazen lie that Haitian migrants in the town of Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs. Some of them, including the reliably reprehensible senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, decided to make it a meme. And of course, the lie became the prime lowlight for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s disastrous debate performance against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. But since that debate ended, Trump has tripled down on spreading this lie along with Vance and is essentially roaming around with white supremacist Laura Loomer. And what I fear a good amount of the media at large isn’t getting is this:
Trump and his cronies want a Red Summer to be their “October surprise”. With Springfield, Ohio as the starting point. And they’re counting on inaction from most of the country to do it.
This is the part of this essay where certain readers will accuse me of hyperventilating and blowing it out of proportion. For those usual suspects that use whataboutism and the tired tech-bro tendency to belittle from a locked account or with a blank avatar, have this Toni Morrison quote and fall back.
I call it an attempt to recreate that Red Summer of 1919 because resentment and hatred are the fuel built from grievance and desperation that Trump and his minions want. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan is a clarion call to all of those white people who feel that Black people and others have ruined their country, and are getting free things at their expense. It’s an old trope from the Tea Party’s slander of former President Barack Obama’s policies (remember “Obamaphones”?)now put into play with Vice President Harris, a Black and South Asian woman from Oakland, California.
Haitian immigrants are now the target of choice for a desperate convicted felon and fascist who is showing signs of rapid mental decline running to be an authoritarian and to stay out of jail. The lie that they are eating pets (because we all know how much some white people in this country will go out of their way to value pets over Black people) is another disgusting attack on a proud people whose homeland is enduring another chaotic period.
I remember vividly when I was younger how Haitians were dangled as the group of choice to pin the HIV/AIDS crisis on as it broke out in the early 1980s. The “4H’s” that was a stain on the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control. (Sounds familiar regarding a certain pandemic these days, doesn’t it?) I remember how a few parents at my Catholic grade school expressed concern about children of those immigrants going to school with us, and how the administration thankfully shot them down.
The hatred for Haitians and Haitian-Americans goes deeper than that period, all the way back to Haiti securing its independence in 1804 from French colonial rule. The United States, who benefited by buying the massive swath of land from the French in the Louisiana Purchase the year before, was so damn shaken by a free Black republic south of their shores that they joined France in demanding financial restitution to where it’s now estimated that Haiti has paid $21 billion out to France since.
At the root of it all, is best summed up by Public Enemy’s iconic album “Fear of A Black Planet”. Trump and his cronies have marked Haitians as the enemy, with Trump promising to deport them all despite their Temporary Protected Status. It’s xenophobia as public policy that he promises will outpace “Operation Wetback” and is undoubtedly the masturbatory dream of another white supremacist who was part of his administration, Steve Bannon. It’s othering that will lead someone unhinged to act.
It’s why on this Sunday morning as I write this, Springfield resident Erika Lee who sparked this racist-Prince-Albert-In-a-can fairytale has gone back on her Facebook story about a neighbor’s missing cat and her added twist — that she suspected it might’ve been the victim of an attack by Haitian neighbors. Here’s the kicker — Lee has a daughter who’s half-Black and identifies herself as part of the LGBTQIA community. Add to that the fact that a photo of a Black man holding two geese which was tied to this baseless lie was actually confirmed by the Ohio Department of Wildlife as someone picking up a goose after it was hit by a car, according to TMZ.
But it hasn’t stopped the pushing of the lie by both sides of the aisle. Marianne Williamson, the haphazard presidential candidate has defended the trope by writing: “Haitian voodoo is in fact real, and to dismiss the story out-of-hand rather than listen to the citizens of Springfield, Ohio confirms in the minds of many voters the stereotype of Democrats as smug elite jerks who think they’re too smart to listen to anyone outside their own silo.”
As for Vance? He admitted it was a lie in a CNN interview on Sunday morning, saying: “If I have to 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.” The grubby opportunist who was edged into this position by tech billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is seeing an army of blue-checked bigots utilized by the former to push it even more to help Trump. Even the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire had to delete a tweet
calling for Vice President Harris to be assassinated, deleting it after an outcry and whining about free speech.
All to try to quell the momentum that Kamala Harris has 50 days out from the election in November. So that she and all these “uppity Negroes” know their place. Anti-Blackness on full display.
Kamala Harris’ parents are from Jamaica and India, immigrants who came here to further their careers and better their lives. But callous racists and Klan adjacents don’t care about the distinctions in nationalities. Haitians are the easy targets — look at how Vance treated Yamiche Alcindor, the NBC senior correspondent who asked him questions about the lie. Look at how Peter Doocy of Fox News harangues Karine Jean-Pierre, President Biden’s Press Secretary. That’s the soft level of xenophobia. Loomer’s tweets attacking Harris by writing about “curry in the White House” and calling her “Shaniqua” is only the beginning.
And they are unfortunately aided online by those Black people who are parroting white supremacist tropes to defend their position as Freedmen Black Americans or FBAs. Individuals who will solely remain on social media sowing hatred tweet by tweet, all for the promise of monies that would never be granted if Trump got back in office. People that have begun to trash Harris in ways to pander to Trump and right-wingers, citing a $1200 stimulus check and lies about HBCU funding. I guess that’s a step up from the thirty pieces of silver Judas received, though.
The Proud Boys marched in Springfield yesterday. Flyers are being handed out by neo-Nazis known as the Blood Tribe who are claiming responsibility for spreading the rumor further. Bomb threats closed schools in the town for two days. The town has had racist violence occur there — it was the site of a lynching in 1904 which saw most of the Black district burned down, and another race riot just two years later. Trump, Vance, and other right-wingers allied with them want that bloodshed. They want that capitulation through violence if there is no following of what historian Timothy Snyder writes in his book On Tyranny, “anticipatory obedience.”
And those in Springfield, Ohio know how dangerous and false this all is. Governor DeWine defended the Haitian residents, saying “the Haitians who are in Springfield are legal. They came to Springfield to work. Ohio is on the move and Springfield has really made a great resurgence” in an ABC interview. The parents of Aiden Clark, an eleven-year-old killed in a school bus accident in Springfield last year, had to publicly demand that Trump and Vance stop using their child to inflame racial rhetoric (the driver in that accident, Hermanio Joseph, was Haitian. He was sentenced to 9 1/2 to 13 years in May.)
But if we’ve learned anything, it’s that there is always this sentiment of “it can’t happen here” mixed with a move to overlook violent acts or the potential for them has been at play since Trump rose to become POTUS. And despite Heather Heyer’s death in Charlottesville, Virginia after neo-Nazis marched through the town, despite Cesar Sayoc, despite the attempted insurrection at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, the mass shootings at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and the murders of the Charleston Nine — we’re seeing the stage set again for a potential tragedy. It’s not coincidental that today is the anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that claimed the lives of 4 little Black girls.
This nation has long had Black blood spilled to shock the system before it goes back to indifference, football scores, and other monotony.
The penchant for ignoring stochastic terrorism by American media outlets is something that should’ve been pried from its system. But in this case, since Black immigrants are the target, what will happen is a wave of apoplectic stories from some outlets, fierce statements of condemnation, and others reposting and quoting the outrage of Black activists, writers, and others of color who have been sounding the alarm and wearing themselves out, all to appease the moment. And then, nothing.
This is how not remembering the past and foregoing action sets the stage for terror. It's why Black people and other people of color don’t brush these verbal attacks off so easily. It’s a shame that there’s still not a unified push that sees it the same way.
