There is no evidence that Haitians have been eating pets in Ohio, but Donald Trump and J.D. Vance continue to repeat such allegations to stir up fear of immigrants.
Historians of the Caribbean are well familiar with the long history of Haiti being treated as a bête noire by France and then the U.S.
The French colony of Saint Domingue (colonial Haiti) produced roughly half of all the sugar and coffee of Europe and the Americas, creating immense wealth for France in the eighteenth century.
When the leaders of the Haitian Revolution (1795–1804) commanded a largely African army in a rebellion that defeated the strongest armies of Europe – France, Spain and England – they emancipated the slaves. A few years later, French revolutionary authorities abolished slavery in the French colonies.
Haiti declared its independence from France a decade later. Independence came at an enormous cost because France required Haiti to pay reparations in an amount estimated to be the equivalent of US $560 million in today’s dollars. Haiti continued to pay this debt well into the 1940s, becoming the only nation where slaves’ descendants paid reparations
to the children of their masters.
Given Haiti’s unique role in successfully challenging slavery and colonialism at a time when both were still expanding, it should come as no surprise that proslavery advocates demonized the new nation. Haiti’s detractors warned that Black rule would bring only carnage and chaos.
In the U.S., where pets are members of the family, allegations of pet eating come close to allegations of cannibalism. There is a long history of such accusations in the Caribbean, beginning with Christopher Columbus’ claims that Carib peoples ate humans so he could justify enslaving them.
Accusations of cannibalism fueled the African slave trade, which links directly to Haiti since slavery enabled its rise as the wealthiest sugar producer of the 1700s.
Haiti and its peoples continued to be depicted as dangerous in the twentieth century. During the long U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915-34 due to concerns about debt to Germany -- one of the in longest U.S. military history — U.S. marines commenced a genre of sensationalist writing about the country that demonized their religion. These stories inspired such zombie films as “I Walked with a Zombie” (1943), in which a Black man ravages a white woman in a tropical island nation.
While the U.S. supported the government François Duvalier as a bulwark against communism in the Caribbean from 1957 to 1986, this “support” came at the expense of the Haitian people as Duvalier ran one of the most repressive regimes in the region.
Refugee and immigration issues have continued to feed Haiti’s image as a bête noire. Haitian refugees fleeing Duvalier repression were abducted at sea and returned to Haiti, and those that made it to U.S. shores were jailed. Many of these people were moved to the U.S. Naval base at Guantánamo, Cuba, in the early 1990s as part of a court case against their repatriation.
Conditions in Guantánamo were appalling: people slept on the ground or on cardboard boxes and were confined by barbed wire, deprived of sanitation facilities and women administered Depo Provera — a form of birth control — without their consent. Most important, Haitian refugees were left in legal limbo and refused entry to the U.S. until a judge challenged these policies on the grounds of human rights violations.
When President George H. W. Bush decided to reduce the population of Guantánamo camps, only one-third of the Haitians confined there were allowed to seek asylum because the Center for Disease Control falsely associated Haitians with the AIDS pandemic by defining them as an “at-risk group,” the only national group to be singled out.
Although Haitian refugees have since benefited from Temporary Protected Status, which grants them temporary asylum and the right to work in the U.S., growing anti-immigrant sentiment in the country continues to accuse them of pet eating and geese slaughtering among other indignities.
Haiti has long paid a price for its role as a defender of antislavery. It is high time to treat the country and its people with some respect, especially since these accusations are fueling the transnational spread of anti-Haitianism. This can be seen in the Dominican Republic where more than 27,000 Haitians and ethnic Haitians have been deported this month and the government threatens to deport 10,000 weekly from now on.