Why does god hate Haiti?
Remember the hysteria that the junior senator from Ohio and the then VP candidate JD Vance whipped up by claiming that his office had been hearing from constituents about immigrants from Haiti catching and eating neighborhood pets, and even geese in the parks?
Remember how the Republican Party candidate, who is now the President, amplified all that more by talking about it in his rallies, and then took it to a whole new level when he brought it up during the debate with the Democratic Party’s candidate, Kamala Harris:
“They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats,” Trump claimed during a debate segment on immigration. “They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
When the ABC debate moderator David Muir informed him that the story had been debunked, Trump stood by the claim, saying he had seen it “on television”.
At least the President doesn’t claim to be uber-religious as the Veep does. The Veep, whose latest book is about his conversion to Catholicism, blatantly lied about Haitians, as if that kind of lying about something that never happened and spreading hate about a group of people is exactly what Jesus directed his followers to do.
In upholding the President’s decision to end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians, the Supreme Court discounted all that racist shit:
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. concluded that Mr. Trump’s many statements about Haitians were not “overtly racial,” and that it was unlikely that race had been a motivating factor in the administration’s decision to end the protections. He was joined by the court’s five other Republican appointees.
The dissenting minority viewed it otherwise:
In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan was incredulous.
“The statements fairly shout,” she wrote, “in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” …
Her list included these comments from Mr. Trump: Haitians in Ohio were “eating the pets” of their neighbors. Haitians “probably have AIDS.” Haiti is a “shithole country,” which is “filthy, dirty, disgusting.” Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.” Haitians are “poisoning the blood” of the nation.
Justice Kagan said those comments were more than sufficient evidence of racial animus. “The references — of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” she wrote.
Who you gonna believe, the President or your own eyes and ears?
The title of this post has been the subject of a few posts in my old blogging platform. After a devastating earthquake in January 2010, Pat Robertson, the Christian televangelist who was a one-time contender in the GOP’s presidential nomination primaries, said that Haitians were being punished by god for the pact that they made with the devil.
They 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.”
And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor.
The GOP has a long history for not caring about Haitians.
I blogged the following on January 12, 2010, after that same earthquake:
Only yesterday it was that in my office I had a long conversation about Haiti with a student .... all because he used to serve in the US Coast Guard, and one of his toughest assignments was to escort back people trying to sneak in to the US, and this included Haitians. An awfully poor country, he described. This was during the violent and chaotic times with all the Aristide confusion ....
So, reading about the earthquake today makes that place very much real, with only one degree of separation .... As if they did not have enough problems on their hands ....
The following is a copy/paste from my January 19, 2019 post: after reading Jill Lepore’s book, These Truths: A History of the United States:
Lepore gives me plenty to get angry about--despite that I am not an African-American, and was raised with Brahmin privilege in the old country. I have no firsthand experience of being the underclass ever, and I am pissed off!
Consider this, for instance: The American Revolution of 1776 echoed across the waters with the French Revolution in 1789. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Right?
It was the same France that had colonized Haiti, which was then known as Saint-Domnigue. It was “the largest colony in the Caribbean, and the richest.” Whites on the island were outnumbered by slaves, whose population was eleven times the population of whites.
A “democratic” revolution in the nearby United States, and another in the colonial power. So, of course, Haiti’s brown people rose up in 1791.
The leaders of the American revolution did not support the revolution in Haiti. Instead, they attacked it. Not just with words: “Between 1791 and 1793, the United States sold arms and ammunition and gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in aid to French planters on the island.” Yep, the young republic set a precedent way back then by sending money and materials to a war, not to help the downtrodden but to support the white and the wealthy!
American newspapers did not cheer the Haitian Revolution, but instead reported it “as a kind of madness, a killing frenzy.”
America reinforced itself not as a land of liberty, but as a land of slavery. How awful!
When George Washington called it quits and headed back home, some of their slaves fled. Washington “sent a slave catcher” after one of them, who offered to return only if she would be granted freedom. “Washington refused, on the ground that it would set a “dangerous precedent.”“ When Washington died, blacks outnumbered whites in that room, Lepore writes.
Nearly 230 years after that revolution, the sitting President of the United States casually and callously referred to Haiti as a “shithole”.
“For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men.”