The United States’ shameful treatment of Haiti, the world’s oldest Black republic, took another cruel turn this week and we have the MAGA crowd and its leader to thank.

 

Haiti has been our punching bag for more than 160 years. We were the last country to recognize it as a nation, by decades; we waited until after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 to do so. You can guess why. Southern politicians feared that recognizing Haiti would give the South’s enslaved population notions about staging their own revolt. As a result of the horse-trading we call lawmaking, we shunned the young republic long after the rest of the world accepted it. 

 

Then in 1915, President Woodrow Wilson, at the urging of National City Bank of New York, sent Marines to occupy Haiti. Wilson’s excuse was that US intervention was needed to stabilize the country after the assassination of the Haitian president. Conveniently, the occupation also protected the profits of the bank that had urged Wilson to invade. That bank happened to own the Bank of Haiti.  

 

The occupation was marked by nakedly racist treatment of Haitians. For example, most of the Marines were Southerners. It was thought that they would know better how to handle Negroes. The Marines instituted a system of forced labor to build infrastructure. During the 19-year occupation, Haitians grew poorer while the occupiers enriched themselves, living in the style of conquerors. Haitian rebels staged numerous revolts, but all were ruthlessly put down by the Marines and Haitian police. One cannot read this history and feel anything but a sense of shame.

 

Throughout the 20th century, our country maintained a cynical policy vis a vis Haiti. We supported Francois Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, who charmed us by mouthing anti-communist propaganda. That he was a murderous dictator who ruled by terrorizing the people didn’t seem to matter to us. We continued our policy of supporting any Haitian president who could control the country’s desperately poor people. 

 

We were quite active in Haiti in the 1990s, mostly behind the scenes. The CIA alternately supported or toppled regimes. It’s widely believed that we deposed  Jean-Bertrand Aristide then reinstated him with a second occupation (1994-1995), which was named Operation Restore Democracy. (The military seems to have no sense of irony.) Needless to say, democracy was not restored. Aristide was later evacuated from Haiti on a US military plane and began a relatively brief exile in South Africa. 

 

Also in the 1990s Haitians began fleeing the country in boats, a generous word  for just about anything that floated.. These overloaded craft variously capsized, were turned back by the US Coast Guard, or dumped their passengers on beaches in the Bahamas or South Florida. The ones dumped in South Florida were usually sent to a detention center in Miami-Dade County and subsequently taken back to Haiti. 

 

In 1992 President George H.W. Bush signed an executive order banning Haitians from seeking asylum and mandating forced repatriation for Haitian migrants who managed to make it onto US beaches. Bill Clinton continued this policy after he was elected.  All the while migrants from Cuba were welcomed with open arms no matter the reason for their exodus. We justified treating Haitian and Cuban refugees differently by saying that Cubans were fleeing — OMG! — communism while the Haitians were only fleeing a bad economy, a polite word for dystopian hell. It didn’t hurt that most Cubans were not black, but Haitians were.

 

Fast forward to the Trump era and we hear Trump tagging Haiti as one of the world’s  “shithole” countries during a 2018 meeting with senators in the White House. Trump went on to say, “Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out,” according to NBC News, which quoted an attendee at the meeting. Another attendee reportedly responded: Because if you do, it will be obvious why. Yes, it would have been obvious that we don’t mind kicking a man when he is down as long as that man is dirt poor and Black. 

 

Will our contempt for Haitians ever abate? I suppose not because it’s still embraced by the leaders of the MAGAs (formerly the Republican Party). In Tuesday night’s debate, Trump said matter-of-factly that migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were stealing pet dogs and cats and eating them. He didn’t mention the nationality of these dog- and cat-eating migrants but he didn’t have to. The country already had heard the internet-fueled fiction that Haitian immigrants were responsible. Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, had gone public with the news of pet-eating Haitians days earlier. The tale was hatched by far-right internet groups and neo-Nazis but that didn’t stop Vance from repeating it. 

 

When local authorities made it clear that no such thing had happened, Vance was forced to partially recant by saying the story might not be true. He didn’t say he was sorry for repeating a shameful, racist lie. And all this was before the debate — when Trump repeated the already refuted lie. That would be pathetic and stupid if it weren’t so downright amoral. 

 

The late Dr. Paul Farmer, who I idolized, wrote a book called The Uses of Haiti. When I told him I’d read it, he replied that only his mother and I had done so. Apparently it didn’t sell that well. The book documents how the powerful countries have used Haiti to pursue their own purposes and prejudices. France comes in for a lot of criticism but our country takes first prize. We’re Number One! You probably won’t read The Uses of Haiti; you’ll have to take my word for it. We have been horrible neighbors to the poorest country in our hemisphere. I am talking now about our country’s policies and our politicians’ actions and attitudes. I am not talking about individual Americans. There are thousands who have traveled to Haiti and fallen in love with that magic place. Many return regularly to do what they can do to help individual Haitians. Those people don’t think of Haiti as a shithole and they don’t treat Haitian migrants as sub-human. 

 

The Haiti slur Trump injected into the presidential debate infuriated me. I blame the hateful right-wing troll machine for starting the story. I blame J.D. Vance for going national with it. And I blame the despicable orange buffoon for bringing it up again after it had been debunked. 

 

I realize that accusations of racism are tossed around too easily these days, often with no justification. But I can’t for the life of me ascribe our treatment of Haiti since its independence in 1804 to anything but racism. So when you hear people saying derogatory things about Haiti or Haitians, please raise your racist antenna. 

 

End of rant.

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