By Bertin M. Louis, Jr.
News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Tuesday. November 12, 2024: On September 25, 2024, Democratic Representative Steven Horsford introduced House Resolution 1500 on the floor of Congress. The purpose of the resolution was to censure Republican Congressman Glen Clay Higgins of Louisiana for a social media post that reinforced false claims made by former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. In a post on X responding to an Associated Press article about Haitians in Springfield filing charges against Trump and Vance, Higgins wrote, “Lol. These Haitians are wild. Eating pets, voodoo, ugliest place in the Western Hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters… but damned if they don’t all feel sophisticated now, laying charges against our President and Vice President.”
He continued: “All these thugs better get their minds and ass out of our country before January 20.” Higgins later deleted the tweet, but the damage was done. Condemnations poured in, followed by resolutions to censure the congressman.
Such comments and lies reflect the worst white supremacist stereotypes about Haiti and Haitians. In general, anti-Haitianism consists of actions, beliefs, outcomes, policies, political strategies, and practices that reflect negative connotations associated with Blackness and Haitian identity. Trump and Vance both used false anti-Haitian rumors as a form of anti-black, anti-immigrant fear-mongering to garner political support.
Examples of such strategies are numerous. In September 2021, for example, US Border Patrol agents were seen flogging Haitians in Del Rio, Texas amid a border crackdown that resulted in the largest mass deportation of asylum seekers in recent US history. Between January 2021 and February 2022, the United States deported or deported over 20,000 Haitians. During the same period, more than 5,000 Haitians were deported from other countries, about half of them from the Bahamas.
Anti-Haitianism, of course, is not limited to the United States. It is a regional and hemispheric phenomenon. Within scholarly and informed circles, the best-known example of this form of political dominance, marginalization, racism, and anti-blackness is in the Dominican Republic. In his study of race and politics, Ernesto Sagás analyzes how Dominican political elites use race and anti-Haitianism to “build national myths and then use these myths to thwart challenges to their hegemony”.
As Sagás explores, the national myth that entrenched Dominican citizenship was that the Dominican Republic was the most Spanish colony in the so-called New World. After the Haitian occupation of Santo Domingo from 1822 to 1844—which freed enslaved people, guaranteed Haitian freedom and independence, and culminated in Dominican independence—the Dominican Republic strengthened its distance from the Negro and Haitian identity. Antihaitianismo then developed as an ideology based on anti-Ziko prejudices, stereotypes and myths about Haitians and people of Haitian descent. Anti-Haitianism, Sagás writes, scapegoats problems within Dominican society and considers Haitians as culturally and racially inferior black sub-humans.
Anti-Haitianismo manifested itself violently in Dominican society in the 1937 genocidal massacre of tens of thousands of Haitians by order of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. As recently as 2013, the country’s highest court issued a ruling, known locally as THE judgmentthat not only supported a constitutional amendment that removed birthright citizenship, but also retroactively stripped the citizenship of more than 200,000 black Dominicans of Haitian descent, rendering them stateless. Starting in 2015, tens of thousands were forced to flee the country. Now, Dominican President Luis Abinader has announced plans for a new round of mass deportations.
“A Certain Kind of Black”
In my book project, Anti-Haitianism in Paradise: Marginalization, Stigma, and Anti-Blackness in the Bahamas, part of the Black Lives and Liberation series from Vanderbilt University Press, I build on Saga’s work and use anti-Haitianism to articulate the unique form of oppression of Haiti and people of Haitian descent. In other words, I am deconstructing the idea and reality of anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic, applying it to different social contexts and extending the theory to explain what the anthropologist Gina Athena Ulysse – regarding the racist treatment and degradation of Haitians in other parts of the world—referred to as “rejection of ia certain kind of black.”
The Bahamas, a small, predominantly Black Caribbean archipelago nation, has a history of anti-Haitian actions. Haitians have immigrated to the Bahamas since the era of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1803). However, on November 9, 2019, members of a Bahamian nationalist group called Operation Sovereign Bahamas protested outside a high school that housed hundreds of victims of Hurricane Dorian. The devastating Category 5 hurricane hovered over Grand Bahama for 24 hours beginning on September 1, 2019, flooding much of the island and largely submerging the Abaco Islands, rendering these areas uninhabitable. Haitians who had been living in informal settlements on Abaco were relocated.
Two months later, Operation Sovereign Bahamas demonstrators called on the Bahamian government to evict the displaced people sheltering in the gymnasium. “The Bahamas is for the Bahamians,” said the group’s founder, Adrian Francis, according to Bahamian news service Eyewitness News Bahamas. Other members of the group carried Bahamian flags and shouted to the evacuees, apparently of Haitian descent, “Go home!” “Repatriation!”, and “We want you to leave our country!” This scene came after the same civic group had held a well-attended town hall meeting on October 4, 2019 in New Providence, Bahamas titled “Eradicating Illegal Immigrants in the Bahamas, Shanty Towns Down.”
Cyclic white supremacy
Anti-Haitianism functions as an ideology rooted in anti-blackness, nationalism, political dominance, and marginalization. We can also see anti-Haitianism expressed as a set of practices. But what is the relationship between anti-Haitianism in the Dominican Republic and anti-Haitianism in the Bahamas? As in the United States, political elites in both countries use anti-Haitianism as a strategy, suggesting that both nations of African descent are structurally anti-Haitian. When Black Dominicans of Haitian descent were forced to leave the Dominican Republic in 2015 because of the conviction, it was done in part by the ruling party as a move to garner political capital.
Another dimension of anti-Haitianism is that these nations express and exercise their sovereignty through anti-Blackness. After Hurricane Dorian, the Bahamas repatriated 228 migrants from Haiti, 153 of whom had been living on hurricane-ravaged Abaco. Many Abaco Haitians lived in informal settlements, locally called shantytowns, and had unexpired work permits that gave them legal status in the country.
When black-majority nations assert their sovereignty through anti-Haitianism, they extend the spirit of white supremacy and anti-blackness, traditions previously exercised on Bahamian and Dominican ancestors through slavery. These cycles also expose cyclic the nature of white supremacy and ENDURANCE of anti-Blackness.
Anti-Haitianism in Hemispheric Perspective
Reflecting its hemispheric dimensions, anti-Haitianism has also developed into an important type of anti-Blackness that informs other types of Blackness within nations in North America, the Caribbean, and South America. Regine O. Jackson’s 2011 Geographies of the Haitian Diaspora discusses how Haitian migrants and their descendants have served in the past and present as repugnant cultural “others” in relation to citizens of Jamaica, Guadeloupe, and Cuba.
In Haiti, following the 2010 earthquake, a United Nations-reported cholera outbreak claimed nearly 10,000 lives and adversely affected more than 820,000 people. The United Nations remains unaccountable and unpunished for this human rights catastrophe. In addition, a lot of help for the earthquakes gave NO go to Haitians, but to civilian and military donor entities, UN agencies, international NGOs and private contractors, suggesting that humanitarian aid can be used as an anti-Haitian weapon.
And in Brazil, researchers Denise Cogo and Terezinha Silva have looked at the racist treatment of Haitians who were encouraged to immigrate to the country in the post-earthquake period to work as laborers ahead of the 2016 Olympics. The adverse experiences of Haitians in Brazil – home to the largest population of blacks in America—expose the connections between labor extraction, anti-blackness, and anti-Haitianism.
Anti-Haitianism also serves other purposes within these examples, such as identity construction. The peoples of the Bahamas, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and other countries construct their identities as superior to Haitian identities, producing anti-Haitian results. The fact that Haitians have yet to be compensated by the United Nations for cholera-related illness and death, and that the people who caused the epidemic have not been punished under Haitian or international law, reflects how Haitian lives are considered not only expendable but also unworthy. for justice.
While we must consider differences in the local histories, socioeconomic conditions, and political situations of the Bahamas, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere, a clear anti-Haitian pattern emerges after the 2010 earthquake. This pattern, displayed in the news and scientific publications, includes alienation, death, banishment, elimination, humiliation, marginalization and stigmatization. Also, while these black-majority nations are subject to anti-Blackness, all of these countries promote a unique form of anti-Blackness that specifically negatively affects Haitians. This should remind us that all that is Black is not the same kind of Black, reflecting hierarchical and differentiated Blackness.
Anti-Haitianism is, in other words, an expression of a rejection of the blackest of blacks—a revolutionary Blackness that seeks freedom, equality, and dignity, but remains collectively punished and stigmatized.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece is part of a series analyzing anti-Haitianism with a hemispheric approach. Read the first article in the series. Bertin M. Louis, Jr., PhD is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American and African Studies (AAAS) at the University of Kentucky. He is the recipient of the 2023 Sam Dubal Memorial Award for Anti-Colonialism and Racial Justice in Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association and the recipient of the 2023-2024 Wenner-Gren Fellowship in Anthropology and the Black Experience (administered by the School for Advanced Research). Louis is also co-editor of Conditionally accepted: Navigating Higher Education from the Margins (University of Texas Press, 2024).
The article is published in partnership with North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA).
Source: Independent Media Institute
