The racist, xenophobic charge that Haitian immigrants are “eating the pets, dogs, cats and even geese,” in Springfield, Ohio by Donald Trump at the September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, reflects a willful imperialist ignorance that cannot be left unchecked lest we forget the backstory on “why they are here.” This story leads us to the vicious legacy of US Imperialism, a bi-partisan legacy of organized international violence in pursuit of US profits and power. This same legacy is alive and well today in the US-backed Zionist genocide in Palestine, the ever-expanding US-backed wars in the Middle East and the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. It is a legacy informed by white supremacy that justifies the subjugation of immigrant workers to racism and wage-slavery. It is a legacy of scapegoating the most oppressed, deployed especially during election cycles, as a mass distraction to blame the nation’s poorest most exploited for capitalism’s inherent wickedness.
Capitalism in crisis
As the US looses market share internationally and US capitalism and its institutions of corporate exploitation rot from within its systemic mass violence intensifies. The infamous one percent has suctioned off 90 percent of the wealth since COVID. The US ranked first in the world in COVID deaths at one million, mostly the working poor, with an additional 1000 deaths weekly even after the plague was declared finished. The oligarchy turned a blind hateful eye to yet another inevitable tragedy of a crisis-ridden failing racist system.
The example of Haiti
Since the 1900s there have been at least three direct US interventions in Haiti, including a decades long intervention from 1915-1934. During this time the US, while plundering Haiti’s resources, implemented the “corvee” neo-slavery system of forced labor. Haitians were seized from their homes and forced to work for months in a program administered by “progressive” President Woodrow Wilson, who also sent US soldiers to empty the vaults of the Haitian National Bank. This imperialist occupation was continued by five Democratic and Republican Administrations. The US, with Cold War concerns of revolutionary regime change of US puppet regimes in the southern cone, propped up fascist Haitian dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and later his son “Baby Doc” Duvalier, from 1957-1986. Close to $1 billion in profits went to the US corporate exploiters while their imposed dictators presided over a period of mass human rights catastrophes –massacres, mass imprisonment and torture of those who sought any kind of democratic guarantees to make once revolutionary and prosperous Haiti – having won its independence and freedom from France a half century earlier – again a livable place.
Aristide’s limited reforms
The limited democratic reforms of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, beginning in 1991, and off and on chaotically until 2004, in the face of two US-backed coups, proved to be too much democracy in the increasingly US-owned and sweatshop dominated Haiti, once among the richest nations in Latin America, reduced by imperialist conquest to the poorest nation on earth. Eighty percent of Haiti’s population live in abject poverty! Aristide’s call for higher wages for sweatshop workers, literally from 17 cents an hour to 29 cents, led to his US-backed removal. The US corporate near slave labor employers in Haiti couldn’t afford Aristide’s promoted rise of 12 cents per hour!!! His proposals to increase spending on education, healthcare and his calling out the racist international order that denies sovereignty and self-determination by Black and Brown nations, similarly outraged the US elite.
Haiti demands reparations for French colonial slavery
Aristide’s 1991 proposals that France pay $21 billion in reparations seem like a drop in the bucket for the incalculable pain and suffering French colonialism meted out to the nation from 1697-1804. France’s super profits were extracted from Haiti in the form of slave labor on its lucrative sugar and coffee plantations and its subsequent vengeful sabotage unleashed after Haiti defeated three French military invasions ordered by Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies until 1815 years.
Haiti’s successful 1791 slave rebellion, led by its revolutionary heroes, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, was the only known slave uprising in human history that led to the founding of a state which was free from slavery and ruled by non-whites and former captives. While revolutionary France’s 1789 National Constituent Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, French revolutionaries, having abolished the feudal aristocracy, had no intention of abolishing chattel slavery in its colonies. But France’s enslaved Africans of Saint-Dominique, saw it otherwise and began the Haitian Revolution that defeated the colonial occupiers.
US slavocracy shuns Haitian freedom struggle
In the US, the Haitian Revolution, almost 75 years before the US Civil War ended slavery, was championed by leading abolitionists including Frederick Douglas, but shunned and feared by the US government, north and south.
The Aristide government included in its reparation demands French re-payment for its “ransom for independence” that French imperialism subsequently imposed on independent Haiti at gunpoint – massive sums that constantly undermined Haitian savings, infrastructure outlays and political stability.
Over the course of 64 years, Haiti was compelled to pay out via this “ransom for independence,” over $560 billion in today’s dollars. Thus, Aristide’s conservative demand of $21 billion from France in reparations for slavery and in financial penalties subsequently imposed by France, according to recent calculations, fell far short of the full cost of French-imposed slave rule, at $151 billion. We leave aside here a discussion as to whether any amount of money could serve as an accurate measure of the value of denying a people its freedom and subjecting them to the ownership and rule of France’s colonial slavemasters.
How much does the US owe Haiti?
The US intervention in Haiti in 1915 included the US emptying of the Haitian National Bank and its corporate the plundering of the island ever since. The National Bank, the forbearer of Citigroup and other Wall Street banks, have historically informed regime changes and US missions abroad that facilitated the ownership of property in Haiti by foreigners, especially US corporations. These US-backed entrepreneurs unleashed and promoted racism as the ideological cover of imperialist conquest — very much like today.
Racist justification for US corporate rule
US Secretary of State Robert Lansing, who served from 1915-20, stated it clearly, “The African Race are devoid of any capacity for political organization.” The color of racism is $Green! As Black Haitians starved, the white bankers’ bellies and wallets were full from the fruits stolen from Haiti’s masses. Even after US troops left in 1934 more than a quarter of Haiti’s revenue went to paying off Haiti’s “debts” to the US. How much would this massive exploitation be worth if it were paid back to Haiti? Likely close to what France owes Haiti and more!
Haiti’s role in worldwide anti-slavery struggles
It should be noted that since its formal independence in 1804 – which few imperialist powers like the US recognized until multiple decades later, Haiti aided in anti-slavery uprisings around the world. In 2010, reactionary US President Bill Clinton (dismantling welfare, militarization of the border, racist “war on drugs,” NAFTA, war against Serbia, and much more) literally apologized to Haiti, for profiting on rice exports from the US sold to Haiti while obliging Haiti to not grow it themselves. This occurred during the racist United Nations-backed 2004-2017 “Stabilization Mission” which saw imperial re-organization of the country including the entrance en masse of US sweat shops at near slave wages, among the lowest on earth.
Twin capitalist parties of immigrant oppression and exploitation
With this sordid history, if I were Donald Trump and the entire racist US establishment I would keep my mouth shut around Haitian immigrants in the US. They are the inevitable byproduct of the US-led economic, colonial and racist warfare against their country.
The Democratic Party is equally complicit in the attack on Haitian immigrants, with images of Biden’s white border patrol agents on horseback hatefully lassoing Black Haitian immigrants in 2021– images that speak a thousand words. [See photo above.] We also think of the Clinton and Obama administrations turning away boats of Black Haitian asylum-seekers in dire need while welcoming boatloads of anti-Cuban government gusanos in much less need. Democratic and Republican administrations’ immigration and military policy are informed by two toxic currents of white supremacy: xenophobia and anti-Black and Latinex racism. The twin parties of US capitalism have historically deported, degraded and demonized Haitian immigrants even more than other oppressed immigrants.
Solidarity with Haitians fleeing to and being in the US must be a top priority of all fighting social movements for equality and justice. [Photo above: Trade union solidarity protest against Haitian deportations]
Malcolm X always championed the oppressed and exploited for “all the hell they caught” from capitalism’s racist bigots. Much less than the “eating the pets” Trump slander, Haitian immigrants have been “biting the dust” of an implacable orgy of French Colonialism and US Imperialism on the island that has been unleashed for daring, as a Black nation, to strive to be free. [Photo above: a not too inaccurate cartoon caricature of Donald Trump’s Springfield, Ohio slander that Haitian immigrants were eating Springfield residents’ pets]
Solidarity with beleaguered Haiti and its people!
No human being is illegal!
Open the borders! For a world without borders!
End all racist deportations!