At last week’s presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, Trump made a number of eyebrow-raising comments that induced eyerolls and chuckles for their sheer absurdity. The biggest one being, “In Springfield they’re eating dogs, they’re eating cats.” Trump was referencing the recent influx of Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, along with a claim he “heard” that Haitian immigrants were stealing household pets off the streets and eating them.
To hear a serious contender for the presidency of the United States utter such nonsense is absurd and laughworthy—at least until we remember that Trump’s words carry power and that a sizeable portion of American citizens believe those words to be true. His words and those of people like him also move people to action. Hateful action.
In the aftermath of the debate, the Haitian community and larger community of Springfield have been under attack. Threats of bombings and school shootings have led to city buildings being closed, schools closing, and public events being canceled. Members of the Haitian community in Springfield are living in fear and hunkering down in their homes to stay safe.
Springfield officials have publicly stated that there is no basis of truth in these claims, but the Trump campaign continues to state it as truth along with his running mate, J.D. Vance. They are doubling down and refusing to shut up despite the lack of proof and the violence that is now being directed toward the Springfield community.
While it should be no surprise to see Trump and company fuel the flames of hate to advance his agenda, the story is not just about how racist Trump and many of his supporters are. It’s also a story about the power of white women’s words and lies.
This story was started by Erica Lee, a Springfield woman who claims to have heard from a neighbor that her missing cat was attacked by a Haitian immigrant. Instead of stopping to investigate the veracity of her neighbor’s claim, she posted the story on Facebook where it picked up traction and gained national attention. Lee claims she that she didn’t mean for any of this to happen and that she is feeling remorse for the Haitian community. Lee, who appears to be white, claims to be of mixed race and states that her daughter is half Black. As if that absolves her of her heinous actions.
Lee is simply the latest in a line of white (or white-presenting in this case) women in this country whose words have had detrimental effects on Black people.
Let’s time travel back to Mississippi in 1955. A young Black boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was visiting family members when Carolyn Bryant—a 24-year-old white woman—told her husband that Till had whistled at her. Her words led to Till being killed in a brutal and heinous fashion. Emmett was abducted, beaten, lynched, and his body thrown in the Tallahatchie River. All for the “crime” of whistling at a white woman in 1955—which would have been a monstrous and out-of-proportion response even had he done it. Which he hadn’t. Carolyn Bryant would later recant her story decades later and admit that she lied. She lied on a child, her lie led to the death of that child, and a collective sorrow still resonates with the Black community to this day. To grow up Black in America is to understand that if a white woman says you did a thing, there may be serious consequences.
While the Haitian community is an immigrant community, they are also Black and part of the larger Black diaspora. Trump’s attack is both an attack on the immigrant community and the Black community. There is no doubt that for a hard-core racist like Trump—and the receipts dating back to the 1970s and ‘80s remind us of how virulent his racism is—that having to run against an articulate Black/Asian woman is fucking with his head. Especially after that debate, where for once, he had a formidable and worthy opponent on the debate stage whom he could not intimidate. Unlike his debate earlier this year with Joe Biden, he could not trip Harris up, nor could he physically try to cower over Harris as he did in 2016 with Hilary Clinton.
Regardless of how one feels about Harris or her policies and platforms, she accomplished with few have ever done and that was to show the world what a small, petty, and unintelligent man Trump really is. His whiteness, his maleness, and his supposed wealth were meaningless to Harris, a woman who very much identifies as Black.
To suffer public humiliation at the hands of a Black woman, thus a member of at least two groups he finds beneath him, was a huge blow and I have no doubt that his racism will be harder to contain moving forward, which makes him a danger.
It has been a few years since we have dealt regularly with the depths of Trump’s vitriol and racism up close, but we would be fools to forget that racism is the fuel that propelled Trump into the political world. Let’s not forget his involvement in the birther movement and his claims about former president Barack Obama and his calls for five Black youths to be put to death for a crime of which they had been exonerated. And those are just two of the biggest examples. He likes Black people to “stay in their place.”
In this moment, we would do good to remind ourselves of how foundational racism is to Trump and the larger MAGA movement and how for millions of disaffected white Americans, they long for a return where whiteness was the ultimate AmEx Black card of access and privilege. We cannot forget thatw what is absurd and laughworthy to many of us holds far more sinister appeal and sparks violence desires for many others.
Every day is a new form of whiplash in this country and the world at large, but while it is easy for people to step back from anti-racism work, it’s needed now more than ever in a world where intentional disinformation can lead to the terrorizing of entire towns. We need white women, for example, to hold many truths in this moment despite their exhaustion, including checking and working with their fellow white women so that the ghosts of Carolyn Bryant and other white women who have lied on Black people can eventually be put to rest and a new way of being can take hold.
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