Donald Trump and JD Vance intensify their claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating pets, journalists have fallen into a familiar trap. Efforts to debunk these claims implicitly suggest that the candidates might be vindicated if genuine cases of feline abduction should emerge. That’s wrong. The real outrage is not the slander of one community, bad as that is, but the underlying message that some nationalities might be congenitally unfit to live in the United States.
What if people actually did eat cats in Port au Prince? (I know of no evidence that they do.) What if, as Senator Vance claims, he’s received 10 “verifiable” reports of the practice in Springfield? What if he verified 100?
The candidates’ preposterous answer is that a small number of petty thefts would count as an argument for “massive deportation.” Trump makes the connection explicit, declaring, “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country, and we’re going to start with Springfield.”
CT lawmaker flies Haitian flag, city mayor condemns Trump pet-eating stance as ‘harmful rhetoric’
This is not (or not only) a demand for collective punishment. It is a theory about cultural difference that smuggles in racial essentialism. Vance doesn’t just observe that immigrants bring “cultural practices that seem very far out there to a lot of Americans.” He also believes those customs reflect profound character traits that are determined by heritage. For Vance, “America … is a group of people with a shared history.” They “love their country … because in their bones they know that this is their home.”
People from other backgrounds (including many citizens like Usha Vance and Melania Trump) can never be part of that “America” nor fully experience what Vance’s “Americans” feel. Their ‘far out’ customs might therefore bespeak personal attributes derived from an alien history that are incompatible with those of “Americans” — and which can never be overcome. That’s how “cultural practices” can justify the expulsion of an entire community of lawful residents. It’s the message Trump spreads with a poem about a snake that poisons the woman who rescued him. The serpent chides, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
These notions create a respectable veneer: the excuse for excluding Haitians is culture, not ethnicity. But it’s a fictitious “culture” that looks just like race, in that it supposedly imparts traits that are both inherited and immutable. As the historian George Fredrickson observed, “[d]eterministic cultural particularism can do the work of biological racism quite effectively.” The French philosopher Etienne Balibar believes there is a “neo-racism” whose dominant theme is “the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which … does not postulate the superiority of certain groups … but ‘only’ … the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions ….”
In fact, the idea isn’t new. In 1889, when the Supreme Court upheld a ban on immigration from China, it reasoned that a government may repel an “encroachment” of immigrants, if it “considers the presence of foreigners … who will not assimilate with us … to be dangerous to its peace and security.” Decades later, labor leader Samuel Gompers was still at it: “I am opposed to the Chinese coming to the United States because his ideals, his civilization, are absolutely in antagonism to the ideals and civilization of America.”
Robert Helfand is a lawyer who lives in Simsbury.
