Reporting on anti-Haitian sentiment means going beyond partisan frames

This story also appeared in the September 20 version of our newsletter, The Front Page, which examines systems of power and inequity in media. Subscribe here.

---

Macollvie Neel, an editor at the Haitian Times, woke up to police cruisers outside her home on Monday.

Neel told CNN the officers had explained that “someone had emailed an [organization] saying they had killed their wife for being racist toward Haitians at my address.” 

Just a few days before, the outlet, which has covered the Haitian diaspora since its founding in 1999, had published a story affirming Haitian solidarity across the diaspora in the wake of the anti-Haitian, xenophobic, and racist rhetoric spouted by presidential candidate Donald Trump. It was just one of the stories they’ve continued to publish about the material impacts of Trump’s comments, including bomb threats directed at Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH. The Times also published an article directing Haitians in Ohio to local mental health resources this week. 

Observations about Haitian practices during U.S. occupation of Haiti fed the myths about eating animals that, even today, are still being circulated — and belong to a history of discrimination against Black immigrants and in particular, people coming from Haiti. 

“We already know what they’re going to say in a lot of ways, so we have to just prioritize getting what’s important out for our community to help us actually fight back, which is what we have to do, and we have to do it in a very sophisticated way,” Neel said. 

With enslaved Haitians fighting for and winning their independence from France in 1804, becoming the first nation to outlaw slavery, slaveholding southern U.S. states became afraid free Haitians would liberate enslaved Africans in the U.S. South Carolina passed an 1822 law prohibiting Black sailors from disembarking at docks to prevent word of the Haitian success spreading. And the U.S. overtook the Haitian government for over 20 years, ruling with a discriminatory, racist system similar to that in place in the Jim Crow South. Under Ronald Reagan, Haitian immigrants were turned away as the Haitian diaspora in the U.S. began forming en masse in the 1970s. 

And while there has been coverage looping Trump and Vance’s comments into the broader zeitgeist of racism linking immigrants to animal consumption, both solidarity and specificity matter. 

“In today’s political environment, the outrage over the racist lie that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio are stealing and eating people’s pets has been filtered through partisan presidential politics,” Black Agenda Report editor and contributor Dr. Jamaica Pierre writes. Thoughtful coverage of the comments’ impact should involve taking a broader view beyond collapsing racism solely onto Republicans.

Careful reporting should include specific Haitian context, along with acknowledgment of how the U.S.’s anti-Black and xenophobic policy and sentiment have intersected to foment anti-Haitian actions and violence — and how the mainstream U.S. media has been part of this apparatus, including the New York Times.

---

This piece was edited and copy edited by Gabe Schneider.

James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective and the podcast producer at The Sick Times.