The anti-Haitian panic is not a persuasion problem
The best response to Trump's new rhetoric would probably be a good round of exposure therapy.
When I first heard the narrative of Haitians in Ohio eating cats, the first thing I did was instinctively sniff. There were no cooking cats in the vicinity of course, but I couldn’t help wonder what such a thing smells like. Do cats smell delicious when you cook them, like a steak? Or are people imagining that they are cooked unskinned and that the oily smell of burnt hair is filling the air? Are the cats being butchered first into unrecognizable filets of meat? Or are they cooked whole like a skewered pig?
With some imagination, one can begin to sense what the right has in mind when they think of eating a cat. Unskinned, still recognizable, probably crawling with worms, and with the chewy, salty taste of a lean rabbit.
I thought about this because, as study after study attests, conservative politics seem to be intimately related with our primitive, pre-rational disgust reflex. And this is often at the root of a whole range of prejudices: the right associates other foreigners with repulsive smells and poor hygiene, they associate women with menstruation, they associate homosexuality with feces, and so on. If you want to know why these attitudes remain so psychologically entrenched in our culture, it helps to begin by understanding that they are at bottom often purely visceral. They have more in common with your gag reflex when you see maggots than they do with some studied, intellectual conclusion that some groups of people are genetically or historically superior than others.
This is what makes the current Haitian panic so instructive: it is a relatively rare example of the digust reflex intervening in our politics without disguise. Usually there would be some kind of pathetic rationalization for persecuting Haitian-Americans layered on top, but contemporary politics have become so nakedly tribal that there would be no point in it. No one outside of the right is going to be persuaded by this; spreading these stories is a way of ginning up animus within the base and mobilizing them for the coming election.
Faced with this kind of pre-rational force playing such a major role in American politics, I can only ask: what is liberalism rationalism’s response? Because ordinarily liberalism’s primary answer to bigotry is just education. In this conception we are supposed to imagine racism as a kind of illogical or counterfactual conclusion imposed by bad thinking and misinformation, and one that can therefore be corrected with lessons in facts and logic. Perhaps through the schools, perhaps through woke HR departments, perhaps through activist callouts — but in all of these cases, we imagine that the inegalitarian impulse can be subordinated to some higher-level discipline of the brain’s executive faculty.
But once we understand bigotry as both an interpersonal and political expression of the gag reflex, it is easy to see why these re-education efforts so often fail. If you have ever had to dispose of a particularly putrid piece of garbage and tried to mentally fortify yourself against retching then you understand the heroic force of will it can actually take to fight that sort of impulse. Simply asking inegalitarians to discipline their repulsion with cool logic and facts isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem.
One of the most effective responses to bigotry, it seems, has very little to do with persuasion at all. Among racists, for example, studies have consistently shown that their bigoted attitudes tend to decrease by simply exposing them to other races. And in the context of the disgust reflex this makes sense, because with enough exposure people eventually get used to things that they were disgusted by. Note that the point of exposure therapy isn’t to convince the subject that what they are disgusted by is “good” — rather, it’s to convince the subject that what they are disgusted by is normal and unremarkable. Perhaps one of the most successful examples of this approach emerged during Bush-era efforts by LGBT activists to lobby for greater representation in the media; this was a strategy that demonstrably paid off in more accepting attitudes among the public.
Thus far, liberal-left media has mostly responded to the anti-Haitian panic by furiously fact-checking the bigoted gossip percolating on the right. One can see here how poor a fit liberal-rationalism is for this moment, because no one is worked up over this story simply because they have been misinformed. Bigots want to believe that Haitian-Americans eat cats because they find people of Haitian descent repulsive; and even though they know on some level that it isn’t true, they believe the underlying theme — that there is something disgusting about these people — is true.
The better response to this panic, I think, would be to just prominently feature Haitian-Americans just being normal as much as possible. Highlight celebrities like Eric Andre, Wyclef, and Blake Griffin. Put together a documentary about life in Haitian-American communities. Get someone on the food network to cook some accra or diri ak djon djon. None of this needs to be delivered polemically, and in fact it would make for better propaganda if it isn’t; framing these images with “and that’s why Trump is wrong” would just put the right on the defensive.
That last point, unfortunately, explains why this is such a dangerous moment for Haitian-Americans. Democrats may want the anti-Haitian panic to go away, but even more than that, they want to make this story a liability for Donald Trump. That means more defenses of Haitian-Americans tethered to indictments of Trump — which will give Republicans a stake in rejecting both. Ironically, the best way to defang this narrative and take the weapon out of Trump’s hands would probably be to dismantle it without mentioning his role at all; but that is probably too counterintuitive an approach to ever be widely adopted.