On September 10, in the middle of a debate against his opponent, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump made a surprising exit. “In Springfield they eat the dogs, the people who come, they eat the cats. “They eat the neighbors’ pets.”stated the American presidential candidate. ” They “These are the Haitian immigrants living in this small town in Ohio. Since then, although this claim has been formally denied by local police, the mayor and the governor of Springfield (both Republicans), the city’s Haitian community has suffered an increase in insults and threats. While the misinformation was going viral on social networks, the CBS network revealed, on Sunday, September 22, a survey according to which 69% of the former president’s voters considered this fake news to be “probably/definitely true.”
Trump’s strategy is paying off even more because Americans have a particularly strong bond with their pets. Thus, according to a study carried out in July 2023 by the Pew Research Center, 62% of them live with at least one pet. Among them, 97% say they consider him another member of their family. “Donald Trump hits the target of the racist imagination of the barbaric immigrant, explain In World Grace Ly, writer and anti-racist activist. The idea is to say: they can live here, work, but deep down they are savages, they will never be like us. » This type of stigma does not only affect Haitians.
As Grace Ly tells it in her book, a Frenchwoman of Chinese-Cambodian origin young model (Fayard, 2018) the numerous preconceived ideas relating, in particular, to the diet of Asians, suspected of eating domestic animals. These prejudices are common in the United States and Europe. “My parents owned a Chinese restaurant and they often asked me what was in the spring rolls, if it was true that they had a dog, she says. Many people think of the “ravioli apartments” in the M6 reports, in which immigrants cooked clandestinely in unsanitary accommodation and in deplorable hygienic conditions. »
From there to thinking that Asians clandestinely cook our favorite hairballs, there is only one step, taken by some. Thus, in a village in Isère, a woman of Vietnamese origin and her husband filed a complaint against their neighbor for harassment. She, convinced that they are trying to capture her cat to eat it, has been knocking on her door every day for four years shouting: “Cat burglars!” »
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