There have been bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, and we should all be taking notice.
On Friday, for the second consecutive day, bomb threats forced the evacuation and closure of public schools and municipal buildings in Springfield. Students at Perrin Woods and Snowhill Elementary Schools were “evacuated to an alternate district location,” according to school district spokesperson Jenna Leinasars. Additionally, Roosevelt Middle School was “closed prior to the start of the school day” following information from the Springfield Police Department, Leinasars noted.
Downtown Springfield, Ohio, in 2007 [Cindy Funk, Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
In a related incident, several city commissioners and a municipal employee received an emailed bomb threat, city spokesperson Karen Graves reported. A second email threatened multiple locations, including Springfield City Hall, Cliff Park High School, Perrin Woods Elementary, Roosevelt Middle School, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and the Ohio License Bureau Southside.
“As a precaution, all affected buildings were evacuated,” Graves said in a statement. “Authorities, with the assistance of explosive detection canines, conducted thorough inspections and cleared the threatened facilities.”
Local police, along with FBI agents based in Dayton, are currently working to trace the source of the email threats, Graves added.
This is the result of an old racist, xenophobic trope: that immigrants are invading and they are eating your pets.
The trope resurfaced as former president Donald Trump unleashed a tirade during his debate with Vice President Harris last Tuesday. “In Springfield, they’re eating dogs,” the former president said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating […] the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame.”
The trope has been used before – ask any would-be authoritarian populist. It’s as easy as instructions like “just add water,” and it activates the prejudices of xenophobes and nativists.
The practice of demonizing immigrants through false claims about their dietary habits dates back to the late 19th century, during a peak of anti-Chinese sentiment. Stereotypes about immigrants consuming dogs, bats, or rats have circulated in the U.S. since the 1800s, beginning with the wave of Chinese immigration.
Here is an excerpt from the Sacramento Daily Union from 21 July 1852: “Our China trade is not what it ought to be, and, besides, the Chinese still eat dog-pie.”
That’s 1852. We have not matured.
In the lead-up to the 1888 presidential election, Grover Cleveland’s campaign distributed trading cards depicting exaggerated images of Chinese men eating rats, while accusing his opponent, Benjamin Harrison, of being “China’s presidential candidate,” according to the book Recollecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History.
More recently, during the 2012 presidential election, conservatives briefly latched onto a passage from President Barack Obama’s memoir, where he mentioned being given dog meat as a child in Indonesia.
The COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, reignited old racist tropes targeting Asian Americans. Former President Donald Trump further fueled these sentiments by referring to COVID-19 as the “Chinese virus” and “kung flu.”
Trump and Vance are following this racist playbook. Indeed, Vance is open about how blatantly he is lying in order to villify a group of legal immigrants for political ends. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he said in an interview on CNN, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”
This time, Haitians are bearing the brunt of the attack. I hope our community is offering them the support they need during this time. My Haitian neighbors are horrified and terrified. As an immigrant refugee, I am too.
“The most successful claims for politicians trying to demonize immigrants have to have a tiny kernel of truth in them, or something that might make them easier to believe,” Julia Young from the Catholic University of America observed in an interview with The Washington Post. “So, for instance, in the case of Haitians: most people in the U.S. know nothing about Haiti, but they might know that it’s a place where voodoo is practiced. And if that’s your only association to Haitians, then it doesn’t become that far-fetched to believe that they might take or eat your pet for an animal sacrifice — which is reprehensible and baseless, but still easier to believe.”
The idea that Haitian immigrants are abducting pets for use in Vodou sacrifices has been spread widely on social media, perhaps most notably in a post shared by Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter). These claims, suffice to say, are baseless, not to mention steeped in racism and long-standing prejudice against Vodou practitioners.
Vodou Alar [Photo Credit: Calvin Hennick / Wikimedia]
Let’s also not fool ourselves that there is no connection with modern Pagan religions either.
Our community has seen this before. The connection between animal sacrifice and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s produced similar claims that were later debunked or found to be baseless. Lurid tales of Pagan rituals involving animal sacrifice abounded in that period. These accusations often involved allegations that animals, particularly domestic animals like dogs and cats, were being killed as part of occult ceremonies. The media and public hysteria amplified these claims, despite little to no empirical evidence of organized Satanic groups performing such rituals.
That does not mean that it failed to have real consequences in people’s lives, from bankruptcy to prison sentences to suicide.
“If you make it seem like a group is savage or uncivilized,” said Anthony Ocampo of California State Polytechnic University – Pomona, to the Guardian, “it makes it a lot easier to scapegoat and enact harmful laws against [them].”
He’s right. He’s talking about the Haitian community in Springfield. But he’s talking about us as well.
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