In some cultures, it’s OK to eat cats. Are we racist to condemn that?

Maybe some Haitians do eat cats. If it’s not in your culture to eat cats, the idea might make you gag, which might make those Haitians seem less sympathetic to you. That’s the genesis of racism. Racism works by bypassing rationality and tapping into the disgust response. It is racist to feel negatively about a group of people on such spurious emotive grounds.

That is what was so objectionable about the outburst of former US president Donald Trump during the first and to date only pre-election debate with Kamala Harris. There is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that Haitians in Ohio are eating people’s pets. But he didn’t need there to be to achieve his objective. The story deploys a primal “ick” factor to replace rational discussion about immigration in an attempt to make a particular race fundamentally unpalatable.

Ohio’s Republican vice-presidential candidate J. D. Vance and Donald Trump, shake at a campaign rally.Credit: AP Photo/Ben Gray

Haitians have a festival called reveillon. Online publication The Haitian Report says that in some parts of Haiti, among a small number of people, it is traditional to eat cat during that festival on one day of the year. So perhaps a few Haitians at least eat cat meat.

This would not put them wildly out of step with the rest of the world. Many countries have pockets of people who eat cat and dog. Australia does too, according to a 2021 BBC Australia report on Alice Springs, which apparently confronted a feral cat problem with the likes of a “wild cat casserole”. Many cultures eat meats that the West has developed an objection to (despite the fact that our ancestors often ate them). I have eaten scorpion in China and frogs legs in Indonesia. The Japanese consider whale a delicacy and there is a small industry in hunting the common Minke breed. Saying so is not racist; responding with an emotional distaste for the people who eat these things is racist.

Which is why the myth of pet-eating Haitians reveals a lot about American politics. The US is struggling because it has embraced emotion over rationality. Polarisation is only a symptom. Neither of the candidates for president in 2024 is even trying to put forward coherent, reasoned policies for the many things that ail the nation. From Hulk Hogan to Brat Kamala, it’s all about the feels.

J.D. Vance, Trump’s pick for vice president, even admitted that the Haitian pet-eating story isn’t effective because it’s true, but because the media has become obsessed with the meme. Vance has first-hand experience of being at the receiving end of that sort of thing. For weeks the internet was alive with the ludicrous fiction that he had sex with a couch. So the pet-eating story isn’t exactly out of place. It’s just a more effective lie in the accumulating unreality show that is politics in the US of A.

Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has labelled Trump and Vance as “weird”. What’s actually “weird” is that both presidential candidates are actively avoiding talking about policy. Kamala Harris has been quizzed twice – once on CNN and once in the debate with Trump – on why she’s changed her policies on issues such as fracking. Both times, she’s answered with the non sequitur that her values haven’t changed. In her CNN exchange with Dana Bash, she declined her interviewer’s lifeline. “Is it because you have more experience now and have learnt more about the information?” Bash offered. Missing the cue, Harris careered off on a tangent. Trump’s policies, as always, are yuge – the biggest tariffs, the highest walls – but catastrophically low on detail. That leaves emotion to do the heavy lifting.

And emotion is a poor way to run a nation. It crowds out the real issues and fosters hatred.

The Haitians in Ohio are a point in case. They have entered the US legally and settled in Springfield, because that’s where they found work. Clearly the pet-eating myth grew legs because it is a proxy for a deeper sense of anxiety over immigration. According to the mayor, the small town of Springfield has grown by 25 per cent over the last three years as a result of immigration. To put that into context for Australians, we’re currently having a heated debate about reducing our intake from around 600,000. If we had the same percentage of new migrants as Springfield, we’d be talking about more than 10 times that – nearly 7 million. There’s no need to spell out for Australians what the consequences of a rapid intake of that scale might be.

So there is a rational discussion to be had here, which has nothing to do with Haitians as a race or even the food choices in different traditions. The town of Springfield, Ohio, just like communities elsewhere around the world, desperately needs to have a chat about what rate of intake is sustainable and desirable. It probably needs to define what its values are and how new groups can be integrated.

Instead, it seems, it doesn’t even factor in the considerations of those who make decisions at a national level and have no stake in the community. They have left towns and counties like this one to cope as best as they may.

In this case, the Biden administration created a new pathway for legal immigration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The idea was to reduce illegal immigration by creating a legal avenue for entry – a fine principle unencumbered by the kind of policy detail that might have envisaged how the immigrants could be distributed. The consequence of that failure to be rational is another emotional flashpoint in a country already drowning in tears and fears.

I’m lucky to count both Haitians and cats among my circle of companions. Emotionally, I’d like them both to be safe and whole. Rationally, I know the best way to do that is to stop weaponising racism. Racism is emotional and the best way to overcome it is to recognise, analyse and address its underlying drivers.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.