Whether it’s via lies told about immigrants, the ongoing violence of borders, the justification of exploding pagers, the expansion of the Overton Window to include once nearly unimaginable horrors, racist myths of home invasion, or the cheerleading of colonization, our political conversations in western news media are saturated with narratives of invasion.
The danger of these narratives has become more obvious over the last few weeks as the presidential election has ramped up xenophobia against immigrants. This was especially true in how Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance, the junior United States Senator from Ohio, began spreading lies about his own constituents: that Haitian residents of Springfield were eating cats. That narrative grew when former president Donald Trump lied that “they’re eating the pets” in his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williams asserted—without any evidence—that Haitians do kill pets for religious reasons. News stories ran with headlines like “What Haitians really eat.”
Liberals called for Harris to travel to Springfield to be a leader of decency and to tamp down the rhetoric about immigrants. But Candidate Harris did the opposite: she went to the Southern Border and hit at Donald Trump from the right, whipping up false hysteria about immigrant invasions and fentanyl. Meanwhile, in her day-job, Vice President Harris expanded asylum restrictions (likely in violation of international law), perpetuating a narrative of invasion the child of two immigrants has loudly championed since her first international trip to Guatemala in 2022 when she told migrants “do not come” to the United States.
Unfortunately, whether discussing infectious disease, national borders, or safety in the the home, narratives of invasion are a mainstream press-aided, bipartisan affair—and, as George Carlin succinctly put it, “Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.” Many liberals cringe when they remember how Trump crudely referred to SARS-CoV-2 as “the China virus;” far fewer remember, if they acknowledged it at all, that the Biden campaign also used inflammatory, sinophobic narratives around Covid. In early 2020, the Biden campaign berated Trump because “40,000 [people from China] traveled into the United States after the travel ban.” Both major parties—and often the mainstream press—ignore that when it comes to fentanyl, Covid, HIV, mpox, or most social contagions, the community spread inside the United States (or inside people’s homes) is due to America being America, not due to outside agitators.
The call is almost always coming from inside the house. It is up to writers in general and journalists in particular to challenge narratives of invasion and to make possible counter-narratives of interdependence and cooperation on an interconnected planet.
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Vance and Trump’s scapegoating of Haitians is hardly the first time they, as a people, have suffered such an indignity from the United States. From the time of the Haitian Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when the enslaved island nation liberated itself from French colonizers, the American ruling class has been nervous about how Haitian freedom-seeking might infect the United States. As historian Greg Grandin recently wrote, during the Haitian Revolution, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson “covertly spent $726,000—already appropriated as part of debt payment to France so they didn’t need Congress approval—to buy arms for French planters to put down what TJ called ‘cannibals of the terrible republic.’”
The Springfield news cycle brought back the decades-old blame of Haitians for the AIDS crisis. In the 1980s, politicians blamed what they dubbed the “4-H” club for AIDS in the United States: hemophiliacs, homosexuals, heroin users, and Haitians. These were all demographic populations which, at the time, were deeply affected by a mysterious new illness that we’d eventually learn was caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). These groups were not the cause of such a virus, but were harmed by it through a combination of bad luck and structural inequality—and then unfairly blamed for it.
As Haitians fled for their lives during the 1991 coup they were intercepted by the US Coast Guard and sent to Guantanamo, where they could be held indefinitely under US control.As I researched my doctoral dissertation Infectious Blackness, I discovered that the reason for initially high rates of HIV in Haiti were due to how, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the for-profit United States blood collection industry had been taking blood from Haitians and—like some kind of international corporate vampire—extracting and transporting it to the US using questionable hygiene practices. The blood of Haitians was welcome in America, but the human beings were not.
When the modes of infection were proven to be the fault of blood collection practices, the corporate bloodsuckers suffered few consequences and the 4-H club continued to take the blame. And so the Hatians suffered yet another form—as intimate as one might imagine—of colonial extraction, with no recourse to justice.
As its title suggests, Infectious Blackness was about the conflation between sickness and race—both through the very material realities produced by subjecting Black people to the conditions of viral transmission, and through the ableist narratives journalists and politicians create when they conflate Blackness and disease more broadly. This happens by positioning insiders as “pure” and “healthy” until outsiders make them “dirty” or not “clean.”
Haitians have paid a high price for this. As I wrote in The Viral Underclass, Guantanamo Bay was not initially created as a site of infinite detention under George W. Bush but rather a decade earlier under Dubya’s father, George H.W. Bush. As Haitians fled for their lives during the 1991 coup they were intercepted by the US Coast Guard and sent to Guantanamo, where they could be held indefinitely under US control; crucially, though, they were not given access to the rights of US law.
While in Guantanamo, these Haitian refugees were subjected to what at the time was believed to have been the largest mass-screening for HIV and—just in case they were someday able to enter the US— hundreds of Haitians found to have HIV were sterilized without their knowledge or consent.
In the decades since, presidential administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have demonized Haitians as an infectious threat to the health of the national body. Most recently, the Biden administration has prepared Guantanamo to again take in Haitian asylum seekers, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—in images evoking an antebellum plantation—has used horses to chase down Haitian asylum seekers as if they were runaway chattel.
The irony of JD Vance raising Haitians as a threat to American HIV rates is that populations within the US are already higher than among any other nation. As Linda Villarosa wrote in the New York Times in 2016, if Black gay men in the United States were a country, we would have the highest rate of HIV of any country on earth.
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On September 20th, in a campaign stop that was basically a recreation of the Oprah Winfrey Show, Vice President Harris told Winfrey that “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.” It was a bizarre brag about being a gun-owner on Harris’s part. In the kind of dynamic I write about in my forthcoming book The Overseer Class, seeing a Black billionaire and a Black-Asian woman presidential candidate yucking it up about killing home invaders is the kind of move I can imagine Lee Atwater watching from hell and saying, “Man, I wish I could have gotten away with that.”
With one throwaway line, Harris perpetuated the American gun owner’s paranoid myth of the nefarious home invader. It’s the kind of fearmongering that justifies the Castle Doctrine, the legal right to defend oneself in one’s home; or, in the case of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” laws—which made it so that George Zimmerman could “legally” kill Trayvon Martin—the right to shoot someone outside of your home, too.
Kamala Harris is cynically hyping up the home-invasion narrative to pander to voters who are gun-owners.Republican demagoguery is crude and obvious, and at least it often gets challenged. But the kind of veiled racism of the Harris-Winfrey exchange usually gets a pass because it is between two women of color (particularly when one of them is the most beloved TV host in history).
The narrative of the murderous home invader is a myth, one more example of the “outside agitator” invading one’s safe space with ill intent. And it is a myth. About 21,000 people are murdered in the US each year, a mere fraction of those killed in car crashes, by COVID-19, or by suicide. Indeed, the person most likely to kill you in your home is you: there are about 2.5 suicides in the US for every murder. And if you are killed in your home by someone else, it’s most likely going to be by a member of your family (if you’re a woman, most likely by your husband or intimate partner).
It’s also a little ridiculous as Harris lives in the US Naval Observatory, the official residence of the Vice President, and anyone breaking into her home would probably be shot by the Secret Service before she knew what was going on. But she’s cynically hyping up the home-invasion narrative to pander to voters who are gun-owners, which is doubly galling considering that having a gun in your home makes you and your family more likely to be killed by a gun, not less.
By perpetuating the gun-owner’s beloved myth of the home invader, Harris is effectively opening the Overton Window wide enough to include Black women liberals in a category that used to be solely occupied by racist, trigger happy white guys. This will only serve to further justify the kinds of surveillance, policing and fear mongering men of color are subjected to—the kind of surveillance which has lethal consequences for Black men like Ahmaud Arbery.
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The Overton Window defines the boundaries of what can be debated, or ignored. And the narratives of invasion which are being ignored regarding United States-backed Israel’s genocidal actions in Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon are many.
We see pundits wanting to just accept that US-backed Israel will bomb Iran, Syria and Lebanon, who are eager to put the moral question of whether to bomb aside.Perhaps most dangerously, Israel’s use of thousands of pagers, solar panels, and walkie talkies as improvised explosive devices opened the Overton Window to include something only conceived of previously by science fiction writers (and which is expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions’ Protocol on Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices). Many writers and news organizations of the same mainstream media class which have treated migrants like an invasive species are openly mulling pagers-as-bombs, questioning people for why they are still using pagers, or even praising the technological innovation of the terror campaign.
In terms of language and narrative possibilities, this is devastating. Prior to the first Gulf War, a good deal of US discourse about bombing was focused on the ethics of whether to bomb or not, and the stakes were examined in terms of civilian casualties. Then, with the invasion of Iraq and “smart bombs,” the conversation shifted to how smart and precise bombing could be. But, in my experience, that came at the expense of questioning bombing altogether. The matter of bombing was treated as settled and accepted; How smart can the bombs be? replaced it. Similarly, we see pundits wanting to just accept that US-backed Israel will bomb Iran, Syria and Lebanon, who are eager to put the moral question of whether to bomb aside. They are itching to say, Look, wouldn’t you rather we use a pager instead of a 2,000 lb bomb, or are you a monster?
And of course they scream bloody murder when refugees legally seek asylum at the US border—to say nothing of what they’d yell if there was an invading army in tanks crossing the Rio Grande—they do not object to Israel actually invading Lebanon (quite possibly soon with the aid of US troops.)
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Because writers set the Overton Window, and the political boundaries of how we address our crises, Ta-Nehisi Coates says that “the task of young writers should be nothing less than saving the world.”
I agree, and that means that now more than ever, all the young writers—those penning poems, screenplays, novels and, yes, even journalism—and those who have the honor of teaching them must be shaping new narratives around the concepts of inclusion, exclusion and invasion. And this must happen in the stories we tell at the level of the personal, state, and planet-wide relationships.
For whether it’s a writer like Fred Rogers telling our stories, Coates, a New York Times reporter, Amy Goodman, you or me, the stakes couldn’t be higher as we all face climate chaos, the increased risk of pandemics that come with the warming planet, or computer-aided war. Our reporting, essays, scripts, and poetry must play an important role in shaping narratives of possibility which favor co-operation over domination, alliances over colonization, and sharing over hoarding.
Nothing less than the future of the human species and all the other living creatures of the earth depends upon it.
