Out of all the outlandish claims at the presidential debate between former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the most absurd was Trump’s exclamation that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs. Not only is that a racist lie. It’s also a part of a long history of anti-Haitianism across the United States and Western hemisphere.

The history of anti-Haitian sentiment in the United States stretches back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, when Haiti’s enslaved population bravely overthrew French colonial rule and declared their independence. It was a monumental victory for the global abolitionist movement. Yet this triumph sent shock waves through American society, striking fear into the hearts of slaveholders and their political allies, who wielded considerable influence over the nation’s major newspapers.

Instead of celebrating Haiti’s historic uprising, the US media painted it as a dangerous contagion spreading from the Caribbean, threatening to infect the United States with notions of black rebellion and social upheaval. Haitian leaders like Toussaint L’Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Jean-Pierre Boyer were vilified as threats to social order, fueling deep-seated racist fears that aimed to preserve the institution of slavery at any cost.