Who's "In the Room" When We Speak?
Lessons from a recent race-baiting rumour involving cats and careless citizens
Readers of Better Worlds Theory know I’m not a fan of “hot takes”. I try to avoid writing immediately on major news items, because my style of analysis is more about teaching moments: reflecting on media and science literacy and the humanist big picture.
I prefer to see how the initial news cycle plays out, and to watch the ground “settle” around key facts and perspectives, rather than to fan the flames of a contentious topic that will always serve publishers before it serves fellow citizens. I don’t like giving more space to infotainment figures than is necessary, or aiding and abetting legacy news in driving up overall levels of civic stress, fear, anger, and helplessness. I especially dislike when legacy media wrings its hands over the outsize importance of a toxic figure that it keeps boosting to the spotlight in the first place.
(Which is why I won’t be naming two of the biggest figures associated with today’s story. As much as I can, I will not feed the algorithm. Like perpetrators in mass shootings, they do not deserve to be elevated for the harm they cause; attention should be centred on those harmed by their actions, and those helping in the aftermath.)
But I’m only human, and like many other humans, I was affected by a recent article summarizing one of the breakout events that spiralled into a hateful narrative about Haitian immigrants in the US this past week. So today, for Monday Media Review, our focus isn’t a movie, a series, a game, or a podcast: it’s an NBC article, in which we might just find our most important takeaway from this latest bout of overt racism.
Our story actually begins back in 2017, when a little Ohio town with a declining population became the perfect place for Haitian migrants looking to work and rebuild. They trickled in at first, collaborating with immigration lawyers to create legal pathways to bolster the local manufacturing sector through packaging, machining, and agricultural labour. In short, they were helping to bring the town back to life—even if their presence also put some short- and mid-term strain on related infrastructure, like hospitals and housing, during the transition.
That transitional pressure then deepened in 2021, with the assassination of Haiti’s president (an act carried out in part by Colombian mercenaries—whole other story there!). At this juncture, there was an uptick in people seeking safety from a land so thoroughly screwed over during its emancipation from France in 1825 that it took 122 years just for the country to pay off the families of slave-owners for its “freedom”. The 2010 earthquake, measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale and devastating the country’s capital, was the cherry on top for a country struggling with debt-servicing for centuries, instead of being able to build proactively and with prevention in mind.
Nevertheless, while many in the West pathologize Haitians for being trapped in their ongoing post-colonial nightmare, Haitians themselves continue to operate with tremendous fortitude and industry. Remittances from those who go abroad provide almost a third of the country’s annual GDP—so folks who find themselves overseas are still working incredibly hard to stabilize life for family members back home.
For a simple, concrete visualization of both the suffering and the resilience among Haitians, consider the existence of bonbon tè, or mud cookies. These are consumed by children and pregnant/nursing women, and the production of them—literally made of dirt, with a little vegetable shortening, salt, and on occasion sugar—is a livelihood that has sustained some of the very poorest in the country well into the 21st century.
The industrious mindset that goes into making something from essentially nothing is extraordinary, and needs to be kept in mind when listening to absurd, hateful rumours about what humans from Haiti are supposedly doing once they reach other lands with more opportunities to prosper, and to send money home to help those in need.
But despite the can-do spirit of Haitian immigrants, and despite the wealth of mutually beneficial relationships with local manufacturing and legal advocates in Ohio, racialized and xenophobic frustration reached a vicious height in August 2023, after a Haitian driver with an out-of-state license drove toward a schoolbus, which swerved and caused an 11-year-old boy to be pitched out a window, to his death.
Even then, though, pay attention to what the parents said after this horrible event, because the contrast is going to matter when we get to the recent news cycle.
As the Springfield News-Sun reported then (and three cheers for small-town news!):
Nathan and Danielle Clark emailed a statement to Rob Rue, commissioner and assistant mayor, which he read at the end of Tuesday’s meeting following additional citizen comments describing their concerns or showing support for the Haitian immigrant population.
“We do not want our son’s name to be associated with the hate that’s being spewed at these meetings,” Nathan and Danielle Clark wrote. “Please do not mix up the values of our family with the uninformed majority that vocalize their hate. Aiden embraced different cultures and would insist you do the same. Thank you to the community for the continued support.”
Nevertheless, this incident emboldened local hate groups, including the neo-Nazi outfit Blood Tribe, which marched in the middle of a blues and jazz fest this year, swastikas flying, and pointed firearms at vehicles with the demand that occupants go back to Africa. (They’d also tried to set up a training camp elsewhere in the state, pursued antisemitic activities with other groups, and showed up to protest at a drag story time event in Wadsworth.)
Then came the latest news cycle.
But keep all this local backstory in mind as we evaluate one reaction in particular.
On September 9, the Republican candidate for vice-president tweeted the following on X: “Months ago, I raised the issue of Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio. Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country. Where is our border czar?”
Republican groups quickly signal-boosted this sensational lie through grammatically incorrect billboards and AI-generated photos of kittens and ducks. (The owner of X also retweeted one of the latter—because of course he did.)
This hate-mongering news cycle then took off in earnest with last week’s US presidential debate, when a barely coherent candidate repeated a version of the claim on stage, sparking a flurry of fact-checking and related journalistic activity. For some, this was the first they’d heard of the whole scandal. For others, this was an affirmation of a xenophobic rumour mill that the far-right has been stoking for years.
Now, there are so many things wrong with the original tweet on September 9, but it’s important to remember that disinformation of this type is never actually concerned with coherence or accuracy. As the original liar (and active state senator) explained in a Sunday interview with CNN:
The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I'm going to do.
So it’s not the right approach to try to discredit every facet of his false statement, because doing so only plays into the real aim of such an incendiary post: namely, to control the conversation; to let liars, racists, and xenophobes establish what we’re going to be talking about for the next few weeks.
Sure, many in the audience won’t believe this blatantly false story, but the sheer fact that its existence upsets so many, and forces whole sections of the media to talk about it, is the point. It shows hateful people that they have the power to control and frighten their fellow citizens if they continue to ride with political candidates like these.
But legacy media dutifully played into this news cycle anyway, with articles this past week teasing out every angle of the senator’s sensational claim, to snatch up market share and keep people wound up and paying attention. (Yes, yes, pot, kettle, black.)
And who suffered for it?
Overnight, the people of Springfield, Ohio became the sight of intense national scrutiny. Yes, decent Ohioans also showed up at a Haitian restaurant in neighbourly solidarity this past weekend—just as the grieving parents of little Aiden came forward last year to disavow any racism others were trying to tether to their son’s tragic death. But all these decent citizens had to come forward, because life had just been made a lot harder by one loudmouth with a platform and an audience of race-baiting haters.
Again, the region had already very recently been the site of growing neo-Nazi activity.
And yet, it was in this local context that an NBC article then emerged, trying to source the rumour that apparently informed the vice-presidential candidate’s remarks.
In “‘It just exploded’: Springfield woman claims” we meet Erika Lee, a local resident who made a Facebook post talking about a neighbour who claimed that a lost cat had been taken by Haitian immigrants who lived nearby.
Sam Howard and Jack Brewster of NewsGuard traced the hearsay at the bottom of this whole affair in a splendid chart:
Yes, there were two other incidents behind this slurry of hearsay (i.e., a photo of a dead goose carried by a man in Columbus, Ohio, and a video of a non-Haitian woman in Canton who allegedly killed and ate a cat), but Lee’s post was the major spark.
And the NBC article spread widely this past weekend, furthering outrage on a number of social media platforms. Here are three excerpts to explain why:
1.
Lee said she never imagined her post would become fodder for conspiracy theories and hate.
“I’m not a racist,” she said through heavy emotion, adding that her daughter is half Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ community. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”
2.
Lee said she pulled her daughter out of school and is now worried about her safety with so much attention on her family. She is also concerned for the safety of the Haitian community, which she said she did not intend to villainize en masse.
“I feel for the Haitian community,” she said. “If I was in the Haitians’ position, I’d be terrified, too, worried that somebody’s going to come after me because they think I’m hurting something that they love and that, again, that’s not what I was trying to do.”
and
3.
Still, she never imagined that her Facebook post would set off a national news cycle.
“I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield," she said.
There are quite a few layers to Lee’s response—and also, to how NBC chose to structure their piece in her defence.
The first, and often most exhausting layer for many marginalized people, is her immediate leap to “I’m not a racist.” Pro tip: That is never the correct first response. It’s a comment that centres the issue not around community impact, but around fear of how this incident will hurt how other people see you.
Now, I am as pasty as a stereotypical vampire. On a clear day, light reflecting from my skin might be enough to bring down an airplane. I’m thirteen generations Canadian, from English, Scottish, Irish, and French settler stock, and along one line I go straight back Hélène Desportes, who is oft-cited as the first white child born in Canada.
I also live in a world where being seen as white has advantages in many circumstances.
And I have felt those advantages firsthand. Others are quick to presume a more affluent or “worthy” background from me just from the colour of my skin. I’ve talked with many poor white people who similarly rest on their skin colour as the one “edge” they have over their BIPOC neighbours, instead of finding solidarity in class struggle. Some white people also assume that the first thing we can bond over is racist and xenophobic views, which many feel comfortable sharing with me the moment that anyone in the BIPOC spectrum is no longer in earshot.
Does prejudice abound in all groups? Absolutely. But there are also deeply entrenched socioeconomic ladders that run longer and sturdier more often for folks who look like me—even if those ladders aren’t quite as long and sturdy for all of us individually; even though many white folks experience extreme financial hardships, too.
I live in a world where I can easily fall back on racialized advantages, too—especially if I’m willing to play into hate. Being an “ally” is something that a lot of white folks do until they don’t feel they’re getting enough recognition for their efforts—or worse, when they’ve had a problematic behaviour called out, and it made them uncomfortable—at which point, they can either drop off suddenly, leaving others in the lurch, or become an active enemy. Whenever an “ally” wants to snap into the reverse political position, suddenly their years of ally-ship become very useful as part of the “before” story on their path to being red-pilled. A whole industry of hate-mongering conservative punditry awaits with open arms to signal-boost people ready to declare that for years they were “blind”, but now they see that “light”(-skinned) is right.
So I don’t speak critically of Lee from an outsider position. She might be “mixed race” in a way that makes her a visible minority, or she might pass more often as white, but either way, she’s part of something bigger than herself whenever she speaks or acts.
Just as I am.
Just as you are, too.
And if I say or do something that causes racialized harm, it does not matter if I see myself as racist. What matters is that I have plucked a string in a vast instrument of racialized hatred, and that its reverberations are now being felt elsewhere.
Full stop.
Lee’s next plea was similarly self-oriented, rather than community-impact-driven: she pointed out that she’s marginalized in other ways, and has a half-Black daughter, whose safety has been impacted by her mother’s post.
Again, though, this does not matter in the context of having done broader harm; it is possible to trigger a wave of racialized hatred from any subject-position.
Is it a good thing that Lee expressed fear and concern for the Haitian community, after witnessing the consequences of her action? Sure.
And does her daughter deserve safety? Of course.
But the article closer—“I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield”—is where the real pain and lesson of this whole episode takes root.
Because there was already a body of racialized violence in Springfield and surrounding communities in Ohio. A year prior, a local family had to hit pause on mourning their child to pen a letter pleading with fellow citizens not to use Aiden’s death to spread xenophobic hate toward Haitian residents. A neo-Nazi march had happened just a few weeks prior to this year’s sensational news cycle.
Lee seems to view herself as the sort of person who would never say something overtly racist or xenophobic from a larger public platform—and I’m sure that she believes this, because the senator’s tweet and another candidate’s claim in the middle of a presidential debate exist on a whole other level of irresponsible social action.
But the Lees of the world are also quick to rationalize away what little power they do have to lessen hate in their vicinity—and that speaks to a challenge we all face:
When hate becomes routine background noise on our national and international stages, how do we even begin to set better standards for ourselves closer to home?
Keeping other humans “in the room”
Whenever I engage in difficult conversations, I strive to keep the world “in the room” with me. This doesn’t mean that “the world” is always going to agree with me, but I try to consider what other people’s thoughts might be, if they were to see what I’m writing or otherwise saying about demographics to which they belong.
Am I writing something simply to provoke them?
Am I writing something that excludes them?
And if so, on either accord: why? Does my purpose justify the approach?
When I’ve written about the Palestinian and Israeli nightmare of our last year, for instance, I’ve made a concerted choice to focus on reminding readers that no group is monolith—not Israelis, not Jews, not Palestinians—because I am trying to push back on the nationalist fervour that consumes wartime news. To me, it is of the utmost importance that we refuse to gamify global conflict by flattening full demographics to nation-state totalities—at least, if we want to defend and build upon our existing democracies, and to advocate for more human dignity and agency wherever possible.
But the ignorance of regional politics among Westerners has been so profound this past year that I often found myself focusing more on the Israeli side of things. I’ve written extensively to remind people that if Israel is a democracy (electoral, at present, having been downgraded from liberal) then it should be treated as one: that is, as a state made up of a range of parties with different political positions, not a Borg-like totality in which the most militant speakers are automatically the most correct, and everyone else is merely a “Communist”, “self-hating”, or “traitorous” Jew (as has been repeated often by some of the most far-right members of this society).
In the process, I haven’t posted as much about all the horrors of wartime life among Palestinians—because I don’t think you can shame someone into empathy, and because many react with incredible hostility, battening down the hatches and refusing to listen to a word more from you, in response to the mere attempt. The information is out there for anyone who has an interest in learning more for themselves, but far too many Westerners are worried that being seen to care about people in Gaza and the West Bank is the same as giving comfort to the enemy of an ill-defined ally—and that’s a real problem for peace-building. So long as a rigidly Jingoist conflation of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition government, the secular state of Israel, the messianic dream of Israel, the broader range of Jewish views in diaspora, and the Christian-nationalist vision of the Middle East remains intact, there is no hope here for deeper humanist thought, and the pursuit of better regional outcomes.
But this choice has shaped my writing in a way that probably throws out many Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Muslim readers, among others disillusioned by all the Westerners who readily echo the overtly eliminationist rhetoric of many militant Israelis; and so, I always think about the people I’m sure my approach disappoints.
I understand the desire to blast people with images of wartime horror—and not just in this case, but also in Sudan’s ongoing nightmare of an ethnic cleansing; around atrocities in Yemen and the utter collapse of Haiti; among immigrants lost in treacherous sea crossings to Europe; for women in utterly abandoned Afghanistan; and in ever so many other places where terror and hardship reign.
I write about many global crises in this newsletter, but there’s never time or space for all of them—and always so much more to say than whatever I do jot down.
So just as I comment on Lee’s defensive “I’m not a racist” remark as a very white person myself (and as such, someone who can always benefit from racism, whether I want to or not), I also offer this reflection on how to comport oneself in everyday conversation from a position extremely vulnerable to criticism.
Even though the answer isn’t always going to be flattering—even though I always write with the expectation that I’m going to be disappointing someone—I still ask myself, “If people from X demographic were in the room with me right now, how would they feel about what I’m saying, and how would my comments change?”
No demographic is monolith, of course, but the point of this mental exercise isn’t to cater to everyone; it’s simply to remind oneself not to be two-faced—not to speak solely with one’s current audience in mind, and to make sure that what you’re saying isn’t something that would change in a heartbeat, if you were talking to someone else.
Are we saying what we do in a way that reflects our best values?
Or are we merely playing politician, adjusting our rhetoric to flatter the people whose approval we presently seek? Our families? Our neighbours? Our friends?
And if the latter, at what cost to our greater humanity?
As an atheist, I do not believe that anyone is listening to all our thoughts, taking note of all our words and deeds for later reckoning. By that metric, I suppose some might think we’re “off the hook” so long as we’re not caught the way that Erika Lee was.
However, as a humanist with a strong interest in habituated biochemical responses to environmental stimuli, I also believe that what we say and do when we think we’re “alone” still has broader consequences. We’re harming ourselves, too, when we normalize modulating our level of demographic hatefulness to suit any given audience.
No, Lee did not signal-boost a hate-mongering claim all on her own to the US presidential debate. She did not personally summon neo-Nazis in her region, either.
But she spoke recklessly about another demographic in a context that was already filled with toxic actors and harmful actions, and that’s something any of us can do, because we’re all bound up in the same, great latticework of social triggers—any of which can send reverberations down the line, irrespective of our best intentions.
So what’s the lesson here?
Well, because I definitely speak from inside a glass house, I’ll keep it personal, and let you folks decide how much it does or does not serve you in turn.
I hope that the consequences of her actions don’t keep Lee from personal growth—and I hope that I never let the consequences of my actions embitter me toward similar. I almost always write with a clear sense of how I’m trying to advocate for a better world, but I can still cause harm by not doing “enough”—and if I ever do cause more harm in the process, then it’s my responsibility to help mitigate its spread.
This latest news cycle will not be the last time we’re called upon to deal with a large-scale example of racialized hatred. Xenophobia and other forms of in-group panic are only going to worsen in the coming years, thanks in large part to our failure to address a key pressure point for resource wars and mass migration (i.e., climate change).
But it’s a mistake to think that we can’t do anything about tribalist hate just because most of us don’t operate from senator- and presidential-candidate-sized platforms.
We can learn to sit with discomfort. We can practise more care with what we say in local communities. We can learn to call in others before small sparks turn to flames.
And we can strive to keep the world “in the room” with us—not to censor our speech, but to help us retain some sense of our core values even in social contexts where it will always, always, always be so much easier to go with the dehumanizing flow.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML