Soupe joumou, the national dish of Haiti. Tom McCorkle/photo; Marie Ostrosky/Food styling, for The Washington Post Watching news reports of Haitian kids being forced to stay home from school to prevent violent attacks in Springfield, Ohio, makes me cry about my own childhood in New York. In 1990, on my way home from school, I was jumped by five boys on the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Kings Highway in Brooklyn.
I don’t remember anyone intervening to stop the violence. When the kicks and punches came flying, what saved my life was taking the turtle position in my purple puffy coat with a backpack filled with hardcover textbooks. A shy and smart Trinidadian classmate literally picked me up, handed me my missing shoe and walked me home.
My attack, just like the threats in Ohio today, was prompted by racist remarks and discriminatory policies against Haitians from people in power, trickling down and empowering my attackers. Back then, it was HIV/AIDS hysteria and the idea that the so-called 4-Hs were to blame for the spread of the disease: Heroin addicts, homosexuals, hemophiliacs and Haitians. The same year as my attack, President George H.
W. Bush’s FDA excluded every single Haitian person from making blood donations, turning childhood bullying into government-sanctioned ostracization. Today, racist remarks have seized on an old anti-immigrant trope that Haitians are eating people’s pets, another effort to cast them as a threat to the American way of life.
It’s absurd f.
