The Sunday Read: ‘Their Son’s Death Was Devastating. Then Politics Made It Worse.’

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The New York Times

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🗓️ 3 November 2024

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

A sheriff’s deputy arrived at Nathan and Danielle Clark’s front door on the outskirts of Springfield, Ohio, in September with the latest memento of what their son’s death had become. “I’m sorry that I have to show you this,” she said and handed them a flier with a picture of Aiden, 11, smiling at the camera after his last baseball game. It was the same image the Clarks had chosen for his funeral program and then made into Christmas ornaments for his classmates, but this time the photograph was printed alongside threats and racial slurs. “Killed by a Haitian invader,” the flier read. “They didn’t care about Aiden. They don’t care about you. They are pieces of human trash that deserve not your sympathy, but utter scorn. Give it to them … and then some.” “They have no right to speak for him like this,” Danielle said. “It’s making me sick. There must be some way to stop it.” This was the version of the country the Clarks and their two teenage children had encountered during the last year, ever since Aiden died in a school bus crash in August 2023 on the way to his first day of sixth grade. The crash was ruled an accident, caused by a legally registered Haitian immigrant who veered into the bus while driving without a valid license. But as the presidential campaign intensified, former President Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, began to tell a different story.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Eli Saslow, and I am a writer at large for the New York Times.
0:19.2	I write a lot about the big tension points in the country, which means over the last year I've
0:24.9	been writing often about conspiracy theories and also anti-immigrant hate that has become
0:31.3	definitive in this election cycle.
0:34.7	For this week's Sunday read, I'll be sharing an article that I wrote about the
0:38.9	Clark family in Springfield, Ohio. A few months ago, a man named Nathan Clark went to a community
0:47.9	meeting and stood up and said that his son was killed in a bus crash that was caused by a Haitian immigrant.
0:56.0	His son's death inspired a wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric and hatred in Springfield
1:02.5	that metastasized into the presidential election.
1:07.0	And all of this hate and cruelty and suddenly bomb threats to Haitian churches, and all of this violence, born in some ways out of their son's death, was abhorrent to them.
1:20.5	And so the father of this child had gone to a community meeting and had said, please, stop the hate. This is not what we want for the
1:28.3	memory of our son. And because he had gone and said this, some of these racist groups were now
1:35.4	threatening his life after his own son had died in this accident. As soon as I saw this father
1:43.0	stand up and give this speech in this video online, which
1:47.0	millions of people saw, I felt like I want to write about him.
1:54.7	This is somebody whose child has died and has been through an unimaginable year. And now he has the courage to stand up
2:03.8	and to try to tell people that they are misrepresenting his family and his son. And so I started
2:11.4	reaching out to the family trying to see if I could come spend time with them and learn more
2:16.0	about what they'd been through and what that was like.
2:20.3	When I was in Springfield, I was far from alone there.
2:24.5	The proud boys were there marching.
2:26.5	The KKK was there during some of the time that I was there for a rally.
	...

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