A jail—no, a focus camp—squats in the course of the Florida Everglades, slick with humidity and menace. Its perimeter is crawling with coiling pythons, prowling alligators, and water thick like swamp stew. However the one signal greeting guests is deceptively easy, a brilliant blue freeway placard that reads, nearly cheerfully, “Alligator Alcatraz.”
There’s no cartoon maw or dripping blood on the metallic, simply the informal normalcy of forms naming a torture web site prefer it’s an amusement park. And that’s the horror: the banality. The shiny signal is the right backdrop for smiling vacationers who need proof they visited America’s newest monument to racial cruelty.
Inside, immigrants, folks searching for security, work, and survival, are held behind razor wire and electrical fencing as they’re “processed” removed from the eyes of the general public. A distant island encircled by water and enamel, by coverage and cruelty. A spot designed to be inescapable, to make struggling invisible, or worse, entertaining.
Exterior, white vacationers stand grinning for selfies. Mother and father hoist toddlers onto their hips and beam in entrance of the signal. Distributors hawk T-shirts, hats, and beverage coolers. A Florida GOP on-line retailer declares: “Seize our merch to help tough-on-crime borders! Restricted provide—get yours earlier than the gators do!” Artists have generated grotesque memes and cartoons of brown migrants being devoured by cartoon alligators with ICE badges and promote them as collectibles. This isn’t only a jail. It’s a theme park of cruelty.
A lot of the protection about Alligator Alcatraz has stopped at calling it “tasteless” or “offensive” or criticizes it as low-cost political theater. They deal with the vacationers as crass, clueless, or just insensitive. That framing is simply too well mannered. It sanitizes what’s truly occurring. These persons are re-enacting a ritual of racial cruelty that’s centuries outdated.
Let’s hold it 100: this ain’t new.
White racists have all the time turned torture into spectacle and revenue. They’ve been doing it for millennia. Their ancestors picnicked, drank, danced, made love, breastfed, and peddled wares at public executions in Europe. They pressed shut to look at our bodies twist on the gallows, collected flayed pores and skin to bind books and sneakers, and boiled heads to show in cupboards. They paid to drink the blood of guillotined prisoners as drugs and good luck.
This wasn’t simply depravity for its personal sake. It formed them. Publicity to a lot cruelty and sadism didn’t make them extra civilized; it primed them to turn into colonizers, enslavers, and mass killers. It educated generations to see violence as regular, to see different human beings as assets to be consumed or destroyed. This was the apprenticeship for empire. All that ethical rot taught them to beat, cage, and kill with out disgrace and with pleasure.
They didn’t cease once they received to America, the place they transported their sadism. White people gathered in massive crowds for lynchings prefer it was Sunday service, introduced their youngsters alongside to look at Black adults and kids be tortured and roasted alive on the town squares. They carved off ears, fingers, enamel, and genitals to promote or hold as heirlooms. They posed for photographs beside charred corpses and turned them into postcards they mailed to household and pals.
And Florida has its personal signature contribution to this tradition of ghoulishness: the “alligator bait” postcards of the early twentieth century. Offered to vacationers. Collected as jokes. These confirmed Black youngsters as “dainty morsels” for alligators’ open mouths, literal bait and prey. The message was unmistakable: Black life was disposable, consumable. Youngsters weren’t human, however meals for the swamp.
This isn’t historic historical past. It’s not nearly postcards from a century in the past. The urge for food for Black and brown struggling is alive and documented in our personal lifetimes. For instance, when Ahmaud Arbery was murdered in 2020, the killer’s sister took a photograph of his blood-soaked physique and posted it to Snapchat like a looking trophy. 5 years earlier in St. Louis, a museum exhibit displayed photographs of Mike Brown’s lifeless physique with out his household’s permission, turning Black demise into instructional spectacle for paying guests.
What we’re witnessing within the Florida swamps isn’t some new, aberrant cruelty. It’s the identical urge for food their ancestors cultivated on the gallows and the lynching tree. It’s the identical impulse that made them accumulate physique elements as trophies and mail postcards of charred corpses. That reflex to show demise into spectacle and memento was by no means buried.
That’s why these vacationers smiling at Alligator Alcatraz issues. They’re not outliers or curiosities. They’re contributors in an unbroken lineage. They’re proving the inheritance is alive. That the intuition to commodify cruelty didn’t die with their lynching ancestors; it merely tailored to new backdrops, new media codecs, new locations. These racists don’t see human beings trapped on that island. They see an opportunity to make recollections. They don’t see a jail. They see a memento stand. And in that second, they’re not simply vacationers. They’re colonizers. They’re lynchers. They’re ghouls — the descendants of those that got here earlier than them, and they’re proud to maintain the ritual going.
That lineage isn’t unintended. It’s alive in each angle of this new spectacle.
Take a look at the brand new “Alligator Alcatraz” propaganda cartoon, which exhibits ICE corralling brown immigrants into an alligator’s jaws. A shark laughs at them. A chicken provides ICE a thumbs-up. It’s imagined to be humorous. Identical to the outdated postcards had been imagined to be humorous. It’s “humor” that dehumanizes. Laughing whereas reinforcing the message that brown our bodies are animals to be trapped, devoured, and erased.
As a result of that’s how propaganda works. Dehumanize them so you may cage them. Make them animals so you may banish them to islands ringed with predators. Make it humorous so the cruelty feels regular. And the vacationers get to be a part of the enjoyable of commodifying horror and taking part in cruelty with a smile and a filter.
We shouldn’t be stunned. That is precisely who America is. That is precisely who Florida is promoting this to. We’re not simply watching historical past repeat itself. We’re dwelling among the many proud descendants of lynchers, colonizers, and ghouls who’ve all the time discovered leisure and revenue in different folks’s dehumanization and struggling.
These folks are ghouls. That phrase isn’t metaphorical. A ghoul is somebody who feeds on the lifeless, who finds pleasure in decay, who’s drawn to corpses and struggling. Their ancestors had been actually that: pawing by means of stays at executions in Europe, chopping off ears and fingers at lynchings in America, preserving physique elements as keepsakes. They made youngsters watch. They taught them not simply to just accept cruelty however to thrill in it. In the present day’s vacationers at Alligator Alcatraz aren’t simply detached to struggling; they’re drawn to it. They present up with cameras to eat it. They need to show they had been there, to savor the horror with out the disgrace.
These vacationers’ presence at this jail isn’t some innocent curiosity or unintended road-trip detour. It’s proof of racial inheritance. As a result of solely a tradition of individuals descended from colonizers, lynchers, and ghouls would see a jail intentionally constructed on an island crawling with alligators and pythons and suppose picture op.
After they stand there grinning in entrance of Alligator Alcatraz, they’re not sightseeing. They’re re-enacting the household ritual and racial heritage. That is intergenerational violence made mundane. It’s proof that white supremacy isn’t an artifact of the previous however a dwelling, respiratory inheritance.
It’s not historical past repeating itself by chance. It’s descendants upholding a sadistic custom with a digicam in hand. See these folks clearly. Don’t faux they’re innocent vacationers. Don’t give them the grace of assuming ignorance. Identify them for what they’re: inheritors of a practice of racist cruelty, descendants of people that discovered pleasure in our struggling. After they smile in entrance of that blue signal, they’re saying their allegiance and dedication to upholding white supremacy.
Consider them.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and creator of “Spare The Youngsters: Why Whupping Youngsters Received’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Youngsters In Jim Crow America.” Learn her Substack right here.
SEE ALSO:
Florida Begins Development Of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Migrant Facility
Alligator Alcatraz Is Racial Violence As Leisure In America
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