Alligator Alcatraz Is Violence As Entertainment In America

Supply: Joe Raedle / Getty

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 vibrant blue freeway placard that reads, virtually cheerfully, “Alligator Alcatraz.”

There’s no cartoon maw or dripping blood on the steel, simply the informal normalcy of forms naming a torture website 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 looking 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.

Outdoors, white vacationers stand grinning for selfies. Dad and mom 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 just too well mannered. It sanitizes what’s really taking place. These persons are re-enacting a ritual of racial cruelty that’s centuries outdated.

Let’s maintain it 100: this ain’t new.

White racists have at all times 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 observe our bodies twist on the gallows, collected flayed pores and skin to bind books and footwear, and boiled heads to show in cupboards. They paid to drink the blood of guillotined prisoners as medication 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 change into colonizers, enslavers, and mass killers. It skilled 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 acquired 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 observe Black adults and youngsters be tortured and roasted alive on the town squares. They carved off ears, fingers, enamel, and genitals to promote or maintain as heirlooms. They posed for images beside charred corpses and turned them into postcards they mailed to household and associates.

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 searching trophy. 5 years earlier in St. Louis, a museum exhibit displayed images 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 components as trophies and mail postcards of charred corpses. That reflex to show demise into spectacle and souvenir was by no means buried.

That’s why these vacationers smiling at Alligator Alcatraz issues. They’re not outliers or curiosities. They’re individuals 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 reminiscences. 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 shouldn’t be unintentional. It’s alive in each angle of this new spectacle.

Take a look at the brand new “Alligator Alcatraz” propaganda cartoon, which reveals ICE corralling brown immigrants into an alligator’s jaws. A shark laughs at them. A fowl provides ICE a thumbs-up. It’s purported to be humorous. Similar to the outdated postcards had been purported 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 possibly can cage them. Make them animals so you possibly can 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 collaborating in cruelty with a smile and a filter.

We shouldn’t be shocked. 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 at all times discovered leisure and revenue in different folks’s dehumanization and struggling.

These persons 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 via stays at executions in Europe, chopping off ears and fingers at lynchings in America, preserving physique components as keepsakes. They made youngsters watch. They taught them not simply to just accept cruelty however to thrill in it. At the moment’s vacationers at Alligator Alcatraz aren’t simply detached to struggling; they’re drawn to it. They present up with cameras to devour it. They wish 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 unintentional 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 assume 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, respiration inheritance.

It’s not historical past repeating itself accidentally. 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 convention 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 writer of “Spare The Children: 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.