When President Donald Trump publicly fantasized about alligators eating immigrants trying to escape from a new Florida detention center, he was echoing words used in the past by avowed racists.
Before a visit to the immigrant detention facility in the Everglades, Trump told reporters that snakes and alligators would attack anyone trying to get out. During the tour, he made another joke about “a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators” at the facility.
Lest anyone think this was just Trump speaking offhandedly, the Florida Republican Party has also begun selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise.
Trump’s remarks were criticized for their performative cruelty. But they were not unique. Allusions to “alligator bait” were made a century ago by Jim Crow-era racist propagandists about African Americans.
This postcard from 1921, for example, labels Black babies as “alligator bait.” And this blatantly racist 1908 article in The Washington Times tells the story of “pickaninnies,” a racial slur used for Black people, being used to lure alligators at a New York zoo.
“Zoo Specimens Coaxed to Summer Quarters by Plump Little Africans,” the subheadline reads.
On its website, The Jim Crow Museum lists numerous other examples of racist imagery and editorials depicting Black people — in many cases, children — as bait for alligators.
In the past, the point of this propaganda was to dehumanize African Americans and train people to treat any violence meted out to them as harmless or even funny. That’s a troubling precedent to keep in mind as the administration plans to begin sending immigrants to this hastily built detention center.
