AI alligators and rebranding Jim Crow

Today’s edition of Spitfire News is free to read. To support my work, consider upgrading for just $5 a month.

Yesterday, Florida officials confirmed that there are people inside the cages of a hastily-built detention center in the Everglades. It “is a concentration camp,” according to journalist Andrea Pitzer, who wrote a global history of concentration camps. On the Fourth of July, this country is embracing the very worst of its history.

Many people have drawn parallels between images of cramped bunkbeds in the Florida camp and those at Auschwitz. But the nickname for the Florida camp, “Alligator Alcatraz,” the merchandise showing alligators and pythons guarding the camp, and the likely AI-generated image of alligators wearing ICE hats posted by the Department of Homeland Security call back to an earlier period of violence and discrimination on U.S. soil: slavery and Jim Crow segregation.

As I watched Florida officials, then federal agencies, then the president, then his conservative media acolytes each invoke rhetoric that fantasizes about alligators eating immigrants, it reminded me of a term that has been used as a racial slur for Black people: “alligator bait.”

Researching its history, I came across the work of Dr. Patricia Turner, a retired professor of folklore from the University of California, Los Angeles. Over the course of her decades-long career, she said, it was “really easy” to find and document examples of alligators terrorizing Black people in popular culture.

Some of the most infamous examples are Florida postcards from the Jim Crow era that feature alligators hunting Black babies, children, and adults. Turner said you can Google “alligator postcard black people” and see it for yourself.

“The alligator is the kind of surrogate for the white man and his goal to either control or eliminate African-Americans, Blacks, in my research,” Turner said. “But I think that the population that they imagine housing in this detention, you know, we all look alike to them. These are brown people. I think the same impulse is very much at work.”

Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s confidantes, has posted what appears to be an AI-generated image of an alligator with a Middle Eastern keffiyeh in its mouth (the garment has become closely associated with pro-Palestinian advocacy), as well as one with a sombrero between its jaws. Loomer’s obsession with the alligator rhetoric also included her suggestion of feeding 65 million people to them—she claims this is the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., but it’s actually the number of Hispanic and Latino people in the U.S.

Other Trump supporters have also used AI to create their own racist alligator imagery. I’ve extensively covered how AI is used to automate and exponentially scale the sexual harassment and sexualized degradation of women. It does the same thing with racism. AI is trained on bodies of imagery that reflect systemic racism and sexism, and it functions as a tool to perpetuate and expand these systems of violence.

“It doesn’t truly invent something new,” Turner said about the AI alligator depictions. “It packages and polishes what’s there in its universe.”

Just like AI recycles and rebrands centuries of American racism, the real-life Everglades camp is just the latest iteration of Florida’s brutal history of incarceration. I also spoke to Dr. Paul Ortiz, a professor of labor history at Cornell University who taught at the University of Florida for 16 years. He came across the same racist postcards while writing about the Jim Crow south.

“There’s an incredible ignorance about the history of incarceration and race in Florida, because it’s horrific,” Ortiz said, citing post-Civil War prison labor camps as well as abusive reform schools like the Dozier School for Boys, which is what the 2024 film Nickel Boys (adapted from the Colson Whitehead novel) is based on.

Ortiz said that the “alligator bait” postcards, as well as postcards featuring lynchings, were purchased by tourists to show off back home—much in the same way that Trump supporters around the U.S. and the world celebrate “Alligator Alcatraz” on social media and by purchasing themed merchandise.

“This is really what Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump want, a historical ignorance which allows them to kind of laugh it up,” Ortiz continued. “It took me back to Florida in the 1940s and the 1890s, where you have these affluent white people laughing and profiting from the extreme oppression of incarcerated people of color.”

Just five years ago, after the police murdered George Floyd, the president of the University of Florida discontinued the “gator bait” chant at school sporting events. His announcement was part of a larger undertaking at the school and around the country to examine and make amends for anti-Black racism in the U.S. We are now experiencing a violent, state-sanctioned backlash against that movement. It seeks to cover up our racist history and double down on present-day racist oppression. Some of the work Ortiz took part in at the University of Florida to examine Jim Crow has since been censored by the state government.

Another history being overwritten by the rhetoric around “Alligator Alcatraz” is the indigenous history of the Everglades, where Miccosukee and Seminole people live today. They have long fought against the environmental impact and injustice of development in their home and ceremonial land. They have been protesting the camp since it was announced. And they actually live alongside the creatures that Republicans fantasize about eating them.

“That’s part of the falseness of what they’re projecting with ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ People in Florida coexist with alligators and pythons all the time,” Turner said. “It’s much more evocative visually in terms of this impulse to want to make sure the white man is perceived as having control and the Black man is victimized in nature.”

Thanks for reading, and if you appreciated this reporting, consider upgrading your subscription for just $5 a month. You’ll get access to all my paywalled writing, too.