Talk:Alligator bait

Notability
I'm having a hard time seeing how this article demonstrates why it should exist. The main argument, that black children were literally used as alligator bait, is advanced by a single person (and parroted without any additional research by other sources), and seems pretty definitively debunked by Snopes. The remainder is just discussing cultural depictions of African Americans in culture, of which we have no shortage of relevant targets (e.g. Stereotypes of African Americans.) The end result is an article that privileges and tacitly endorses a fringe POV, and will probably encourage the existence of that fringe view as accepted fact. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs talk 18:50, 13 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I was concerned that the article was not casting enough doubt on the practice's historicity, but also worried that accepting the fact that it never happened in wikivoice would cause upset. That's not a fair weighing of the scholarly debate as you point out; discounting Hughes and elevating Snopes is appropriate. I've made some changes, but alterations always welcome to state this more clearly.
 * As to notability, I think the representation and the slur are both notable topics. Rightly or wrongly – and almost certainly wrongly – the amount of attention they've received by Snopes, Hughes, Turner (in her book Ceramic uncles & celluloid mammies: Black images and their influence on culture, there's a chapter devoted to it, but I haven't added yet), in the debate over UF's chant, and in books about racial slurs, makes me think both of those are notable. Whether a separate article is warranted, though, is of course much less clear; many notable topics don't require dedicated pages. In this case, I think there's a good reason to have a separate article – to provide a more accurate answer to whether this ever happened than people on social media or at the Jim Crow Museum do. But it also comes with risks, so happy to hear your thoughts. Urve (talk) 01:50, 14 September 2022 (UTC)
 * User:David Fuchs, I disagree re:notability. Sorry--and I removed the tag. I also disagree with the POV issue. This was a well-established trope, it seems, and to the few hits from JSTOR I could add more: there's plenty. Should it be a standalone article? Sure, why not? We have one for lawn jockey. We have one for I'm not racist, I have black friends. But what is the fringe POV?, I know I messed up your formatting in my eagerness to add more sources, but I think you are fluent enough with the sfn code to adjust what I stuck in there. And thanks for writing it up. Drmies (talk) 02:10, 14 September 2022 (UTC)
 * Despite the equivocating in the language, the article's existence and framing privileges the view that actual baiting was a real thing, not just part of a broader racial stereotype used on postcards. If the argument is "the motif of black children posing with alligators deserves a standalone article", that's one thing (I don't think so, given that we already have a ton of overlapping articles covering the same stuff that don't have size issues,) but right now the very existence of this article is helping further a fringe academic view (rather than mentioning it in passing.) Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs  talk 18:41, 14 September 2022 (UTC)

Additional Evidence and Sources
The Ferris State University Jim Crow Museum, cited elsewhere in the Wiki post, also published a letter with a summary of other research into the trope and a link to a more comprehensive article laying out the research. Ferris State took the letter seriously enough to publish it on the same site they published their other pieces about "alligator bait."

The letter can be seen at https://www.ferris.edu/HTMLS/news/jimcrow/letters/2020/alligatorbaitESPN.htm

https://esnpc.blogspot.com/2020/04/live-human-alligator-bait-fact-or.html

It's interesting to note that the author of the two Ferris State articles about the expression and possible practice say there is no evidence that it happened, but that they assume it must have happened given the pervasive nature of the expression and images. But there is an alternate explanation for widespread distribution of the images and expression.

The research lays out a convincing argument that the decades of stories about first "crocodile bait" in Sri Lanka and later "alligator bait" in the US all derive from, and are essentially rewritten variations of, the original source about so-called crocodile hunters in Ceylon. That article was written by a man known to be a military humorist who submitted non-serious drawings and stories to numerous magazines. His article about crocodile hunting may be one of those non-serious, "humorous" stories. The story itself makes crazy claims about parents renting out their children and English hunters "never missing." Those sorts of claims are repeated in most of the later babies as "alligator bait" stories. Another such story, out of Chipley, Florida, is one of the most frequently cited such story offered as evidence of evidence of the literal historic practice. That article also makes crazy claims about parents renting their children and it being very safe because the hunters never miss. That story was also shown to have been written by a non-serious writer - a self-proclaimed "sex philosopher" who also penned a few other similarly ridiculous "click bait" stories for newspapers he worked for.

If we take the stories as true for the supposed fact of hunting alligators with human bait, then they should be taken as true for the silly claims of parents renting their children for a pittance and hunters never missing. I prefer to take those claims as evidence of falsehood all around, absent any other compelling evidence.

If you follow the trail of similar babies-as-bait stories from Ceylon through Chipley Florida, they are mostly very similar. Some of them are about exporting Jewish babies from Russia for use as bait in Egypt - not plausible. Also, there are stories about "white crackers" being used as bait in Florida that appeared earlier than those about using black babies as bait. Other stories place the practice in Africa.

The many "alligator bait" postcards, images and marketing materials all appeared after the mass marketing of a photograph out of an art studio in Tennessee; a picture of several black babies above the title "alligator bait." That photo, and not the literal truth of the underlying supposed hunting practice, likely caused the later proliferation of images. Repeated new variations of the old crocodile bait/alligator bait stories kept the stories alive, but never actually proved the existence of the practice, and were not taken seriously at the time.

If the practice had been known and widespread, the NAACP would have had more to say about it when they responded to the 1923 reports out of Florida, which seemed to strike them as novel, and not as another one of a longstanding practice. §Svaihingen (talk) 05:16, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Should this be described as a "purported historical practice", an "urban legend", or even a "conspiracy theory"?
I have raised the matter of deleting this article not because I necessarily think it should be entirely deleted, but solely because the balance is far too uneven. and it appears to be being used to promote a fringe theory.

I described the topic as a conspiracy theory because the belief that it really happened appears to only be propagated by a single (barely notable) employee of a museum, (personally I think this is akin to a security guard at the Louvre giving his personal opinions on the Mona Lisa). I did not want to remove too much from the article and left Hughes' claims in because the responses to him debunking his assertions are notable.

I am not fully beholden to the "conspiracy theory" label, I would not describe topics that are clearly mere legend as such because they tend not to have proponents advancing them as fact. If Hughes' claims are to be included in the article then that does make it a conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion of course. CorwenAv (talk) 02:05, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
 * "used to promote a fringe theory"? What? OK, I saw the edits you made to the article, and I'm not going to waste any more time on this. Drmies (talk) 03:45, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Cutting this for now
In case anyone can do something with it: While not addressing the alligator bait trope specifically, a 1948 review of "negro stereotypes" in various forms of media mentioned "vicious comic pictorial postcards" and noted "Stereotypes are usually based more in fiction than in facts. It is our urgent responsibility to stamp out these patterns as they affect our music, theatre, motion picture, literature, textbooks, and our comics."

jengod (talk) 07:00, 27 February 2023 (UTC)