Alligator Auschwitz & White Supremacy's Evolving Killing Fields

The Land Remembers...

Hey Family,

It’s America’s Independence Day. My family, neighbors, and friends didn’t put on our finest red, white, and blue gear to enjoy barbeque and drink in the name of America. We celebrated a day for the family to get together, despite whatever the hell this country was doing, had already done, or was thinking about doing to us - we were still here. Today feels no different. In the wake of the horrific opening of the Florida ICE detention center, disgustingly named Alligator Alcatraz, we are witnessing America participate in its truest traditions: hypocrisy and cruelty.

For our ancestors, July 4th was never simply a day of patriotic celebration, but rather a potent opportunity for subversive resistance and radical truth-telling. Frederick Douglass’s scorching 1852 speech "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" laid bare the hypocrisy of a nation celebrating freedom while maintaining chains, declaring: "This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn." With blistering clarity, he exposed America’s contradictions:

"What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim."

The land remembers. The water refuses to forget. Across America, the earth itself has been weaponized against Black and Brown bodies in a relentless campaign of erasure and terror. The grotesque spectacle of alligators devouring Black people during Jim Crow was never just about the violence itself - it was about transforming living beings into instruments of execution, then packaging that horror as entertainment. Today's so-called attractions like Alligator Alcatraz, which should be more accurately termed Alligator Auschwitz, continue this tradition of commodifying cruelty while obscuring its genocidal lineage. This pattern extends far beyond swamp horrors to the very geography of America, where trees stand as silent witnesses to lynchings, where entire Black towns like Oscarville, Georgia, were deliberately flooded to create recreational lakes like Lanier that continue claiming lives as if rejecting their forced existence. The violence is never contained - it mutates, finding new expressions in poisoned water systems like Memphis', drained by Elon Musk's AI ventures while Black communities thirst, in the cyclical scapegoating that begins with immigrants but always expands to target the elderly, disabled, and dissident. White supremacy cannot coexist - it can only consume, and the land itself bears the scars of its endless hunger.

Southern trees tell stories we've been conditioned to ignore. Their branches served as gallows for thousands of lynchings, their roots nourished by blood. These silent witnesses still stand in parks and backyards across the country, their history whitewashed beneath layers of civic pride and willful forgetting. The drowning of Oscarville in 1912 was no accident - a thriving Black community violently displaced by white mobs, then deliberately submerged beneath what is now Lake Lanier. The lake's summer drownings feel like hauntings, the water resisting its recreational rebranding. This pattern repeats across the geography of America - Seneca Village buried beneath Central Park, Kowaliga beneath Alabama's lakes - Black spaces systematically erased, then repurposed for white leisure. The modern manifestations wear corporate disguises: in Memphis, Musk's AI operations guzzle groundwater while toxins seep into Black neighborhoods, a high-tech repetition of the same old violence. The targets may change - immigrants today, the vulnerable tomorrow - but the machinery remains the same. Lynch mobs didn't stop at Black men; they came for women, children, allies. The border crackdowns and welfare cuts follow the same logic of expansionist destruction.

Gator Bait was a specific and cruel genre of bigoted memorabilia

The postcards of lynchings mailed as souvenirs, the alligator attacks framed as natural justice - Alligator Auschwitz continues this tradition of packaging racial terror as family entertainment. The rebranding is cosmetic; the underlying message remains unchanged: watch them die. The Nazis recognized the efficiency of this American model, studying Jim Crow laws as blueprints for their own genocidal systems. When we name these attractions Alligator Auschwitz, we're not drawing cheap parallels - we're tracing direct lineages. But in the midst of this horror, there are visions of reversal.

Years ago, I dreamt of a shotgun house overrun with alligators—their scaled bodies draped over furniture, climbing walls, filling every room with an eerie, purposeful presence. Yet I felt no fear as I moved through the space, guiding children and elders to safety, closing doors behind us like a sacred ritual. When violent intruders breached the house, the alligators turned on them with swift precision, their jaws becoming instruments of protection rather than predation. This dream, once baffling, now reveals itself as a blueprint: the alligators, so often weaponized against Black life in our collective nightmare of American history, were instead enforcing boundaries, becoming guardians of the vulnerable. The shotgun house—that quintessential architecture of Southern Black life—transformed into a fortress where the very forces meant to destroy us became our fierce protectors.

This revelation fuels the upcoming Kalunga 2.0 dream workshop, where we’ll gather to decode such visions and realign with the ancestral wisdom embedded in water and memory. Named for the horizontal line on the Kongo cosmogram that maps the boundary between worlds, the workshop invites us to see dreams not as passive escapes but as insurgent communications—from ancestors, from the land itself. Just as my dream reimagined alligators as enforcers of justice, Kalunga 2.0 creates space to collectively reinterpret our nightmares and visions, to listen for the water’s whispers beneath America’s violent surface. Here, we’ll explore how dreams might reveal strategies of survival, how submerged histories rise through symbolism, and the ways in which we can commune with the spirits of swamps, rivers, and coasts that have witnessed both our suffering and our resilience. An act of remembering that the water never forgot, and that our liberation might yet emerge from its depths.

The land is keeping score in ways we're only beginning to understand - the continuous drownings and mysterious deaths at Lake Lanier, Elon Musk’s methane gas generators exacerbating the air and water crisis in Memphis, the alligator's gnashing jaws just feet away from the flimsy ICE detention tents in the Everglades - these aren't random tragedies but reckonings. The spiritual work now is to appease these waters, not out of fear but strategy, to recognize that the earth itself may rise as an ally in liberation. The trees remember. The water refuses to forget. And white supremacy's greatest miscalculation may be its belief that its crimes would sink without a trace. The land remembers. The water is rising. And the alligators are watching.

So here we stand, family—on this Fourth of July, beneath the weight of history and the heat of a nation still playing the same old games of cruelty and erasure. We gather not to celebrate America’s myth of freedom, but to honor our own survival, our refusal to disappear. From Frederick Douglass’s fiery indictment to the rebellions timed to the crack of fireworks, our ancestors taught us how to turn this nation’s empty pageantry into a stage for truth. The land remembers what America tries to drown—the lynching trees, the flooded towns, the swamps turned prisons. But just as my dream revealed, the very forces meant to destroy us can become our protectors, if we listen. The alligators are watching. The water is rising. And on July 10th, under the full Capricorn moon, we’ll gather at Kalunga 2.0 to trace the breadcrumbs our ancestors left in dreams, to decipher the warnings and blueprints whispered beneath the surface. This is not mysticism; it’s strategy. Because white supremacy’s greatest lie is that its violence will go unanswered. But the land keeps score. The water never forgets. And neither will we.

See you at the workshop. The ancestors are waiting.

Until Next Time,

Nikki