At an absolute minimum the use of this as a headline is a microaggression. It doesn’t feel good to see it atop this sub and promoted so widely today.

Here is a Wikipedia article about this usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alligator_bait

“Depicting African-American children as alligator bait was a common trope in American popular culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. The motif was present in a wide array of media, including newspaper reports, songs, and visual art. In the American popular imagination, black children were commonly used as bait for hunting alligators,[1] which are one of the central apex predators of the folklore of the United States, along with cougars, bears and wolves.[2] The reasons for dubbing black babies “alligator bait” are unknown, but the identification may be a consequence of earlier associations of African crocodiles—a relative of American alligators—with Africa and its people.[3] Gators largely live in the swamplands of the Southern United States, which were one place people escaping enslavement hid to evade capture.[3] According to popular legend, enslaved people who disappeared in swamps may have been killed by alligators; children were understood as particularly vulnerable to attacks by alligators, and that identification may have evolved into the bait image.[3] Alligator lore draws from “a shared dread of these reptilian creatures that come out of the water to eat dogs and children.”[4]

I cannot imagine why McMahon or ESPN felt this was warranted or needed.