Please Consider the Racial Impact of Your Halloween Decor
Oh, it’s that time of year again! So here is a PSA to remind you that when your Halloween decorations include hanging fake bodies from trees, please consider the extent to which they look like the scene of a lynching and how that might impact Black and brown families in your neighborhood. I see some of these “hanging figures” every year. Some I’d call benign — like what is clearly a little ghost or bat or monster.
But some are downright disturbing. These disturbing ones are often lifelike in size and detail, hung by an actual noose or rope, and with the look of bloody dismemberment and decay about them. I suppose they are meant to simply look ghoulish and spooky; but they strongly mirror the aftermath of a lynching, in which the victim’s body was often mutilated, left hanging and exposed to the elements, in public, for days or weeks.
For many Black and brown people, that image of a mauled body/half-body hanging from a rope on a tree is instantly recognizable and deeply, deeply disturbing. I’ve never witnessed a lynching, but I am the direct descendant of lynched people, and I have Black elders in my family who, as children, either witnessed or were constantly living under the threat and specter of lynchings. (If a history lesson is helpful, consider, as I have written elsewhere, that the thousands of known lynchings in…
