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Keep Halloween Spooky, Not Harmful

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Children in Halloween costumes trick-or-treating with pumpkin buckets

If you follow my work, you know that in all of my endeavors my focus is to reduce harm. There’s no way to eliminate harm but when you know better you can certainly do better and that gesture alone can ripple into a cascade of awareness and kindness for our collective communities. During all holidays, I find this to be even more important, as during this time of year we want to focus on positive collective impact and not uniformed practices that rely on bypassing burden.

Let us remember that Halloween can be magical for children. From their first costume as babies; dressed as pumpkins with orange cheeks and tiny leaf head pieces, or as adorable kittens and witches, to their excited trick-or-treating years, in the United States this holiday centers around childhood enjoyment. I personally love to see the creativity of each person who comes to my door. If it aligns with your family’s values, there’s nothing wrong with celebrating Halloween. However, as we approach Halloween 2025, it’s crucial for all parents to understand which practices cause real harm.

In American tradition, October 31st marks when the veil between our world and the spirit world grows thin. The custom of scary decorations and costumes originally served a purpose: to blend in with wandering spirits so they wouldn’t target your home or family. Children dress as frightening creatures to disguise themselves from actual threats that are now “among us”. Keeping this in mind, may help clarify why using someone else’s identity or culture as your “shield” is inappropriate.

Lets break down some simple examples:

  1. Painting your child’s skin black or brown is never acceptable. This practice has deep historical roots in minstrelsy, which depicted Black people as unintelligent performers existing for white entertainment. No character requires darkening skin to complete a costume when done respectfully.

  2. Afros are not costumes—they’re natural hair that grows from people’s bodies worldwide. Wearing disheveled afro wigs perpetuates harmful stereotypes that cast Black hair as “unkempt,” “unprofessional,” or “wild” when worn naturally, and beautifully by Black people ourselves.

  3. Deities, religious figures, and cultural identities are not props. Hindu priests, Indian goddesses, Egyptian royalty, and historical figures like the Queen of Sheba are deeply meaningful to millions of people daily and around the world. They’re not tools to “scare away demons” or entertainment for Halloween night.

Halloween offers endless creative possibilities: zombies, witches, vampires, scarecrows, spiders, ravens, ogres, ghosts, skeletons, and countless other spooky creatures. Focus on these traditional elements rather than appropriating identities, cultures, or appearances that aren’t yours to wear for fun or entertainment. Teaching your little ones to stay within the moment

Let’s keep Halloween about children’s laughter, spooky fun, and candy bags they won’t want to share, while ensuring everyone can celebrate and we can actively reduce racial and cultural harm at the same time.

Know the Game: Is Your Child’s Classroom Set Up for Growth or Erasure?

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Children painting together at a classroom art table

As school time arrives, there’s so much to cover and yet so much we have to wait and see how it turns out. Undoubtedly, the school year brings hopes of friendship, growth, and a chance to see your child grow into a new version of themselves. Social interaction is critical for brain development, so the quality of those interactions is essential. The children want to connect. When we have little ones under the age of 8, the social interactions aren’t just with their friends—it’s also with the adults who guide them throughout their day.

When you are a parent of a Black child, the typical environment of any classroom has markers that are inherent indicators of one or two things: the classroom is set up for either their growth or their erasure. It may sound hyperbolic, but it is indeed one of the easiest mistakes parents in predominantly white spaces overlook—the visual, physical, and audio cues in classrooms that are rooted in eliminating the prospect of collaboration and diversity.

The assumption that your classroom has to have a percentage of representation reflective of the student body is technically and numerically accepted. However, it’s not generally a safe space for a growing mind to understand their full society. If there’s even just one child who is “different,” separating that difference as unique, unusual, or special is tokenism and effectively eliminates the truth that the space this person shares with others is uniquely lacking in diversity, not the other way around. It’s important to note the power dynamic of spaces that are homogeneously white rather than other ethnically coded cultural spaces. The tendency to lack general knowledge or the need to acknowledge other practices or norms is considered bad form. The “othering” is profound. It is deeply harmful. Whether this “othering” is loud or quietly practiced, your child feels it.

As I continue to write what may help you in assessing the safety of your Black child’s educational experience, I cannot emphasize enough that you MUST be an active participant in normalizing their existence far before they reach school. Their skin, their hair, their bodies, their sensibilities ARE different from your own. It is CRITICAL that you familiarize yourself and normalize the spectrum of existence for Black people, so you are not experimenting on your child as they grow. You are still their first experience in this world. It is far too common for two white parents, identity-struggling biracial parents, and white primary caregivers to be their child’s first racist experience. This can be prevented. So please keep this in mind as you approach your child’s school. You are their first line of defense, so know the game.

It is critical to have conversations with the teacher and administration about:

  • What their practice and policy is around racial discrimination

  • What is their knowledge and approach to avoid racial profiling in behavioral norms for Black children

  • What practices and policies do they have for engagement during holidays

  • What curricular diversity is planned to include the positive contributions of Black people, not only in the United States but throughout the world.

I would suggest you follow up and get their responses via email as well.

What to look for in the school/classrooms:

  • Names AND pictures of Black scientists, artists, writers (not just entertainers or MLK)

  • Circle time books—are the illustrations diverse?

  • The toys—all boys? All girls? All shades and shapes?

  • The emotional regulation board—who are the angry characters and who are the regulated characters?

This is by no means a complete list. These are starter points. The society we have created requires your personal growth and deep advocacy. It requires your activism. Raising a Black child is an ultimate gift. Do your best to ensure the spaces that mold them are also reflecting that truth.

The Concept of a Black Home

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Young girl in rain boots planting seedlings in a greenhouse

If you have Black children, you are a Black household.

This seems straightforward, but most people reading this will immediately resist that description. If you pause a little longer, you might realize something crucial: if your children are Black and your household doesn’t actively understand and engage with issues that uplift or impact the Black community, you’re effectively leaving your child to navigate that terrain alone.

There’s a razor-thin line between othering your child and truly accepting the reality that your entire household is affected by what affects them.

If you’re a non-white parent who doesn’t understand society’s impact on Black children, this understanding is imperative. It’s not enough to simply know the statistics—the likelihood that your child could (and most likely is) experiencing racism in school, extracurricular activities, or while engaging with social systems as basic as riding the city bus.

What’s imperative is navigating the nuances of such ignorance with a deep radar for being gaslit and dismissed back into your comfort zone. If your gut is telling you something is off, it is off. If racism wasn’t in your top two explanations, double-check whether you’re avoiding what has been normalized in your world—not necessarily the world your child experiences daily.

If you find yourself asking, “Could it really be…?” It could. And most likely, it is.

What This Looks and Sounds Like

The manifestations are countless:

  • Assumptions about behavior leading to predictions of “nefarious pathways”

  • Presumptions about likelihood and capability

  • Adults showing apparent lack of experience with Black children, then either refusing accountability or using “not knowing” as justification for inaction

  • Absence of dialogue around the impact of cultural, racial, and ethnic experiences in our society

  • Describing appearance with coded, generally negative words: “wooly,” “frizzy,” “little monkey,” “hyper,” “loud” (when referring to excitement or energy)

  • Labeling children as “different” when the real issue is adults’ lack of exposure to Black children

I could go on. They can go on as well.

Some of these incidents might seem “silly” to address. However, your position should align with your child’s experience, not your own understanding of it. It’s crucial that your child isn’t taught to comply just to get along.

Every issue that affects a Black person must fully affect your household. Without this perspective, you effectively leave your child alone to address the fear and, ultimately, the shame of their involuntary inclusion in whatever the Black community is being charged with.

Everything charged to the Black community is being charged to yours.

One privilege of being white is that when the white community faces behavioral accusations, it’s not charged to the entire community. For example, though most mass shooters are white males, we haven’t labeled this demographic as “dangerous when angry and in crowds.” Yet any deficit attributed to the Black community—whether an individual act or not—lands as the responsibility and reflection of the group entirely.

Your child is no exception.

Your Essential Role

As parents, your job is to ensure that in a world directed at invalidating your baby’s existence, you empower your child with this truth: there is nothing—NOTHING—wrong with how they exist.

Your active commitment to engaging with Black history through the eyes of the Black community is essential. You don’t need to be different people. You do, however, need to be well-informed and an active advocate for your child and their community to live unharmed.

Parents are parents—you don’t want anything to happen to your precious child. This is precisely why it’s imperative to examine which lens you’re using when teaching your child how to be in this complicated society.

White parents especially must address their fear of their Black child navigating an aggressive world. (I’ll explore this more in a future post.) After consistent work on your own personal experiences, narratives, and conditioning, the short answer is this: don’t teach them to fear what being Black means.

There’s often a hidden narrative that white parents carry—one that positions their Black child as somehow complicit in persistent stereotypes, or as having innate knowledge about their “racial role.” This usually isn’t conscious.

There is a solution—many, actually. First and foremost: teach your child a deep understanding of their strength, and of the strength, beauty, and brilliance that is their Blackness, however that presents itself.

This foundation of strength and clarity will prove far more valuable when the day comes that they must stand up for themselves—and that day will come.

The concept of a Black home isn’t just about recognition—it’s about transformation. It’s about ensuring that every child who enters your door knows they belong not just in your family, but in this world, exactly as they are.

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