As mentioned in “It’s Almost Halloween! Where are all the Black People?” I am a lover of “spooky season.” This year however, I asked more questions about the holiday, its traditions and how and why Black people “celebrate” it (or not). So I embarked on a learning journey.
I asked the question in an editorial team meeting a few weeks ago and received several shoulder shrugs and suggestions that interest waned at a young age for my coworkers. But in the background, off-camera came the voice of Nekia “Mac” McDonald, director of community access, at TL|BGP saying, “Traditional African religion and practices.” That piqued my interest. I’ve experienced white, Christian traditions that viewed Halloween as evil and, instead, held harvest celebrations. I asked Mac if he’d be interested in talking further about how the Eurocentric and Indigenous American traditions—the focus of today’s Halloween activities—often conflict with African traditions and beliefs, which may be at the heart of why we don’t see more Black people in Halloween marketing, décor, and celebrations.
Halloween began as a mixed bag of traditions, bridging early European creepy customs with Indigenous American supernatural routines. In Europe, the holiday derived from All Hallows’ Eve, linked to either the Christian observances of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day devoted to remembering the dead, or pre-Christian Celtic traditions (most notably Samhain, a Celtic festival that heralded the end of harvest and beginning of winter). As such, it was a magical and supernatural time of year when spirits entered the world of the living. And there are indigenous traditions in the Americas that echo their own versions of respecting ancestors, such as the Mexican Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), when the deceased are remembered with joyful celebrations—families visit graves, decorate them and build ‘altars’ to welcome back the deceased. The contrast this points to is the often ‘spooky’ commercialization and monetarization of Halloween marketed by the West in modern times.
Commercialization, especially in Western contexts, has also played a role in steering the holiday in the direction of horror, blood, gore, and fear; this further highlights how Halloween has become untethered from its spiritual or reverent roots. This dynamic also occurs in a broader context in which practices associated with African, Caribbean, or First Nations spiritual systems are often exoticized or demonized. Common examples of this include voodoo and Haitian Vodou, which in Western media is typically presented through negative connotations given its historical connections to colonialism and ties to anti-oppression (e.g., in reference to Haiti’s revolutionary history).
“[Look at] what happened in Haiti, which is the coup de gras … [Haitians] took their spiritual system, they call on their God and delivered themselves from the bondages of slavery,” Mac says. “So now you look at everything associated with Haiti, everything associated with their spiritual systems, everything associated with their way of life [and decide it’s] negative.”
The negative portrayal of traditional practices are turned into something to be feared, which denies authentic representation in historical context.
In short, Halloween, with its face paintings, costumes, and bobbing for apples, is a product that costumes and recontextualizes cultural norms. It does this so it can be consumed by mass culture, muddling contemporary significance with cultural misunderstanding and misrepresentation. Many African, Caribbean, and indigenous American cultural traditions and spiritual practices stretch back centuries and remain alive today. Yet they are often misconstrued by Western, commercialized narratives serving to reinforce negative stereotypes, particularly at Halloween. Capoeira, a martial-arts style masquerading as dance, was employed by enslaved people in Brazil giving them the freedom to practice their martial skills in public under the guise of a dance performed for tourist entertainment. People to be enslaved brought from West Africa to the Americas, synthesized their religions with Christianity, clothed them in ‘Christian’ garb and practiced their spiritual traditions to hide them. “Under duress of slavery, it was kind of easy to say, OK we can practice your thing. But under it, we’re going to do our thing,” Mac says.
While such an example might elicit an eye roll, understanding how colonial history contributed to the current traditions of Halloween is important. says Mac. “The historical undertones take actual traditions and actual practices and make them antagonistic because they upset the balance of power. … [W]e are reducing traditions that have historically been shamed into literal invisibility.”This helps explain the absence of Black people in current traditions. It also allows us to recognize there are political aspects at play when commercial enterprises and mass media practice cultural appropriation. It’s about power.
Mac suggests all of this is a way to depict Black individuals and cultures as evil. “This Western concept of ghosts and ancestors being spooky is all about attaching a negative connotation rather than being anything spiritual. … If you've captured a group of people,” he says, referencing enslaved people, “taking them from their homeland, taking them from their way of being, they're using everything in their power to get free—which includes their spiritual system.” This includes everything from drums, which were outlawed when oppressors recognized the beats and rhythms were means of communication, to spirituals which gave directions as a means for escaping slavery.
In Africa and Afro-Caribbean communities, the veneration of ancestors is expressed through festivals such as the Egungun, a celebration in Nigeria, and masking traditions in Trinidad, Jamaica and New Orleans, which, unlike Halloween, are not rife with commercialization and stereotyping. These traditions prioritize respect for the ancestors and their culture, in stark contrast to Halloween costuming practices.
Halloween is not practiced in most of Africa and in most of the Caribbean (except in locations with strong European-influenced culture). Again, because of its Westernization, Halloween depends on commercial interests, leaving it deluded of any original meanings. Further, there are distinct features of the spirituality of African traditions and their place under the umbrella of Westernized Christianity.
Africans taken from their homeland and their enslaved descendants made choices about how and when to practice their spiritual traditions. If a practice was seen to have the potential to benefit the slave owner, in many cases, it wasn’t done. Those living in captivity could use traditional knowledge of nature, for example, as both a curse and a blessing. If it were used to help crops grow, thus benefitting the enslaver, the knowledge might have been withheld. Therefore, whether true or not, when crops failed or animals died, enslavers blamed and demonized African traditions.
Specific African spiritual practices within Christian traditions weren’t always obvious either. Mac gives an example: “When I was baptized, it wasn’t just a matter of saying my faith. I had to sit on a ‘mourning bench’ for a week, fast, wear white, and go into seclusion where I prayed and meditated until I received a spiritual sign that I was ready to be baptized. We didn’t just go down to the river or a pool and get dunked.”
It’s worth noting many traditional African religions typically don’t require practitioners to joined or convert in the ways Western religions do. These practices are largely based on family lineage and responsibilities, where each family might have its own connection with the divine entities, focused on honoring the ancestors and keeping to inherited responsibilities. Many of these traditions emphasize balance, rather than distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ When bad things happen, it is seen in terms of spiritual misalignment rather than in terms of sin or moral failure. Sickness or misbehavior doesn’t necessarily constitute a physical or moral problem so much as a spiritual error.
“Spiritual alignment is often impeded by social and systemic pressures on Black communities, Mac says. “Many of the issues experienced in Black communities are a result of forced disconnection from cultural practices. It’s a challenge negotiating a spiritual life in full view, when a system of political, social and economic structures are either indifferent or actively opposed to it.”
Mac and I talked for nearly two hours and there was still more to say. I left the conversation appreciative of his time and care in sharing with me and with more questions to research and a much deeper understanding of why Black communities are not as likely to celebrate or be present in modern Halloween culture. With Black and Indigenous people’s own traditions and ways of being oft stolen, twisted and commercialized, holding those traditions close and not practicing them in the ways of the Western world, makes so much more sense to me now.
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