This is still bothering me. A lot. Because it's an amazingly efficient intersection of racism, classism, ableism, and sexism, and that's a lot to put on what's supposed to be Free Candy For Everyone Night.
White people regularly, consistently over-estimate the age of black children. I went to grab a link, but Googling "white people over-estimate age of black children" brings up literally a PAGE of studies.
You want evidence? Google the same string. Behold a PAGE of studies. White people look at black kids, especially black boys, and high-ball their age in a dangerous way.
People estimate the ages of girls based on, putting it crassly, chest size. I was a DD when I was nine years old. They just...grew, over the course of one miserable, aching summer.
Nine years old and I'm not getting the colorful cartoony training bras; I'm getting serious hardware that digs into my shoulders and hurts my back. I'm getting the boys snapping my straps and adult men suddenly treating me in a different, scary way.
Now we're going to add "oh, and you could have had the police called on you for going trick-or-treating" to that? Because maybe some asshole assumes that if it's got breasts on, it must be a teenager?
(Now pause and consider that black girls exist, that black girls might also shoot up over the course of the summer, and that many people are already going to over-estimate their age, and you have a lot of little girls being denied yet another thing the little boys get to have.)
Classism is also a thing here, a thing which often (but not always) slams into racism. I grew up poor. I'm not shy about that. For me, Halloween was THE ONE NIGHT where I got to have the exact same opportunities as the other kids.
You didn't have to be a genius to know that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and hell, even the Birthday Skeleton all liked the rich kids more. But the Great Pumpkin? His good gifts were for the valiant, the strong, and the willing to carry an umbrella.
The bleak flipside of my epic trick-or-treat stories is that I planned my excursions meticulously and to the minute because I had one night to get enough name-brand candy to see me through the next six months.
So yeah, I kept trick-or-treating until I was seventeen. Pride was less important to me than Snickers bars. It's a lot easier to give something up when you know that you get it through another channel.
Ableism, also at this party (this is a terrible party). Maybe it's in the law--I don't think it's in the law--but the reporting on this issue has not mentioned any exemptions for people with developmental delays.
In my old neighborhood, we had a lovely man in his early thirties whose parents still brought him trick-or-treating every year, because he loved it, and they loved him.
It'd be nice to think that no one would have seen this law as an excuse to call the police on him over the cost of a few fun-sized candy bars, but I've met humans, and counting on "oh, they'll make an exception" is never a good idea.
All four of these factors are in play, and there are absolutely children, right now, whose parents are being forced to take all four of these factors into consideration when trying to figure out whether trick-or-treating is safe for them.
Just...let kids have candy. Please. A teenager who's trick-or-treating is a teenager who's NOT smashing pumpkins or egging houses, and unless it's your kid, how do you know they're a teenager, anyway?
Let kids have candy. Don't gatekeep Halloween. Don't try to take the Great Pumpkin away from the people who need him most. Please.
This is not the Halloween spirit.
This is not the Halloween spirit.
