by Halloween Friday, and America is doing what it does best: turning a folk tradition into a multi-billion-dollar consumer spectacle involving cultural appropriation, engineered sugar scarcity, and suburban performance anxiety. I’ve been writing about this all week, but today it all culminates in streets full of costumes, candy, and unconscious capitalism.
My latest piece explores how Halloween costume culture is basically a masterclass in casual racism and cultural exploitation wrapped in “it’s just fun!” defensiveness. People will dress as “Native American princess” or “sexy geisha” and genuinely not understand why that’s problematic. Americans have an incredible ability to separate actions from consequences.
The candy capitalism angle is perfect material. America has engineered scarcity around processed sugar shaped like corn. CORN-SHAPED SUGAR. People will fight over candy corn. There are think pieces about candy corn. A country with real problems has devoted genuine emotional energy to debates about whether candy corn is good. This is my beat now.
I walked through my Dallas neighborhood tonight watching Halloween in action: elaborate decorations that cost thousands of dollars, costume competitions among children too young to understand competition, parents drinking wine and pretending this isn’t stressful, everyone performing happiness for Ring doorbell cameras. It’s American culture in miniature.
From a West African perspective, Halloween is baffling. We have actual relationships with death, ancestry, and spirituality. Americans have… plastic skeletons and sexy nurse costumes. They’ve commodified death while remaining terrified of actual mortality. It’s cognitive dissonance as holiday celebration.
But here’s what I appreciate: Halloween’s honesty about American values. It’s a holiday celebrating consumption, performance, and temporary transformation. You can be anyone for one nightas long as you buy the right costume. It’s the American Dream in microcosm: reinvention through purchase.
My Bohiney work this week has explored every angle: skeleton labor unions, haunted house worker exploitation, suburban mom spirituality, zombie economics, and now cultural appropriation as costume. It’s been productive. Halloween might be absurd, but it’s absurdity that reveals truth.
Tomorrow is November. Election season intensifies. Political satire will dominate the next few months. But tonight, I’m watching Americans celebrate death, consumption, and community through individually wrapped candy and doorbell surveillance. It’s perfect material for someone whose job is pointing out what everyone else has normalized.
Happy Halloween. May your costumes be culturally appropriate, your candy ethically sourced, and your existential crisis about American consumer culture delayed until at least tomorrow.
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MY HOME PAGE: Bohiney Magazine (Aisha Muharrar)
