Halloween Racists

How do you spot a racist?

No one wants to be friends or even friendly with racists. But how do you really know who in your neighborhood is racist? In most cities, you’re left to wonder, but in Cleveland Heights, there’s a way to find out.

Cleveland Heights is a city that’s as racially integrated as any (the trick being that not many cities in the world are very integrated). In any event, Cleveland Heights has about 27,000 white people and about 21,000 black people. Cleveland Heights also borders East Cleveland, one of the most maligned cities in Ohio (and for good reason) and some of the sketchier parts of Cleveland. And while it is numerically racially integrated, in practice the whites and blacks tend to live in different parts of the city. We have about 16-20 houses on our street, only three of which are occupied by black families.

If you want to know who is racist in Cleveland Heights, you wait for Halloween. You wait for what I affectionately call the “visiting trick-or-treaters.” A number of presumably-poor black families that you’ve never seen before in your lives descend upon the mostly white streets of the moderate to upscale streets of Cleveland Heights. Every one of the kids using a pillow case for a candy bag. Not every one in costume; many in poor or barely recognizable costumes.

In Cleveland Heights, if you want to find the racists, look for the residents of the nice neighborhoods that are just put off by this. And they do exist, and it sneaks out of them all night long. The dad who you are chatting with you mentions that “those people that aren’t from this neighborhood are just all over tonight.” Or the woman at the door of her house who, passing out candy, shrieks “my goodness I’ve never seen so many trick or treaters. Where did you all come from? You just take one a piece now!!” My father-in-law speculates that a quarter to a third of the neighborhood turns off their lights because they just “don’t like it.”

(I have to say that I am sometimes myself irked by the annual visit of the 35 or 40 year old woman, who appears to be escorting her kids, who steps up herself to stick her pillowcase in my face. Some version of this woman appears every year. One of them a few years ago was kind enough to lie that the bag was for “her sick son,” which made it easier not to hate her, but screw the rest; I fantasize about not giving them candy, but my sorry, pathetic self gives up the peanut butter cup every time).

It's tough to know what to make of this at first, but the more you think about it, the harder it is to complain about this. The visting trick or treater parents don’t want to expose their kids to the nastiness of their neighborhood after dark. Instead of sitting at home, they want their kids to experience trick-or-treating. They're willing to live with the embarrassment of it all. So they cross the border for goodies, like seniors in the United States used to take the bus to Canada for medicine to pick up their prescriptions on the cheap.

There's no way to really complain about that when you think about it. And that doesn't even take into account the racial gay-dar they bring that lets us know which neighborhood folks need to be skipped over when it comes time to invite people over for a cookout.

The way I see it, they’re really doing me a favor.