Monday, November 1, 2010

Trick or Treating Neighborhoods

              Halloween is in two days and everyone is very excited about it. I always talk with one of the Annenberg workers when I see him in the cafeteria and today was no different. He came up to me and asked what I was going to dress up as for Halloween on Sunday. After I told him my costume idea, I asked what his plans were.  I learned that he has a son and that he would be staying at the house handing out candy while his wife took their son door-to-door to trick-or-treat. I joked that he would need to buy a large amount of candy because if he ran out the children would be angry. I told him that back in my hometown, my neighborhood had so many trick-or-treaters, that we would have to run to the gas station down the street to buy more bags of candy during the night. Sometimes we had to give two or three times! We did this because we did not want the kids to be sad that we had no candy to give them. He then told me that in his neighborhood, if they run out of candy, the children throw eggs at his house. Shocked, I said," Oh! They've never thrown eggs at us before!" To this he responded, "Yes, well we obviously live in very different neighborhoods."


          I had never really thought about how different trick-or-treating would be in neighborhoods of different social classes. I would say my neighborhood is middle to upper-middle class: the perfect place to trick-or-treat. The houses are close enough together so the children don't get tired walking house to house, and the families can afford to buy plenty of crazy Halloween decorations and candy. In fact, my neighborhood is viewed as such a good trick-or-treating spot that public buses transport young children and families from the ghettoes and other lower-income neighborhoods to our neighborhood so they can trick-or-treat in safety. Starting before it even gets dark, our streets are filled with cars that I don't recognize. Families arrive hours in advance to score a parking spot on our street. On all other days of the year, my neighborhood might have 2 or 3 black families, but on Halloween, over 75% of the trick-or-treaters are black. I had always thought that they came because our neighborhood was fun to trick or treat in, not because their neighborhood might be violent or dangerous like the Annenberg worker alluded to.
        In lecture this week, we discussed ghettoes and how childhood is not a prolonged stage of the life cycle there. Children are not escorted around by parents to knock on doors and receive candy. Instead, the streets are governed by the "hard living" individuals  who revert to violence and tricks when candy is not received. With my family, I've always had a safe environment to grow up in and have never been forced to grow out of childhood too quickly so it is so shocking to think how different my life has been compared to a child in a lower-end neighborhood. On Halloween, when children from my neighborhood came to the door asking for candy, it was sometimes hard to tell their ages. They were all very eager, loud, and happy and they all elaborately dressed up in costumes for Halloween. When the black children from the other neighborhoods came up, however, I immediately noticed a difference between the younger kids and the teenagers. The young kids still maintained that child-like innocence and youthfully enjoyed the holiday. The older teenagers, however, tended to come in normal, every-day clothes and acted either embarrassed or that they were "too cool" for the holiday. Because youth in lower-class neighborhoods will "go for bad" to protect themselves, they develop a very different way of living than I was accustomed to in my neighborhood. 


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