Beacon Broadside

Forget "All": Why Most Women Never Even Get Half

Sherrilyn Ifill is Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. She is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century. Professor Ifill is nationally recognized as an advocate in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, judicial diversity and judicial decision-making. 

I am genuinely pleased by the announcement that Anne Marie Slaughter has scored a book deal following her hugely popular essay in The Atlantic, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Slaughter’s piece has been appropriately praised for opening a robust and dynamic conversation about the very real difficulties women at the top face in trying to have families while pursuing elite professional careers. Critics have pointed out that Slaughter’s essay addresses only women at the top—the 1%, so to speak. But Slaughter concedes this herself in the piece, and fully recognizes that women like her operate from a position of economic and educational privilege. 

The problem with Slaughter’s piece—and now planned book—is not that she doesn’t speak for most women, but that she and other women in the 1% fail to recognize how their failure to exercise power in support of women at the economic bottom hurts all of us. Take a fictionalized, working-class black woman named Crystal living in a city like Baltimore, a town blessed with a large number of highly-ranked hospital systems. Jobs in health care are plentiful and a woman with only a high school education and who is, say, a practical nurse may be able to find employment as a home health care worker or as an aide in a hospital. If she lives in West Baltimore and has no car, she will have to leave her home early—most likely while it’s still dark to get to work at 7 or 8am when her shift begins. Baltimore has one of the most limited subway systems for a major American city. Thus, Crystal will have to wait at a bus stop and take a ride that will last about hour or more before she makes it to her job. When she leaves home in the morning, she must leave her children—ages 12, 9 and 7—to get ready for school. This means that the 12 year old will have responsibility for waking and organizing the two younger children, and ensuring that they make it to school on time. This includes seeing to it that her siblings have their notebooks and homework in their backpacks, locking the door to the home, and navigating bullies (her siblings’ and her own) on the walk to school. 

If her shift at work is 12 hours, Crystal will make it home by 8pm or 9pm. Perhaps she has a neighbor or sister or cousin look in on her children in the afternoon. Maybe not. If she has a normal 8 hour shift, she will make it home, physically exhausted, by 7 or 8, with precious little time, or perhaps even inclination, to read with her children or to spend “quality” time asking about their day and getting familiar with the names of their teachers and friends.

So what do the women of the 1% percent, who’ve just discovered that they can’t have it all, have to do with Crystal? The women in the 1% have the power to take the lead in changing the conditions that make it nearly impossible for Crystal to work and parent effectively. They are regular voters. Perhaps they work in city or state government, or they are doctors, professors or partners at a major law firm in town. Perhaps they work in the federal government like Slaughter did, taking the Amtrak Northeast Corridor train to their job at a federal agency in D.C. 

Despite Slaughter’s accurate portrayal of the difficulties these women face in balancing their home and work lives, these women actually have power. But the failure of the transportation system in Baltimore to meet the needs of working class people is not a priority for them. They drive or take the commuter train to work. They have a nanny or regular babysitter who meets their children at the bus stop and brings them home. So they did not seek to ensure that the billions of dollars in stimulus money were allocated for construction projects would go to projects that would benefit working women—like inner city transportation improvements—rather than highway construction projects more likely to benefit those at the top.

Women of the 1% vigorously supported the Lily Ledbetter Act, and are mindful at their own workplace of pay equity between men and women. But these same women are not at the forefront of efforts to increase the minimum wage, which stands at a pitiful $7.25/hr. That would give Crystal less than $300/week before taxes on which to raise her 3 children.

You might also enjoy:

Anita Hill on the housing crisis 

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What role have elite women played in seeking to change oppressive criminal justice policies like stop-and-frisk, California’s “3 strikes you’re out” sentencing law or the proliferation of long criminal sentences for non-violent drug offenses that might be responsible for landing Crystal’s husband in jail for years, without the ability to contribute to the well-being and support of his children and wife? Isn’t the emotional stability of Crystal’s son—who if he lived in New York City might be stopped and frisked by police a dozen times during his teen years—just as important as that of Slaughter’s son? What choices does the working-class mom of a black, teen stop-and-frisk victim have to help her son through the emotional fallout of police harassment?

And let’s be real. Many women in the top 1% employ women at the economic bottom. All over Manhattan one sees the startling visual of black and Latina women pushing white babies in carriages and strollers. What worker protections do these women enjoy? Many of these domestic workers leave their own children all day in the care of others to take care of the children of economically elite women. Organizations like the National Domestic Workers Alliance have worked for years to organize and obtain basic labor protections for domestic workers. Where do 1% women stand on the efforts to afford labor rights and benefits to the women who care for their children and clean their homes?

Finally, we should remember that Crystal and women like her are not without ambition. Like Slaughter and other economically elite women, they have a strong desire to elevate their educational and professional status. Crystal enjoys working with patients and also knows that if she were able to get her degree as a registered nurse, she would make considerably more money than she is able to make now. Having children should not mean the end of education or professional development for women. How can we support the ability of working class women to move up the ladder?

Slaughter’s piece fails to recognize that women in the 1% have real power to transform the work/family reality for women at the economic bottom, who are seeking the luxury of the kind of choices about which Slaughter and I wring our hands.

As a weekly rider on the Amtrak ACELA train on the run from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, it’s been hard not to notice over the past two years how many high-powered white women on the evening train seem to unwind by reading Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. With briefcases tucked behind their knees and power lipstick faded after the day’s meetings, exhausted 1% women on the evening train ride seem to find a kind of perverse relaxation in reading a romanticized account about the bonds that might develop between privileged white women and their black maids. But we needn’t rely on fanciful, retro fables that elevate personal friendship over economic, educational and social transformation. Change for women in the workplace will happen from the bottom up, and will take hold when powerful women expend their capital on behalf of women in the 99%. But I suspect that we shall wait a long time before there is a book deal that tells this story.

Photo from Bigstock.

Dear Camp Cain: Stop Calling It a Lynching

Today's post is from Sherrilyn A. Ifill, professor at the University of Maryland, Francis King Carey School of Law in Baltimore and the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century. This post originally appeared at The Root.

The Negro was unsexed and made to eat a portion of his anatomy which had been cut away. Another portion was sent by parcel post to Governor Dorsey, whom the people of this section hate bitterly.

--lynching of "Negro" Williams, Moultrie, Ga., Washington Eagle, July 16, 1921

Four young women from the crowd pushed their way through the outer rim of the circle and emptied rifles into the negro. They stood by while other men cut off fingers, toes and other parts of the body and passed them around as souvenirs.

--lynching of Philip Gathers, Bulloch Gounty, Ga., Atlanta Journal, June 21, 1920

A crowd of twenty men battered the door of Cooper's home and pounced upon him with knives and axes. He was killed as his wife looked on. The body was tied to a buggy and dragged to the church. Torches were applied to the house of worship, and when the flames were licking high into the air, Cooper's nude form was thrown into the blaze.

--lynching of Eli Cooper, Eastman, Ga., Chicago Defender, Sept. 6, 1919

These shocking and gruesome accounts of lynching in 100 Years of Lynching are just three of the more than 500 recorded lynchings in Georgia from the 1880s until the mid-20th century. Less than a half century after the last recorded lynching in the state, Clarence Thomas, a son of the Peach State, claimed on national television to be the victim of what he called a "high-tech lynching" after credible allegations emerged that he had engaged in sexual harassment of a female employee while he was head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Thomas, then a sitting federal appellate court judge, was in line to serve on the highest court in the most powerful country in the world.

With his white wife seated behind him, Thomas described his Supreme Court confirmation hearing as "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves." The words and imagery were shocking and powerful, and reset the course of his confirmation hearings.

Now the "high-tech lynching" claim has been invoked in a campaign ad on behalf of another son of Georgia, presidential candidate Herman Cain, in an attempt to fend off negative fallout from the revelation that Cain was accused of sexual harassment by several women in the 1990s during his time as president of the National Restaurant Association.

Whatever one thinks of either Thomas or Cain, neither is the victim of a lynching, and their deliberate invocation of the most hideous and grotesque of racial crimes to shield their own conduct from scrutiny profoundly misrepresents the significance of lynching in the racial history of this country. In fact, it is an insult to the nearly 5,000 African-American men who were lynched  (and a few dozen African-American women as well) from the 1880s until the 1960s to continue trotting out this imagery as a convenient way of cowing critics -- white and black -- into ignoring claims of sexual harassment.

The men who were lynched in nearly every state in this country suffered unimaginable terror and pain, and they suffered it alone. They were not millionaires, or former chairmen of Federal Reserve boards, like Cain. They had no public relations firms representing them, or well-funded political groups organized to plead their cases. Not even their families could help them. In fact, in the aftermath of a lynching, the families of victims were often so frightened they did not claim the remains of their loved ones, fearing that bloodthirsty lynch mob members would exact violence against the families as well.

Thomas should have known better than to invoke lynching imagery to describe the Senate Judiciary Committee's decision to examine the claim that he had harassed Anita Hill. There is no record of a black man ever facing lynching for engaging in sexually inappropriate conduct with a black woman. As a Southerner, Thomas no doubt knew this.

In fact, even the old saw that lynching was primarily utilized to punish black men for raping white women was debunked in the early 20th century in a study carefully prepared by anti-lynching activist and newspaper publisher Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Her study showed that lynchings were most often exacted in response to allegations that a black man had assaulted or killed a white man. Later records bore that out.

The victims of lynching were not just the thousands of men who were tortured and stripped of their humanity, often before cheering crowds of housewives and children. Lynching was a community crime, designed to frighten entire black communities into submission. And it did.

When civil rights workers tried to register voters in Sunflower County, Mississippi, in the 1950s, they found black sharecroppers still telling the story of one of the most grotesque lynchings ever recorded. Luther Holbert and his wife had chunks of their flesh taken from their bodies with screws, and their fingers and toes cut off before they were finally burned to death. Although this lynching had happened decades earlier, in the 1950s it still held the small black sharecropping community in Sunflower County in the grip of paralyzing fear.

What does this history of lynching have to do with the fact that the National Restaurant Association decided to pay tens of thousands of dollars to women who accused Cain of sexual harassment in the 1990s, or that Thomas was alleged to have persistently made unwanted sexual remarks to a female subordinate while he headed up the federal government's employment discrimination agency? In a word, nothing.

What Cain hopes to gain from describing himself as a lynching victim is precisely what Thomas received: the shame and fear of white liberals, who, in Thomas' case, failed to adequately investigate and expose the credible testimony of witnesses who by all accounts would have corroborated Hill's claims. Many have persuasively argued that had then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Joe Biden (D-Del.) called other witnesses who were prepared to attest to Thomas' misconduct, the result of the 1991 hearings and the confirmation vote would likely have been quite different.

And this is why it's important that we talk about what lynching is and isn't. The history of lynching in this country continues to hold enormous power in our imagination. Being accused of participating in a lynch mob is among the most incendiary charges one can make in this country.

What W.E.B. Du Bois called "America's national crime" has been the subject of movies, songs, poems and plays. The very word invokes terror, shame and fear and is enough to make the media, Republican and Democratic opponents and perhaps even the alleged victims of Cain's misconduct just want it all to go away. Using the term "high-tech" to modify the charge does little to alleviate the power of the accusation or to lessen its ability to silence critics.

The mere fact that you are a black man accused of sexual misconduct does not make you a lynching victim. Nor are you a lynching victim just because members of your own party think you are a poor choice to fill the newly empty U.S. Senate seat of the just-elected first black president, as Roland Burris was when State Sen. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) begged the skeptical press not to "lynch" Burris in December 2008.

If you are a black millionaire, running to hold the most powerful office in the world, or a black federal judge seeking a seat on the highest court in the country, and you are questioned about sexually inappropriate conduct toward women in your employ, you are not a lynching victim. You are the privileged descendant of a generation of blacks who endured the terror of lynching -- of hanging and burning and dismemberment -- and who lived lives of fear and discouragement that are unimaginable to us.

Once and for all, besieged black Republicans -- indeed, any public figure subjected to media scrutiny based on allegations of wrongdoing -- should drop the manipulative and deeply insulting invocation of lynching, high-tech or otherwise, to try and disarm their detractors. Lynching victims were not metaphors. They were real people who suffered unimaginably. Using lynching as an expedient way to derail accusations of sexual harassment makes a mockery of those who died and the communities that lived in the grip of lynching's terror.

Photo by Gage Skidmore. Used under Creative Commons.

SCOTUS, Prosecutorial Misconduct, and Public Confidence in the Justice System

Sherrilyn Ifill is Professor of Law at the University of Maryland. She is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century.

There's a story to be told from the intense media focus on last week's Snyder v. Phelps case in the Supreme Court. To be sure, the case - involving a challenge by the father of a slain serviceman to protests conducted by a fringe religious organization at his son's funeral - is an important one in which the Court may provide importance guidance on the reach of the First Amendment. The protests at the military funerals, in which followers of the Westboro Baptist "church," hold up signs that celebrate the death of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which Westboro members regard as a punishment for what they believe is U.S. tolerance of gays in the military - are repulsive by almost any sane standard. Given the lurid facts of the case, and the tension between our sympathy for Alfred Snyder and our traditional robust protection of even repulsive speech under the First Amendment, it's perhaps not surprising that almost every major news outlet and Supreme Court blog reported on last Thursday's oral argument.

But it's telling that on the same day Snyder was argued, the Court also heard oral argument in Connick v. Thompson - a case with considerably more concrete implications for the lives of thousands of criminal defendants. In Connick, the Court will decide whether a man who was convicted of capital murder and held in solitary confinement on death row for 14 years can hold a prosecutor's office civilly liable for violating his constitutional rights by withholding exculpatory evidence from defense counsel and failing to train prosecutors in their obligation to furnish this information to defense counsel. The obligation of prosecutors to turn over such evidence to defense counsel was first established by the Supreme Court in 1963. But the New Orleans district attorney's office argues in Connick that it cannot be held liable for a single incident of violating Brady. Instead, the prosecutor argues that they can only be held liable if it is demonstrated that they engaged in a pattern of withholding such evidence. In other words, only if we repeatedly violated the Constitution can we be compelled to pay for allowing an innocent man to be imprisoned and almost executed.

Forget the Beer Summit. Shirley Sherrod’s Story Begins Our Conversation on Race

Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and is nationally recognized as an advocate in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, judicial diversity and judicial decision-making. Ifill is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century.

If you've watched the full video of the speech given by former USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development Shirley Sherrod at the NAACP Freedom Fund breakfast, then you know that a hideous injustice has been perpetrated against a thoughtful, smart, sensitive, reflective, principled African American woman. She movingly described her journey as a child who had to work in the fields in the deep South to becoming a representative of the USDA. The result of this journey was her recognition that "it's not about black or white, it's about the poor." As Sherrod told her audience, "we have to work together." It's the ultimate irony that she lamented at the end of her speech that "it's a shame that we don't have white people and black people in this audience."

In fact, Sherrod's speech should be required listening for those who want to understand the arc of race and racism in America and the possibilities for redemption in this country. The world into which Mrs. Sherrod was born is one that can poison you or strengthen you. Mrs. Sherrod chose the latter path. According to Mrs. Sherrod, her father was murdered by white men who were acquitted, despite the presence of eyewitnesses at the crime scene. Her family home was threatened by violent whites. Her mother protected the family home with a gun and with courage. Sherrod decided early-on to devote her life to helping the less fortunate. She learned that the less fortunate are black and white. And she learned and encouraged her listeners to hold themselves accountable and look beyond "black and white." Sherrod's story and her compelling telling of it at the NAACP breakfast should be regarded as the opening statement in the "conversation on race" that keeps getting hijacked in this country.

Trashing Thurgood Marshall

Sherrilyn Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law, and is nationally recognized as an advocate in the areas of civil rights, voting rights, judicial diversity and judicial decision-making. Ifill is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the 21st Century. This article originally appeared at The Root, where she is a frequent contributor.

The second day of the confirmation hearings of Elena Kagan to the U.S. Supreme Court was marked by some substantive dialogue, respectful banter and even an exchange of ethnic humor between the nominee and members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Republicans and Democrats alike seemed to have forgotten the previous day's tensions.  But for many of us who'd sat in stunned silence while Republicans members of the committee used their opening statements to unleash an orchestrated disparagement of the record and legacy of Supreme Court justice and civil rights icon Thurgood Marshall, the wounds still felt raw.

The invocation of Marshall (35 times by Republicans) was a surprising new low, even for the shameless opportunism of modern confirmation hearings. At first it seemed astonishing as senator after senator -- Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), John Cornyn (R-Texas) -- disparaged nominee Kagan's "association" with Thurgood Marshall. But the abandonment of the "Marshall as slur" tactic on day 2 suggests that the Republican senators' opening-day sucker punch may have backfired.

Right and Wrong in American Racial Politics: Is Our Civil Rights Tradition Now Obsolete?

Today's post is from Sherrilyn A. Ifill, a civil rights lawyer and law professor at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, Maryland. Ifill is the author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century.

Conservative commentator Bill Bennett famously (and arrogantly) summed up the significance of Barack Obama's win last November as the end of "excuses" for blacks. Although Bennett, as a white right-wing talking head prone to inflammatory racial commentary may have been an inappropriate and certainly ill-timed messenger of this bromide, his statement was not far off from what many black people have been saying among our family members, and in our community centers and churches since November. Days after the election a black analyst in the Washington Post seemed to unconsciously parrot Bennett when she declared that, "African-Americans just entered the 'no-excuses' zone." Black comics joked that blacks could no longer claim that we are being held back by "the man," when with a black man in the White House we technically are "the man." The widely accepted understanding of this sentiment is that traditional black civil rights thinking--which focuses on dismantling systematic racial inequity as the principal means of improving the economic, educational and social condition of African Americans--has been rendered obsolete by Obama's presidency.

But in the months since Obama's election, little attention has been directed at the possibility that Obama's ascension has thrown another traditional black school of thought into potential obsolescence: black conservatism. I've been fascinated by the dearth of statements by black conservatives (and the directionless rambling of the few that have offered some reflections) on the meaning of the Obama presidency. I speak of course of Ward Connerly, Justice Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele, among others--those who, as Chris Rock bitingly put it years ago, have "devoted their lives to making sure the white man gets a break." I began thinking of Obama's presidency as a blow to black conservatives when I was on the Mall on Inauguration Day. I was surprised that when Justice Thomas appeared on the screen of the jumbotron, taking his place along with other Supreme Court justices on the dais, he elicited nary a boo, a hiss or even a sarcastic comment from the normally vocal liberal crowd around me. It was as though Obama's inauguration was, in and of itself, answer to all of Thomas' tirades against affirmative action.

Because whatever you think of the merits going forward of affirmative action, and other traditional civil rights strategies, there can be no doubt that Obama's presidency would not have been possible without the successes and groundwork laid by those earlier efforts.

My Soul Looks Back and Wonders

Today's post is from Sherrilyn Ifill, author of On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-first Century. Ifill is a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law. She is also a civil rights lawyer and a regular speaker on race, public policy, and law. She blogs regularly at BlackProf.com, where a version of this post originally appeared. 

Sometimes, you just can't be cynical. Sometimes – even though you know that we still have a long way to go, that the work of achieving a racially just society is far from over, even though you don't subscribe to the messianic fervor that sometimes surrounds talk of about this presidential campaign – sometimes you just have to stop for a moment, and acknowledge the extraordinariness of this moment in American history.

Sometimes, as the old spiritual goes, "my soul looks back and wonders, how I got over." And so I'm taking a moment to reflect on an event that I wished my father had lived to see. I've watched conventions since 1968. I consider myself politically savvy, intellectually gifted, skeptical and pragmatic. But when Michelle Obama and her daughters were standing up on that stage with fresh perms, looking like my sister and her daughters, and when Barack Obama was nominated to be the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party by acclamation Wednesday night, I got a little emotional.

Unlike so many others, I'm not thinking so much about 1963 and King's "I Have a Dream" speech today. Instead, today I'm thinking about 1964. Forty-four years ago, the Democratic Party refused to seat that great voting rights activist, leader and former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer on the floor of the convention.

The Relevance of Nooses and Lynching in the Age of Obama

by Sherrilyn A. Ifill

In the flush of the current presidential campaign, when crowds of blacks and whites caught up in Obama fever chant together, “race doesn’t matter,” and even the mainstream media seems delirious with the possibility that the U.S. may be poised to elect its first black president, it’s hard to remember that only a few months ago college campuses, high schools and workplaces from Louisiana to New York were sites of racial intimidation. 2007 was the year of the noose. Dozens of incidents, in which nooses were hung in places designed to intimidate black workers and students, seemed to engulf the country. Many of these noose hangings seem to have been set off by the case of the Jena Six -- a Louisiana case in which black high school students faced serious criminal charges after a series of violent conflicts with white students. The friction between the students arose after white students hung nooses from a tree that had long been regarded as reserved as a meeting place for white students. Many whites minimized the noose hangings at Jena and in other places as mere pranks. Blacks, by and large, regarded the noose hangings as hate crimes – messages of intimidation and white supremacy inspired by the nearly 5,000 lynchings of black men and women that took place in the 20th century.

Today, it’s almost tempting to dismiss the rash of noose incidents and attendant focus on the history of lynching as just a strange autumnal anomaly -- some kind of retro race moment, a last gasp of 20th century racism. Nooses had fallen so far outside the national conversation that it came as somewhat of a shock last Tuesday when President Bush finally condemned noose displays in a ceremony at the White House commemorating Black History Month. The noose, said the President “is wrong . .. [and has] no place in America today.” The President forcefully insisted that displaying a noose is “not a harmless prank, and lynching is not a word to be mentioned in jest.” Instead the noose, said the President, “is a symbol of gross injustice.”

The timing of the President’s statement was curious. Months earlier, when noose incidents were on the front page of major newspapers every day, a presidential statement denouncing the display of nooses would have been a powerful and authoritative repudiation of racist symbols. Yet at that time, the President was silent on the issue. As a result, President Bush’s statement last week seemed strangely out of time. It read like a random selection from a stack of draft presidential statements, hauled out for Black History Month. Clearly drafted months ago [and perhaps embargoed for unknown reasons], the President’s statement provided no guidance on how to reconcile the rash of noose displays four months ago with the current mood of racial harmony and possibility sweeping the country.

The Legacy of Lynchings in Halloween Decorations

Halloween is a time for "gallows humor," but macabre displays of fake bodies swaying from trees are not a laughing matter for those who understand the legacy of lynching in America.

From Crystal Lake, Florida, to Stratford, Connecticut, hanging dummies have been stirring up debate and protest. This year, however, we’ve had almost non-stop news coverage of noose-related incidents following the events in Jena, Louisiana. Could it be that we still need a primer on one of the more violent chapters of America’s history?

An article in the SF Gate talks more generally about the spate of noose incidents that have made news recently. Sherrilyn Ifill, a Beacon author whose book On the Courthouse Lawn chronicles the history of lynching in America, addresses the disconnect between white and black perceptions of the image of the noose:

"Many white people are unaware of the incredible power of the lynching story for African Americans," said Sherrilyn Ifill, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and a former civil rights attorney. "Lynching was a message crime. It served to tell the black community that there were boundaries. Don't get too educated. Don't vote. Don't get too wealthy. Don't look at a white woman.

"It was not just used to punish an individual, but to serve as a threat to others."

What can you do to be more sensitive to the racial overtones of certain types of Halloween imagery? Diary of an Anxious Black Woman offers a few tips on how to avoid racist subtexts in your Halloween decorations, costumes, and how you interact with trick or treaters. It's an excellent, informative read.

Happy Halloween!