From deep in the culture war trenches, we bring you the latest in the annual War on Halloween waged by Social Justice™ jihadists against fun, free speech, and Western civilization itself.
‘Jack-o’-Lanterns: A Brief History’, by random DEI historian outside of Walmart
In the last installment of 2025 War on Halloween, we explored the allegedly racist origin of the term “spooky” according to DEI TikTok.
We discovered together, based on a cursory examination of the facts, that the term does not actually have any roots as a racial epithet at all.
In a similar vein, another DEI scholar, a woman apparently wandering a Walmart parking lot, decided to make a TikTok video explaining that pumpkins are a “symbol of what they did to our people”:
Pumpkins really indicate how they took the slaves’ heads and skulls and put lights inside of ‘em… So be careful how you celebrate these devilish white man holidays. Halloween is devil’s day, I’m tellin’ y’all. Pumpkins are a symbol of what they did to our people, indigenous people, brown-skinned people, they put fire inside of their skulls and lit it and hung it from trees.
Now pumpkins are racist too.
— One Bad Dude (@OneBadDude_) October 26, 2025
When does it end 🤦♂️ pic.twitter.com/vVlBApxbAn
Related: Social Engineers: White Men's Sexual Interest in Big Butts Is Now Racist
Consider the confidence with which these people deliver their sermons — so self-assured, yet ironically so ill-informed and wildly inaccurate all at once.
The ability to spout absolute nonsense, often conjured out of thin air on the spot, with gravitas, a straight face, and no sense of humility is truly a remarkable character trait — one that you see in all walks of life.
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
-Charles Bukowski
This character trait is often compounded in DEI people, who enjoy immunity from pushback in polite liberal society, as anyone who might challenge their ahistorical ramblings understands they will immediately be branded a racist and therefore decide it’s not worth the bother, thereby allowing the nonsense to hang in the air uncorrected.
Related: MSNBC News Actor, Race Scholar ‘Confront the First Amendment’s Dark History’
Let’s make lemonade out of lemons and turn this lady’s DEI propaganda into, as Barack Obama would call it, a “teachable moment.”
Aside from a knee-jerk suspicion that this lady was making up nonsense to suit her racial grievance agenda, I admit to not knowing the origin story of carving pumpkins up and making faces out of them.
So I looked it up, and the tradition actually dates back to pre-Christian pagan mythology out of Ireland.
Via Britannica (emphasis added):
The jack-o’-lantern has a long history with Halloween, although our favorite demonic faces haven’t always been carved out of pumpkins.
Their origin comes from an Irish myth about Stingy Jack, who tricked the Devil for his own monetary gain. When Jack died, God didn’t allow him into heaven, and the Devil didn’t let him into hell, so Jack was sentenced to roam the earth for eternity. In Ireland, people started to carve demonic faces out of turnips to frighten away Jack’s wandering soul. When Irish immigrants moved to the U.S., they began carving jack-o’-lanterns from pumpkins, as these were native to the region…
Halloween is based on the Celtic festival Samhain, a celebration in ancient Britain and Ireland that marked the end of summer and the beginning of the new year on November 1. It was believed that during Samhain the souls of those who had died that year traveled to the otherworld and that other souls would return to visit their homes.
In the 8th century CE, the Roman Catholic Church moved All Saints’ Day, a day celebrating the church’s saints, to November 1. This meant that All Hallows’ Eve (or Halloween) fell on October 31. Traditions from Samhain remained, such as wearing disguises to hide yourself from the souls wandering around your home. The folklore about Stingy Jack was quickly incorporated into Halloween, and we’ve been carving pumpkins—or turnips—ever since.
Just to make sure my bases were covered, I consulted the omniscient oracle that is ChatGPT, which would not hesitate to tell me if the white devil had strung up black skulls like light Christmas lights from trees, and that’s where Jack-o’-Lanterns came from.
“Did white people hang black people's skulls from trees to make Jack-o'-Lanterns?” I prompted.
The idea that white people hung Black people's skulls from trees to make jack-o'-lanterns is not grounded in historical fact…
However, there is a darker part of American history related to white supremacy and racial violence. During the period of extreme racial terror, especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some white supremacist groups, particularly the Ku Klux Klan, used gruesome imagery and acts of violence to intimidate Black people. In some extreme cases, the bodies of Black victims were displayed in horrific ways, sometimes with their body parts used as trophies or to make grotesque "decorations."
That being said, there’s no historical evidence that suggests that Black people’s skulls were routinely used for jack-o'-lanterns specifically, though racial violence was part of a much larger context of cruelty and dehumanization. The story you're referencing might be a conflation of different historical elements or a piece of myth that reflects broader, ugly truths about racism and violence in American history.
