A Knoxville social worker named Elisabeth Spencer Pitts has publicly called on the city to take down white-sheet ghost decorations hanging from trees in downtown Market Square, arguing that the standard Halloween decor resembles a “white supremacist lynching.”
The ghosts form part of Knoxville’s official “Wicked Cool Halloween” decorations in the popular downtown square.
Independent journalist Andy Ngo highlighted her Facebook posts and images of the displays, noting that the last documented lynching in the United States occurred 45 years ago.
In a Facebook post complaining about the decorations, Pitts wrote:
Maybe I’m sensitive and possessed of a very flighty and prolific imagination, but this sh-t just ain’t copacetic in my humble opinion. The governance and daily operations of and by the Knoxville City Government are, by the most charitable estimations (I guess), simply tone deaf and incompetent- and in many cases just absolutely brutal in purpose and mechanism- but I feel like this Halloween aesthetic is exceptionally off the mark even for them. JFC can we just NOT hang anthropomorphic figures in trees in a downtown southern city right now?
While some commenters agreed with her, many also pointed out the absurdity of her complaint.
