“These kids today lack discipline and they’re killing the parents!”

This is one of the popular myths I hear all the time from Black folks on social media when discussions about physical punishment come up. Far too many of us have been raised to believe anything that supports beating Black children no matter how far-fetched and illogical it is. When I hear this argument that if you don’t beat your kids they will kill you, I always scream, “SHOW ME THE DATA!”

We live in a racist country that pathologizes every aspect of Black life, and that racism is smog that we breathe in constantly. In our conversations, Black folks apply some of those same pathologies to our children. Arguments in favor of physical punishment are generally rooted not only in the fundamental belief that whuppings will serve as a protective measure from white racism, but also that our children are inherently deviant and potentially criminal. And so Black children must be contained or controlled or civilized through violence.

Because I’m sick of this kids-killing-parents argument, I decided to do a little research. Here are the facts.

There is no surge of “these kids today” killing their parents. According to data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, and every study that has ever been done on parricide, the killing of parents and stepparents by children is a very rare occurrence. Killings of parents constitute about 1 percent of all homicides in the United States in which the victim-offender relationship is known.

The latest study I found on “parricide” reveals that between 1976 and 2007, there were an estimated 133 offenders arrested per year for killing their fathers, an estimated 113 offenders were arrested per year for killing their mothers, an estimated 50 offenders were arrested per year for killing their stepfathers, and an estimated seven offenders were arrested per year for killing their stepmothers. Contrary to popular belief, most of the offenders were not young children or teens; the average age of offenders was between 23 and 32.

Even though Black folks like to argue, “these kids today are killing their parents,” all the studies show that parricide offenders, 73% of them, are more likely to be middle to upper-class White males.  So not only is parricide a rare event in the U.S. and more likely to be committed by White males, in Black communities our children are more at risk of being killed by their parents and caretakers than being harmed by their own children.

An average of 365 Black children die annually as a result of maltreatment. This is a rate that is three times higher than for all other racial groups. Most of the fatalities that occur as a result of physical punishment are not committed by sadistic parents who torture their kids. Every district attorney I have ever talked to about these fatalities has reported that the parents who kill their children did so accidently while spanking.

When there are cases of kids killing their parents, there’s usually a backstory. Here is a list of factors I’m citing from studies on parricide.

• Family isolated either by geography or behavior and life style from surrounding community.
• One or both parents substance abusers, particularly alcohol.
• Child has not been in trouble with authorities.
• Guns are the most common form of weapon. Most commonly found in the home.
• Child has told teachers, friends or someone about abuse.
• Warnings have been ignored, or law enforcement, social services and other agencies repeatedly return child to abusers. •Precipitating “triggering” event, such as sibling leaving, divorce, loss of job, change in surroundings, leads to killings.
• Crimes are ALWAYS premeditated, in the sense that abused children have thought about killing the abuser (or committing suicide) for many years.
• Crimes are always unusually violent. “Overkill” is a hallmark of parricide.
• Parent is often sleeping or in a defenseless position when crime occurs, which doesn’t fit legal definition of “self-defense.”
• Kids historically get tougher sentences for killing a parent than a parent gets for killing a child – though most do NOT receive life without parole.

I started plotting to kill my adoptive mother during my pre-teens. I did so because I wanted her to stop whupping me. I was tired of being afraid. I felt voiceless, powerless, and that I had no one to turn to for protection. With each hit I grew more angry and resentful. I always promised, “The next time she hits me I’m going to wait until she goes to sleep and I’m going to stab her.” I even fantasized about tying her up and whupping her with all the objects she every used on me: belts, switches, extension cords, a broom, hot comb, and whatever else I could pick up. I share this because I believe that assaulting a child is more likely to put a child at risk of hitting or killing a parent than refraining from spanking them because 50 years worth of studies have shown that spanking can lead to aggressive behaviors and violence.

Black folks, we should be dealing with the FACTS – the horrific number of children in our communities dying each day and being facilitated through the foster care system.  We should be having serious discussions about healthier non-violent alternatives to physical punishment instead of deflecting and shutting down conversations by trafficking in racist mythologies about our children.

By June Allen

When I was a child I was terrified of being a parent. My earliest memory was being beaten by my mother. I don’t remember what provoked her, but I still have flashbacks of her raging hands and feet against my small, brown body.

When I found out I was pregnant, the fear of being just like her intensified. I believed that I was destined to harm my daughter, because of what I had experienced. Thankfully, the love I had for my unborn child drove me to break this abusive pathology.

I am so grateful to have found Dr. Stacey Patton’s work via social media. As a virtual big sister, she had my inner child’s back. I adored her honesty, empathy and fearlessness, which also empowered me as a black parent to speak.

In this piece, I share the 3 reasons we still justify whupping our children. I also reveal the tools that helped me process the layers of trauma, and the hope building my legacy of compassionate parenting.

1. We are emotionally disconnected from our bodies.
When we experience trauma, we disconnect from ourselves in order to tolerate the overwhelming pain. This can be helpful in extreme cases (like a car accident). but when the trauma is inflicted by our parents, it has devastating consequences on our relational well-being.

Disconnecting from painful emotions also robs us of the feelings that bring us joy. Over time, this leaves us feeling hollow, our souls feeling numb and empty. When we are so detached from our own humanity, we can’t empathize with our children’s pain.

During an early therapy session, I couldn’t answer the question, “So what happened to all the feelings around these experiences?” I was too numb to articulate my feelings.

Whilst we may not consciously recall our parents’ cruelty, memories linger in the unconscious mind and body. When we become parents, many cling to whuppings, making our children scapegoats for our unacknowledged trauma and buried rage. If we stopped whupping our children then we’d be left to face our own unresolved pain.

2. We don’t want to admit that our parents were abusive.
Our brains are wired for survival, so the child’s attachment process has powerful, primal ties to ensure success. When parents are violent, the unconscious mind uses denial and fantasy, to maintain the bond and protect us from the truth.

The Bible is also a convenient shaming tool, which feeds this avoidant behavior. Ephesians 6:1-2 says, ‘Children, obey your parents in the Lord for this is right. Honor thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise.’ My parents were devout Christians, so with this scripture ringing in my ears, I understood that my pain was invisible and they could absolve themselves of any responsibility for their abusive, neglectful behavior by disguising it as a religious mandate.

When my mother lashed out and my father didn’t protect us, I learned that people who ‘loved’ me were allowed to hurt me. When I saw other black children being pinched, slapped, punched and having their hair pulled, I felt the pain as if it was happening to me. I kept myself small and lost myself time and time again, inside the narcissistic needs of others.

3. Whuppings are white supremacy on autopilot.
During my psychotherapy training, I discovered Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, the 18^th-century plantation diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a vicious British slave owner who thrived on traumatizing the slaves to assert his power and maintain control.

His methods included raping 158 women 3,852 times; snatching young babies from their mothers to break any attachment and burning them to death over a slow fire. He punished slaves by forcing one to defecate inside the mouth of the accused, who would then be gagged for hours.

This book hit home for me, as Thistlewood’s plantation was in Jamaica where my parents were raised. My ancestors left those plantations with no emotional support, or true understanding of the psychological poison left behind to bleed inside our families in the afterlife of slavery. Seeing the names of his victims humanized the numbers, and allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of our intergenerational trauma.

The goal of white supremacy is to pass its poisonous legacy onto future generations. When we are violent towards our black children, we recycle white supremacist violence against us. When we hurt and silence our children, we feel a temporary sense of power inside a system of insane powerlessness.

With so many layers to heal around this issue, where do we begin? Compassionate parenting begins with being compassionate towards the self.

In 2009, I began working an anonymous 12 step program to begin healing. The meetings provide powerful opportunities for identification; the tools hold me through the excruciating surrender to my truth.

For the first time in my life, I experienced true kindness. I felt heard. I mattered. I was not alone. Over the years, I have built a solid network of black fellows who have now become my trusted family of choice.

I also attended therapy, which became my golden hour to unravel the layers of pain and trauma around my abusive childhood experiences. As a black man, my therapist challenged my fear of racial intimacy, and held the space for me to process the shame and self-loathing keeping me from greatness.

Compassionate parenting is a heart-centered journey of connection, growth and acceptance. As I consciously raise my daughter through each milestone, I am also given the opportunity to re-parent my own wounded inner child. While the inner work is sometimes slow and often painful, I have never hit my daughter and connect with her on a much deeper level.

My journey of recovery has now become a service, where I teach the power of racial intimacy, emotional sobriety and personal empowerment. My hope is that we commit to doing the work required to find inner peace, and return our beautiful, black children to the honored, sacred space in our families where they belong.

June Allen (@yardofgreatness), a guest contributor to Spare the Kids, is a racial wellness educator based in London, UK.  Join her for the podcast edition of this post where she shares more details, tools and insights at www.juneallen.net/tbs16.  

I finally got a chance to listen to Kendrick Lamar’s “Fear,” a feature song from his new album ‘Damn.’

The song takes us on a journey through his developmental stages of fear, beginning with his childhood at age 7, then 17, and 27. Each stage represents a window into Lamar’s awareness of how the toxic smog of white supremacy poisons Black life at every turn, especially our intimate and social relationships with each other.

Lamar’s lyrical analysis of his own life cycle reveals that Black folks never age out of fear because at each developmental milestone we are met with new amped up forms of devaluation by the state, other Black folks who are walking around as victims of unrecognized traumas, and from the people who are supposed to love us and provide a refuge from hate and violence.

In a recent Facebook post, I griped about how I hear so many Black parents sowing the seeds of fear in their children early on. I wrote:

It really unnerves me when I hear black people say, “I want my child to fear me.”

Why?

There’s already so much racist ugly in the world for them to fear. There’s already so many mean-spirited people in the world who hate and want to destroy us. Why, as their giver and nurturer of life, would you want to put yourself within that spectrum of angst and devaluation?

And from a scientific perspective, fear is a form of chronic stress that activates biochemical responses in your child’s body which moves them into maximum alert in times of threat, and they don’t always immediately return to normal levels.

Fear causes inflammation throughout the body and prompts biological changes that can affect the immune, vascular, metabolic and endocrine systems, and can prompt their cells to age more quickly. This cumulative wear and tear – known as an “allostatic load” – can negatively impact your son or daughter beyond childhood, and even the future health of their children because stress also causes genetic changes.

Fear is killing black people. And I’m not being hyperbolic. Just take a look at any report on health disparities. The foundation is often laid with the accumulation of toxic stress that begins in childhood.

The fear, the pain and damage of unresolved childhood traumas is the bitter root of most of what ails our communities: child abuse, domestic violence, sexual exploitation, misogyny, misandry, phobias, substance abuse, and dare I say so much of our political fecklessness. So many of us are walking around saying, “I turned out fine.” But really, so many of us are victims of unrecognized trauma.

If we prime our children to fear the people who love them most and teach them that obedience is survival and their greatest virtue, then how can we expect to raise future generations of young people to engage in effective resistance against our enemies?

Fear does not equal respect.

A few days later, a number of folks sent me messages on Facebook: “Did you hear Kendrick Lamar’s new song? He talks about beatings.” So I begrudgingly decided to check it out, thinking that it was going to be yet another one of those rap songs by a Black male artist thanking and celebrating his mama for hurting his body to prepare him for a cruel racist world.

Here’s that verse folks were telling me about:

“I beat yo’ ass, keep talkin’ back

I beat yo’ ass, who bought you that?

You stole it, I beat yo’ ass if you say that game is broken

I beat yo’ ass if you jump on my couch

I beat yo’ ass if you walk in this house with tears in your eyes

Runnin’ from poopoo and ‘prentice

Go back outside, I beat yo’ ass lil nigga

That homework better be finished, I beat yo’ ass

Yo’ teachers better not be bitchin’ ’bout you in class

That pizza better not be wasted, you eat it all

That TV better not be loud if you got it on

Them Jordans better not get dirty when I just bought ’em

Better not hear ’bout you humpin’ on Kiesha’s daughter

Better not hear you got caught up, I beat yo’ ass

You better not run to your father, I beat yo’ ass

You know my patience runnin’ thin

I got buku payments to make

County building’s on my ass

Tryna take my food stamps away

I beat yo’ ass if you tell them social workers he live here

I beat yo’ ass if I beat yo’ ass twice and you still here

Seven years old, think you run this house by yourself?

Nigga, you gon’ fear me if you don’t fear no one else”

I won’t dissect the entire song, but I’ll focus on that first verse because it is yet another testimony of a Black male rapper reflecting back on his mother’s cruelty and how that pain has continued to reside within his body and spirit as a grown man.   What it reveals is how a Black boy had to grow up under constant attack, on guard, and unconsciously reacting to his own repressed past.

Sadly, like many young Black males, Lamar’s first experiences with cruelty and humiliation came at the hands of his mother. But unlike other artists before him, Lamar does not celebrate his mother’s cruelty by calling her a “queen,” thanking her for the beatings, and crediting mother-perpetrated violence for his success.

Lamar is different from the Black boys and men that have for generations accepted the internalized “lie” that slavery, Jim Crow, and racist policing practices requires cruelty to protect Black children, especially males, from their own impulses. While his mother tried to conceal her cruelty to justify the beatings, a more honest truth emerges from Lamar’s lyrics: he never associated the beatings and the fear with safety and comfort and love.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Black mothers who whup their sons and terrorize them in early child do not truly realize the damage they are doing. And yet, the racist notions of Black boys as deviant and violent are ultimately reinforced by parents who are doing their best to minimize the stressful realities of poverty, racism, sexism, and inequality.

Like many folks in the Black community, his mother may have rationalized her violence against her son by calling the harsh discipline an expression of love that ultimately kept him safe and led to his success. But this kind of denial and justification, and even much of the joking about being whupped, feeds the cycle of abuse in Black communities and drives the truth about our traumas underground.

Think about Ghostface Killah’s song “Whip You with a Strap,” from his 2006 album Fishscale. He recalls his mother’s response to his temper tantrums:

“Take me across her lap, she used to whip me with a strap

When I was bad

Bad

Take me across her lap, she used to whip me with a strap
When I was bad
Bad

Picture me snotty nose sittin on my aunt’s lap

The kid like 5 or 6 shit I will curse back

I got it from the older folks sittin in the living room

Everybody had cups stylistic song boom

But then came Darryl Mack lightin’ all the reefer up

Baby caught a contact I’m trying to tie my sneaker up

I’m missing all the loops strings going in the wrong holes

It feels like I’m wobbling, look at all these afros

Soon as I thought I was good the joke’s on me

I heard a voice “get in the room, I get angry”

Sting my feet catch a tantrum

Spit, scream, fuck that

Momma shake me real hard, then get the big gat

That’s called the belt help me as I yelled

I’m in the room like (panting)”huh, huh, huh” with mad welps

Ragged out, bad belt yes her presence was felt

Then get my black ass in the bed it’s time crash out (crash out)

Take me across her lap, she used to whip me with a strap

When I was bad

Bad

Despite the alcohol, I had a great old Mama

She famous for her slaps and to this day she’s honored

But when I was a lil dude her son was a lil rude

I picked the peas off my plate and pour juice in her nigga food

Get beat, then I’d run and tell grandman “mama hit me for no reason”

She whipped me hard when I finished eatin

And felt that belt stingin after I wet that bed

Hid my drawers and start cryin, when she felt that bed

Caught another when I told her those the fake pro-keds

In the corner weavin and screamin trying to block my head (ahHH!)

Nowadays kids don’t get beat, they get big treats

Fresh pair of sneaks, punishments like have a ceas

Back then when friends and neighbors would bust that ass

And bring you back to your momma she got the switch in the stash

That’s back to back beatings

Only went outside for free lunch with welts on my legs still leakin yo

Take me across her lap, she used to whip me with a strap

When I was bad

Bad”

While the cruel Black Mama is often placed on a pedestal, innocent black women ultimately become the targets of this repressed rage accumulated since boyhood. As Howard University Law School professor Reginald Robinson has noted, “that cruelty gets repressed, surfacing again as nearly autobiographical lyrics because these artists uncon-sciously need to reveal the truth of their cruel sufferings to others, and they need others like enlightened witnesses to validate their lyric-based personal histories, without at the same time directly confronting their cruel mothers.”

He further explains that these artists, who may not have been touched lovingly as children, become hyper-masculine as a defense mechanism as they relive their painful childhood experiences through their music. They’d never admit to it, but these men really want to assault the mothers who were the first to hurt and emasculate them.

It’s important to emphasize that black men are not born hating black women. It is the trauma they suffer that teaches them the need for self-preservation. But there are very few spaces for black men to talk about their trauma and pain other than through comedy, rap music, or nostalgic anecdotes about being whupped and turning out fine. Even speaking about their abusive experiences at the hands of Black women is often considered misogynistic.

I hope that folks will really listen to each verse of “Fear” and understand how the insanity of white supremacy requires the destruction of Black children physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. And the greatest trick of all is to invite their loved ones to participate in the process.

If we are ever going to become more politically effective warriors in the fight for racial justice, producing children who live with toxic fear in their body is the very last thing that Black America needs.

3/21/2017

Dr. Stacey Patton reads from her new book, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America and engages her audience with a Q & A discussion on Facebook live.

A white teacher shares a powerful memory of a Black mom who whupped her daughter in front of his class 40 years ago.

For the past week, I’ve been receiving scores of emails and tweets from readers about my latest piece for The New York Times – Stop Beating Black Children. Some of those messages have been positive and some of them not worth reading to the end. But one letter from a retired schoolteacher left me in stunned silence because it took me back to my own childhood. The teacher, who is now in his seventies, gave me permission to reprint his letter but asked that I not reveal his name.

Here’s what he wrote on March 16:

“Professor Patton,

My name is XXXX XXXXXX.  I am White.  I grew up in a lower middle-class Jewish home where a hand was never laid upon me as a form of discipline. I employed that same form of discipline with my own three children. 

I also possess a Bachelor’s Degree in Elementary Education, a Master’s Degree in the Psychology of Reading, am a Board Certified Reading Specialist in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania where I taught beginning in the late 1960’s for forty-years for the School District of Philadelphia, working with Black children and other minority students of color during that entire tenure in the most impoverished neighborhoods of that city where my students’ families lived in abject poverty while coming to class with more psychological, emotional and physical baggage than any child attending elementary school should be asked to carry.  Because of where I grew up and went to school, I had no meaningful contact with children of color and their families until I began my first year of teaching, which was almost my last.

During that first year I asked for the parents of one of my students who I was having difficulty teaching to come after school for a parental conference to discuss the situation.  While I was teaching my class the day of the conference, the girl’s mother walked into my classroom without announcing herself, grabbed a hold of her daughter, threw her to the floor, took an extension cord out of her pocketbook and began to beat that child until she was crying hysterically, stopped, turned to me and said, “Mr. XXXXXX, you won’t have no more trouble from her,” turned and walked out the door. 

To say I was in a state of shock would be the understatement of the year.  Viewing just what took place, never having had experienced anything like that in my life, not ever thinking that anything like that could happen, I was briefly in a state of paralysis.  When what took place finally hit me, I asked two of the other girls in the class to take the beaten girl to the nurse’s office, called the principal to explain what had just happened and then went next door to ask a teacher’s aide to watch my class when I went to the men’s room to compose myself. 

At the end of the day of wasn’t sure if teaching was the right choice as a profession for me and wondered if I would even return the next day to get my personal possessions.  What changed my mind was speaking to an older more experienced Black teacher before I left school that day who had dealt with these kinds of situations over the years and somehow convinced me that I had the makings of a great teacher, that these children needed me as much as I needed them and that I should return the next day and pick up where I had left off.  I did, and eventually went on to have a successful forty year career doing something I loved, turning down promotions to better neighborhoods in the city that were not impoverished and whose students, whose families were not living in abject poverty.

The advice that of the more experienced Black teacher was the truth: I needed to be with my first students as much as they needed me to be their teacher.  I don’t know what potential that other teacher saw in me, but she was more prescient than I could have every imagined. One thing I didn’t recover from so quickly was asking for any parents to come in to talk about their children, as at least tens years or so went by before I did again. 

I have first-hand knowledge of everything you addressed in your article and couldn’t agree with you more.  After centuries of existence, there are still so many cultural, racial, religious, ethnic and socio-economics problems that our country faces that one can’t fathom even where to begin.  As I approach the age of seventy I am sadden by what I read in the newspaper and see on the news, because it seems the stories never change, only the names and with the election of that imbecile in the White House, I can only see things growing worse than they already are. 

I can only hope that members of one of our country’s demographics grow old and go the way of the Dodo and younger generations, who are more tolerant and compassionate will rise up in a world where we don’t see everyone that doesn’t look like us as the “Other,” a phrase Malcom Gladwell coined and that the words of Martin Luther King become reality when he said, “I have a dream that our children will be judged by the strength of their character, and not the color of their skin.”  I know I will not be around to see that come to be, but everyday I’m still alive, I hope that my three grandchildren, who are biracial and multiracial, will.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     Yours truly,

XXXXXX XXXXXXXX”

This letter touched me because it brought up memories from my own childhood. It forced me to remember all those times when my adoptive mother slapped me in front of my teachers when they reported that I was a disruptive chatterbox in class or that my performance was slacking. I remembered all those times when I couldn’t sit comfortably in my desk the next day after being whupped for negative comments on my report cards.

A teen who was forced to wear a shaming sign because of his poor grades.

This white male teacher’s letter made me remember a scene from fourth grade when a classmate’s mother came up to the school and beat him in front of the class with a handful of switches. Situations like this built a wall of distrust between our teachers and us. They dimmed the light in our eyes. Shut down our curiosity. Silenced us. Made us resistant to learning. Kept us from asking questions and made us fearful of making mistakes, which is required for the learning process. In our mind, teachers were the enemy who had the power to have us whupped.

I hated my white teachers for sitting back and allowing these beatings to go down. I felt that they were complicit in our abuse. How could they be okay with standing there and watching our parents slap and beat up? Why didn’t they intervene? If they knew that our bodies were going to be hurt, then why did they keep telling our parents when we messed up? Not to mention, our parents never allowed us the chance to give our side of the story. They always took our teacher’s words over ours, and sometimes our teachers really were mean or racists who shouldn’t have been teaching black children.

All these years, until I received this teacher’s poignant letter, I felt that educators were willfully complicit in the pain meted out on Black children by parents, who did not have the tools to address their children’s behaviors at school. Sometimes these parents were still holding on to their own traumas they experienced at school. Maybe their parents handled similar situations the same way. My adoptive mother was whupped at school and never got past junior high. And so she hit me out of frustration and embarrassment. She was not intellectually equipped to help me meet the challenges of school life but she felt that she could beat good behavior and good grades into me.

Parents who engage in this kind of behavior want to show their child that they are “boss.” They actually believe that they are assisting the teacher by demonstrating that they “don’t take not stuff,” and are a good, responsible Black parent. Just as enslaved parents did on plantations centuries ago.

Situations like this can escalate into serious abuse, or even fatalities. In February 2015, a Florida woman was arrested for beating her daughter over bad grades and making her wear a shaming T-shirt. A year later, 14-year-old Jalen Daniel’s parents beat him to death over bad grades. A simple Google search turns up scores of similar stories.

For a long time, I assumed that teachers never thought about the power and impact of their reports to parents. But this letter shows that at least some teachers were deeply affected. Even more telling, that scene in his classroom kept him from communicating with parents about their child’s progress for fear that his students might be beaten.

In a follow-up note, he said that he never regretted his decision to stay and teach. “Working with the kind of children I described in my letter, who were still young enough to wear an aura of innocence and trust about them and were still able to see only the good in people, was not only a joy, but a refuge from the problems I endured in my own life which paled in comparison to what that had to suffer.  I always felt and still do that helping a child is the noblest thing an adult could do . . . I can’t think of anything worth fighting for more than the lives and futures of our children.”