How Can You Love Your Children If You Beat Them?


I always wanted to pose a question to Black parents specifically, but was always unsure about how to go about doing so without causing too much offense. So I’ll just ask it straight: Black people who are raising Black children, Do you like your children?

I know folks say all the time how much they love their babies and all, but that’s the socially responsible answer meant to keep child protective services out of your business. The question is: When you are all alone and no one is around to judge you, how do you really feel about your children? Most days do they feel like a burden to you or do you respect them as human beings and as individuals?

I ask this because there is a video floating around both Facebook and some of the gossip sites, which shows a dad pummeling his son out in the middle of the street while some annoymous, possible neighbor records the entire incident from the safety of his porch. The kids crime, as the Internet tells it, was that he was smoking weed in the house. An offense that he had been warned about previously. In the video, which you can watch here, you can see the father wailing on his son repeatedly like a boxer would do to an unmatched oppenent. After he is done beating and publicly humiliating his child, he then instructs him to get his stuff because he is no longer wanted in their home. Then the father casually walks across the street and back into his home, while his battered and bruised son sits crying to himself on the curb.

Although, there are many other examples of this sort of “discipline” I chose to highlight this particular incident because I wanted to dispell the myth that the often harsh and heavy handed punishment of our children is a direct result of children being raised in households without fathers. It isn’t true. And sometimes, as seen in the video, the abuse (yes, abuse) by the fathers, grandfathers and uncles in our lives is more severe and hurtful than anything that could be done at the hands of a single mother.

I also chose to highlight this video based upon how nonchalant the bystanders are about the severity of this beating. From the anonymous camera person whose only reaction to watching a grown man beat the snot out of a child is to “ooh” and “aah” at the potency of the dad’s right hook, to the many viewers and social media sharers of this video, who justify this beating by saying that the son had it coming. No one intevenes. No one thinks it is a problem. No one sees the abuse. No one stops to consider that perhaps the reason why this child decided to smoke weed is to numb the pain of living in the house with parents, who say they love him, but act like they don’t like him very much.

Shortly, after Toya Graham captured the national spotlight and was hailed a hero for beating her son, who was participating in the protests and riots in Baltimore, Stacey Patton, adjunct professor of American history at American University and the author of “That Mean Old Yesterday,” penned a brilliant piece for The Washington Post, challenging the idea that we beat our children in order to protect them. In particular, she notes:

“Praising Graham distracts from a hard truth: It doesn’t matter how black children behave — whether they throw rocks at the police, burn a CVS, join gangs, walk home from the store with candy in their pockets, listen to rap music in a car with friends, play with a toy gun in a park or simply make eye contact with a police officer — they risk being killed and then blamed for their own deaths, because black youths are rarely viewed as innocent or worthy of protection.

If there were an easy way to keep black children safe from police, out of prisons, morgues and graves, we would not have spent the past three years in an almost endless cycle of grieving the loss of young black people: Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride, Rekia Boyd, Jordan Davis, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray and . . . and . . . and . . . . The list is too long to fit into my word count.

This celebration of Toya Graham reflects a belief that black youths are inherently problematic, criminal and out of control. The video also supports the idea that black fathers are always absent, and that everything will be fine if an angry black mom just beats the “thug” out of an angry young man.”

Our prisons are filled with men and women whose parents also tried to beat the thug out of them. Matter of fact, a recent study conducted in Germany found that, as reported by the Economist, “People who as children experienced the “powerlessness” of frequent spankings report a disproportionately greater interest later in life to own guns, Mr Pfeiffer says. They also demand more draconian prison sentences, including the death penalty, for convicted criminals. And they seem more prone to violence themselves.”

Sometimes I wonder if we are afraid to love our children. Our history in this country, includes a legacy where Black children were not the offspring of Black parents, but rather the property of slave masters who could trade, sell and abuse them at will. Not only did our ancestors watch helplessly as their own children were beaten by the master’s whip, but sometimes, our ancestors were enlisted to do the whipping themselves.

Yet this tradition of beating our children before “they” can beat them continues on in our community. And yet our communities are no more the safer, and our children or no more the happier.