Aberrant Behavior Episode 4 - Spankings and Slavery

In this episode, I talk specifically to black parents, guardians and caregivers. I wanted to facilitate a conversation about the devastating effects of spankings within the black family.

I talk from my perspective as a kid who received many spankings growing up and how that affected me detrimentally. I was only able to identify said detrimental effects when I started doing the work of healing from my many traumas. This is my attempt to start a conversation and perhaps a change of heart in people who have adopted this slave era practice of beating black bodies as their own.

It was never ours to begin with. In fact, according to an article, “West African traditional belief held that children were reincarnated ancestors. West African societies held children in a much higher regard than slave societies in the Atlantic world, which placed emphasis on black bodies as property, not as human beings. West Africans believed that children came from the afterlife, that they were gods or reincarnated ancestors who led profoundly spiritual lives and held extraordinary mystical powers that could be harnessed through ritual practice for the good of the community. In fact, it was believed that coercion and hitting a child could scare off their soul. With Colonialism and slave trade, African-Americans adopted the practice of beating children from white slave masters” (Patton, 2017). 

It is a practice that is extremely detrimental to the psychological wellbeing of our children, Obedience from our children shouldn’t be the biggest accomplishments of us raising them. There is much to be said about raising children who are independent in thought and actions who are not mere subservient clones of ours.

I leave you with my favorite poem from Kahlil Gibran on raising children:

“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.”

Resources:

The case against spanking: https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/04/spanking

Corporal punishment in black communities: Not an intrinsic cultural tradition but racial trauma: https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2017/04/racial-trauma

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