NYTimes | While
70 percent of Americans approve of corporal punishment, black Americans
have a distinct history with the subject. Beating children has been a
depressingly familiar habit in black families since our arrival in the
New World. As the black psychiatrists William H. Grier and Price M.
Cobbs wrote in “Black Rage,” their 1968 examination of psychological
black life: “Beating in child-rearing actually has its psychological
roots in slavery and even yet black parents will feel that, just as they
have suffered beatings as children, so it is right that their children
be so treated.”
The
lash of the plantation overseer fell heavily on children to whip them
into fear of white authority. Terror in the field often gave way to
parents beating black children in the shack, or at times in the presence
of the slave owner in forced cooperation to break a rebellious child’s
spirit. Black parents beat their children to keep them from misbehaving
in the eyes of whites who had the power to send black youth to their
deaths for the slightest offense. Today, many black parents fear that a
loose tongue or flash of temper could get their child killed by a
trigger-happy cop. They would rather beat their offspring than bury
them.
If
beating children began, paradoxically, as a violent preventive of even
greater violence, it was enthusiastically embraced in black culture,
especially when God was recruited. As an ordained Baptist minister with a
doctorate in religion, I have heard all sorts of religious excuses for
whippings.
NYTimes | According
to reports about the Adrian Peterson felony abuse indictment,
Peterson’s 4-year-old son pushed another of Peterson’s sons off a video
game. Peterson then retrieved a tree branch — called a “switch” —
stripped off its leaves, shoved leaves into the boy’s mouth and beat him
with his pants down until he bled.
According to a CBS affiliate in Houston,
Peterson texted the boy’s mother that she would be “mad at me about his
legs. I got kinda good wit the tail end of the switch.”
He
also reportedly texted that he “felt bad after the fact when I notice
the switch was wrapping around hitting I (sic) thigh” and “Got him in
nuts once I noticed. But I felt so bad, n I’m all tearing that butt up
when needed! I start putting them in timeout. N save the whooping for
needed memories!”
But
the boy reportedly said, “Daddy Peterson hit me on my face,” that his
father “likes belts and switches,” that “there are a lot of belts in
Daddy’s closet,” and that he “has a whooping room.”
Spanking is not against the law in America — although some argue that it should be, as it is in Sweden and some other countries
— but, as with most things in life, there are degrees beyond which even
something that is generally acceptable, or at least legal, crosses a
threshold and becomes not so.
