WASHINGTON — THE indictment last week of the N.F.L. player Adrian Peterson by a Texas grand jury for reckless or negligent injury to a child has set into relief the harmful disciplinary practices of some black families. Mr. Peterson used a “switch,” a slim, leafless tree branch, to beat his 4-year-old son, raising welts on the youngster’s legs, buttocks and scrotum. This is child abuse dressed up as acceptable punishment.
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.”i posed the question as to these beatings being a result of slavery in an earlier post, this it why this caught my interest. i saw him on Tameron Hall's show this morning and was intrigued by his response to questions about Viking Adrian Peterson and his alleged over beating of his 4 year old.
i was subjected to beatings from a stepfather at 10 yrs by his fist to my face or switches big enough to leave purple welts on me while my aunts and uncles and mother watched no one tried to stop him at a family reunion.both parents use to use what ever they got their hand on first extension cords, iron cords steam iron for clothes cord, one time step father took the hard plastic rim around a small plastic pool and beat me with that, i stole a cap gun from a store and got caught.
i want to say i understand Peterson maybe but it would be from the remembrance not personal experience.i have two kids i beat my son once for going off for hours with other kids he didn't know, it was the first time they visited after their mom and i separated nothing to do with violence, i never did it again and never with my daughter they are now 44 and 42 respectively and have kids of their own they seem to take the manner i took after my son's beating with my belt, i took to looking mean and adopting a "you know i mean it voice" it worked.i thank God that i took a more passive but stern approach when i very well could have fallen into the same bag as Dr. Dyson refers to.
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.
Like many biblical literalists, lots of black believers are fond of quoting Scriptures to justify corporal punishment, particularly the verse in Proverbs 13:24 that says, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” But in Hebrew, the word translated as “rod” is the same word used in Psalms 23:4, “thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.” The shepherd’s rod was used to guide the sheep, not to beat them.
Many believers — including Mr. Peterson, a vocal Christian — have confused the correction of children’s behavior with corporal punishment. The word “discipline” comes from the Latin “discipuli,” which means student or disciple, suggesting a teacher-pupil relationship. Punishment comes from the Greek word “poine” and its Latin derivative “poena,” which mean revenge, and form the root words of pain, penalty and penitentiary.
The point of discipline is to transmit values to children. The purpose of punishment is to coerce compliance and secure control, and failing that, to inflict pain as a form of revenge, a realm the Bible says belongs to God
i too remember the "spare the rod spoil the child" back in the day there was little sparing. i remember my grandmother use to line us up and take our shirts off and force us to sing hymns if we got it wrong or showed a lack of enthusiasm she would hit our backs with a wet dish cloth. we all are victims to our past some escape some don't some are dormant others are right out the gate.
Yet secular black culture thrives on colorful stories of punishment that are passed along as myths of ancient wisdom — a type of moral glue that holds together varying communities in black life across time and circumstance. Black comedians cut their teeth on dramatically recalling “whoopings” with belts, switches, extension cords, hairbrushes or whatever implement was at hand. Even as genial a comic as Bill Cosby offered a riff in his legendary 1983 routine that left no doubt about the deadly threat of black punishment. “My father established our relationship when I was 7 years old,” Mr. Cosby joked. “He looked at me and says, ‘You know, I brought you in this world, I’ll take you out. And it don’t make no difference to me, cause I’ll make another one look just like you.’ ”
The humor is blunted when when we recall that Marvin Gaye’s life ended violently in 1984 at the hands of his father, a minister who brutalized him mercilessly as a child before shooting him to death in a chilling echo of Mr. Cosby’s words. 10 minutes ago
maybe had we not been so suppressed we might have found our way out of this, we should view this as a start and those families can start a discourse that may allow us to put this away for future generations but not forgotten if we do it will return.
