The Black Family’s Escape From Corporal Punishment
In May, the Guardian published a profile of Malcolm and Simone Collins, a married couple who have become the public faces of the pronatalist movement, which promotes high birth rates as a bulwark against population decline. The Collinses are white, transposing the bookish aesthetic of a Wes Anderson movie onto their frontiers-y corner of Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. They also hit their kids. At one point, reporter Jenny Kleeman observed Malcolm slapping his 2-year-old son’s face “with the palm of his hand.”
Criticism of this casual display of corporal punishment dominated the response to the article on social media, which in turn produced a remarkable rebuttal from the Collinses. “We are kind of shocked by the racism threaded throughout this recent controversy,” Simone wrote in an email to Business Insider. “It is pretty well-documented that African Americans and other minority groups practice corporal punishment much more than other groups.”
I knew better than to get too offended by this attempt at self-exoneration, but it was one of those moments when my perception of myself (Black father of two kids) seemed totally at odds with the perception of myself held by a white stranger (Black father of two kids whom he probably smacks around). No matter how badly the Collinses had mistreated their children, it could not possibly be worse than how Black people treated ours.
This was not a new assumption. When I was growing up during the 1990s and aughts, the consensus among politicians, news reporters, celebrities, and public intellectuals was that Black parents were morally bankrupt and irresponsible. Heated debates over welfare reform cast Black mothers as lazy and undeserving, while America’s Dad, Bill Cosby, chided Black fathers for being deadbeats. “They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men,” Barack Obama told a Chicago church congregation in 2008, expressing a sentiment that would have been equally at home on The O’Reilly Factor. The upshot was clear: Our families were so lacking in positive values that we, their Black children, would be lucky if we survived them.
One effect of these low expectations is that the bar for Black fathers in the post-Obama era is somewhere near the floor. So many problems — “superpredators” and “crack babies,” high crime and low test scores, pregnant teens and incarcerated fathers — were blamed on my forebears that my generation’s basic competence is sometimes mistaken for exceptionality. “It’s so nice,” my son’s pre-K teacher told me and my wife unprompted, “to see a Black boy who has such a close relationship with his dad.” I have received enough praise for taking my kids to the supermarket without their mother’s supervision that it’s hard not to indulge in some degree of self-satisfaction.
The data seemed to tell the same triumphant story. Black fathers today are more involved with their children than fathers of other races, according to the CDC, while Pew said that Black parents were the most likely to consider parenting the most important aspect of their lives. A study commissioned by the racial-justice advocacy group Color of Change found that digital media vastly overrepresents the share of Black families that have absentee parents, are on welfare, or are involved with criminal activity, while underrepresenting white ones. Right-wing media is the worst offender, but the message is similar across the ideological spectrum: Black families are hotbeds of social instability, despite the “vast majority” of Black fathers doing “what we expect and hope Black dads would do,” said the Color of Change report’s author, Travis Dixon of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Yet Black parents seem unable to fully shed our timeworn status as the standard against which others are favorably judged. And perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in debates over corporal punishment, which mask just how hard Black parents have fought to move beyond such narrow efforts to define them.
In 1968, when my mother was 18 years old, single, and pregnant with her first child, a nationwide backlash to the civil-rights movement was in full swing with pundits and policymakers settling on absent Black dads and feckless Black moms as responsible for Black people’s troubles. At the time, however, corporal punishment was being deployed against children everywhere — rich or poor, at school or in the house, by adults who were Black, white, or otherwise, across the United States. My brother was no exception, a willful kid whom my mother disciplined the way she had been taught. He still remembers the flower pattern on the plastic belt she used.
It would not have occurred to either of them to think of corporal punishment as a “Black” thing — it was simply parenting. By the time she had me nearly 20 years later, and my sister four years after that, my mother and my father had opted to make a clean break with how they were raised. They never once hit us, and we didn’t grow up feeling like some important part of our parents’ cultures had been lost.
Still, the idea that Black families are especially devoted to corporal punishment has become broadly accepted, even by Black people themselves. Some characterized the practice as a desperate means of self-preservation, of protecting Black kids from racist violence in the outside world by enforcing severe discipline at home. Some argued that it was part of our culture. If corporal punishment were criminalized, “every Black parent in the South is going to be in jail,” Charles Barkley said while defending Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings running back who was arrested in 2014 for child abuse for whipping his 4-year-old son’s buttocks and genitals with a tree branch.
In 2019, a group of Black physicians pushed back on the American Academy of Pediatrics’ advisory against corporal punishment, saying that, by failing to differentiate between “spanking” and “abuse,” the organization was putting Black families at greater risk of aggressive enforcement by child-protection agencies and alienating them from doctors who were critical of the practice. The AAP’s advisory linked all forms of corporal punishment to “an increased risk of negative behavioral, cognitive, psychosocial, and emotional outcomes for children” and offered no caveats for spanking. Combined with the Black doctors’ protests, the incident fed the twin notions that corporal punishment was bad parenting and bad parenting was “Black.”
For white people like the Collinses, invoking Black culture to defend their own behavior was another way to avoid interrogating the behavior itself. Meanwhile, most of the Black parenting I have seen rarely resembled their vision of it. My wife regularly jokes that our children are alarmingly unafraid of us. Our agreement never to spank them was almost entirely unspoken, while the Black parents we are friends with in Atlanta, a large Southern city of the sort Barkley once implied was swarming with Black parents who hit their kids, also do not hit their children.
“I’m very vigilant because of my upbringing,” said Amare, a craftsman with a 3-year-old daughter whose mother spanked and pinched him and whose father beat him. “I am very scared of re-creating that. I know I never will.” Tomi Akitunde, who edits a Black parenting blog called Mater Mea, told me, “Our parenting advice is always going to be rooted in this mindful, no-corporal-punishment mind-set.”
“I recently confronted my mother about some of the harsh corporal punishment she used, and she didn’t even remember it,” said my friend Walter. “It’s not okay.”
For most of American history, Black parenting has taken place under duress with survival mode the default. Sarah Vidal McMurtry, a clinical psychologist who specializes in children’s developmental disabilities, said she can see millennial and Gen-Z Black parents wrestling with the legacy their parents left them. “‘I want to do things differently,’” she said they tell her. “I see a lot of parents talk about, ‘I want to hear from my child. I want to understand what they’re going through.’”
McMurtry remembers being taught as a child, “You’re to be seen and not heard.” Trauma loomed large in her community in Mississippi, from the systemic to the personal, and it led to a parenting style rooted in fear. “Some of these practices limit the development of communication strategies for children,” she said. “Like how to communicate about conflict in a way that’s respectful versus just having to ‘hush it up’ or having to get really loud in order to be heard.”
For Colette, who has two daughters ages 11 and 10, developing that kind of relationship is part of a bigger objective — striking the ideal balance between letting her kids be kids, who “need to be able to make mistakes,” and preparing them for being Black women. “I want to fulfill that child part of them,” she said, “so that as an adult, they’re not behaving in ways that are childish.” She is also not a disciplinarian — the go-to consequence for misbehavior in her home is to limit the girls’ smartphone access. “It’s a generational change,” she said.
Even the parents I spoke with who are poorer and more economically precarious than their parents have put special emphasis on their children’s emotional well-being.
“I think the times were different,” said Trina, the founder of a Black parenting website called Parenting for Liberation. “I think the challenges that Black folks were wrestling with were different.” Before her son was born, Trina did anti-incarceration advocacy work with Black youth that involved lobbying adults to listen with respect to what kids had to say — an approach she felt reflected her values. But when she became a parent, she said, those values largely went out the window. She became an authoritarian, yelling and issuing top-down edicts. “I had to get really curious about why there was a misalignment,” she said. She realized she was trying to force her son to behave in ways that would “prevent racism from happening to him — which, if I was at work, I would’ve never said that to my young people.”
The costs became clear to her in the disheartening correlation she saw between how she parented and how her son acted. “When I was parenting from fear, I noticed that he was a little more fearful and timid,” she told me. She concluded that she wanted her parenting to be driven more by questions than predetermined answers: “Is my child thriving? Is my child mentally and emotionally well?” She began by providing more space for him to speak up when she was being too fearful, too authoritarian, too easily frustrated. The result was a small revolution in her son’s self-esteem and sense of empowerment, and it reconfirmed for Trina that she could move beyond survival mode. “We can unlearn,” she said, “and learn new practices.”
There have always been wide variances in how Black people parent. Some have tried to instill a “twice as good” ethos in their kids, arming them for success on the terms of a cutthroat white-dominated society; others have embraced alternative or Afrocentric approaches that eschewed white opinion altogether. Most assumed that Black children would enter a world that was hostile toward them and demanded extraordinary fortitude. George Floyd’s killing in 2020 would in many ways justify those assumptions — but for many parents, it was also a turning point, a moment to reflect on whether their children’s youth was a necessary sacrifice.
“They have a childhood,” Walter said of his two sons. “I know what it’s like to not be able to experience that in its fullness.” “We’re pushing back on schools, we’re calling out police brutality,” said Amelia, Walter’s wife. “But an enduring message I get from my Black friends is that they want their kids to have joy.”
Like-minded Black parenting communities dedicated to preserving this more innocent notion of Black childhood — in part by rejecting corporal punishment — have risen accordingly. Essence, arguably the most influential Black magazine in the U.S., recently asked Trina, whose Parenting for Liberation website doubles as a hub for in-person meetups, to contribute to an article titled, “Gentle Parenting — But Make it Black.” Implied in this approach is a commitment not to submit one’s parenting to the whims of white judgment — or to that of Black scolds like Obama, for that matter.
Also implied is a commitment to stronger Black parenting communities, both online and off, that can forge new norms and practices. As the Collinses showed, it’s clear that bad parenting is still coded as “Black,” and that efforts to cast Black parents as America’s bogeymen are not going away any time soon. The coding runs so deep, and has been used to justify marginalizing Black families for so much of our history, that we can no more transcend it alone than we can exorcise it using rods or switches.
The understanding that young Black parents are not what mainstream assumptions make us out to be is a rejection less of how past generations approached raising Black children than of the hoary notion that Black people need to be hammered into worthiness. “Black people need rest, and time, and space,” said Amelia. “I’m not saying parenting in a strict way is okay, but I could understand the politics of that and give parents grace.” In this regard, the experience of being a Black parent both represents its own unique set of challenges and is, in some ways, emblematic of parenting overall: Centuries have been spent defining it in terms of its perceived failures, but the only thing truly definite about it is that parents can, and must continue to, redefine it for ourselves.