Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The survival legacy of slavery taught blacks to spank more than whites -- and that's why you don't see as many black kids having public tantrums.
Oct 7, 1998 | About this time two years ago, a group of parents at my son's Montessori school were precariously perched on their children's teensy chairs, trying to listen to a Better Parenting seminar while trying not to envision what they must have looked like to the person directly behind them. (So little chair, so much heinie.) The lecturer, a parent who is a clinical psychologist, was explaining that spanking is never, ever appropriate. "It just shows the child you have no control over the situation, " she said, in her soothing, well-modulated voice.
Post-lecture, over cookies and coffee, several black parents edged near each other and whispered, "I'm sorry, but I spank. I believe in spanking. This not-spanking thing is for white folks."
Or, in the eyes of our elders, overly assimilated black ones. This spring, I went back to my 25th college reunion. One morning I shared breakfast and small talk with a classmate's family from Chicago. "Your children are such nice kids," I told the husband, who'd stayed behind to drink coffee with me while his wife went off to see about arrangements for their 12-year-old daughter and 7-year-old son. The husband laughed. "Well then, that would be by the grace of God, because according to my parents, we don't discipline them nearly enough." He grew up in a working-class family on the South Side, and in his parents' view, he and my classmate, a computer engineer and a doctor, respectively, were leaving a little too much slack in the leash. There were, he admitted, some inter-household tensions from time to time over whose parenting philosophy was correct.
That led to a discussion on spanking -- we both do, when we think it's needed, but only with our hands, only on the butt, and never when we're furious with them -- and who does it and how much and so on. Our very scientific conclusion: We do it, "they" (meaning white folks) don't -- and the results, judging from the unchecked public tantrums we've seen many young white children employ, seem to speak for themselves.
Spanking is part of a long, historic continuum in our community. During slavery, a black person's pout or backtalk to the wrong person could not only get him whipped, it could get him sold -- or, if the transgression was deemed bad enough, maimed or killed. So black mothers and, by extension, the entire local community, had a vested interest in keeping their children alive and safe. Swift physical retribution for even minute transgressions tended to reinforce the rules, and adhering to the rules meant you were able to live to raise another generation -- who, in all probability, spanked, too, but not as hard as the previous one.
The annals of black comedy are rife with examples of strict parental discipline. Sinbad, Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and the late Robin Harris have all riffed howlingly funny on the subject of gettin' whupped. Cosby used to make audiences scream in delighted recognition when he went into his routine about The Belt that hung in his father's closet: how long it was. How thick it was. How big the metal buckle was. What it sounded like as it whistled through the air, accurately aiming, like a smart bomb made from the cow's outside, at his quivering buttocks. What it felt like when, on impact, his flesh was sucked through the holes.
He was exaggerating, of course. (Of course he was!) But he made his point: In general, black folks were definitely into physical discipline; it was what helped turn you into a citizen of the civilized world. In 1988, I had a brief conversation with Jesse Jackson when he was in town for the California presidential primary. His mother, Helen, had come along on the campaign bus, and I told him what a delightful lady I thought she was.
"Huh," he snorted, "you should have grown up with her. My Mama beat me so bad when I was little, I can still feel it." I laughed and suggested those whacks from his tiny, devoted mother might have made him the notable person he is today. He winked: "Probably didn't hurt."
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