"James, did I read you correctly, that people in Baltimore beat older children with shoes and belts, and that this is not as bad as being struck with the mother's hand?"
JoAnn
Yes, madam, you did, and I did.
While my white nationalist friends believe that there is not one iota of cultural or behavioral residue from slavery among the black American population, I beg to differ. Child rearing practices pass down through the ages little changed, except in cases of enlightenment, and our nation has made certain that black students languish in the world's worst schools.
Keep in mind that most slaves were the children of a slave woman, and also of the slave master. There is no such thing as a black American. They are all mixed-race. Whereas the white slaves of the early colonial period were not owned by a parent, and fled and fought at the first opportunity, precipitating the importation of my docile African slaves, the emancipated African American slave had been the property of his father, had been whipped by his father [Yes, some times an uncle, and yes, sometimes a son of a mated pair of slaves, but still ruled by the white daddy in the big house], had been whipped by his mother in his father's absence. This tradition has continued as the switch in the rural south and the belt in urban areas has replaced the whip proper. Good middle-class black families still whip with the belt. President Obama promoted and lauded this practice at a high profile prayer breakfast with church luminaries a couple years ago.
Using a weapon on a family member to punish seems cruel. However, it is less personal and less proximate, making it psychologically easier on both parties. I train boxers and stick fights, and know what of I speak. Also, whipping imparts far less force, though inflicts more pain. A 400 pound mamma slapping and punching is far more likely to end up with a dead or crippled child than a mamma who is whooping away with the belt she can't get around her waist any longer. The shoe is purely a female gambit, and is usually resorted to by a mother who has hurt her hand on an increasingly hardened teenage body. Beating teenagers is very stressful foo women, and, counterintuitive though it may seem, she tends to seek sanctuary from her burden of cruelly disciplining her child—a burden her ancestors laid upon her—by depersonalizing it as much as possible. Just as they did, with an implement, one that floats somewhat free an makes a less efficient psychological and moral bridge between the master adult and her slave child.
The many beatings of black children that I have seen at the hands of their mothers in food markets, on buses and in public spaces, have all seemed highly stressful for the parent, who—stupid, violent and ignorant though she may be—is usually simply trying to control or teach her child in the manner that she was instructed to, when she herself was a child. Also, keep in mind, that black girls typically begin parenting at 8, as most black urban welfare mothers depend on their oldest female child to do the majority of the parenting while she either works, shops, gets high, drinks, whores or breeds.
The single most savage attack I have seen by a mother on a child was when I was building a display in the box display L-entrance of a supermarket in 2009. A boy of 8 or 9 waked in ahead of his mother, who was about 30. I stepped back to make room, as he grabbed for a bag of Doritos that I had diabolically displayed to catch his eye as he came into this wonderland of free food.
She said, sternly, "no."
They were both wearing white shorts and red shirt [his a polo shirt and hers a buttoned up blouse] with white sneakers, tastefully dressed and belted, her with little jewelry and no wig, but a tightly bunned afro.
He began to plead and her eyes flashed hate. He moved quickly, but not quickly enough, trying to place that bag back on the wire rack and turn away from the hurtling steel shopping cart at the same time. The bumper pipe on the bottom of the cart caught him just above the ankle with a tinny "schliing!" At the very same time that his leg was buckling from the cruel blow, his mother [who was about 180 to his 80 pounds] gritted her teeth as she snarled and pushed the harder, driving the bottom corner of the steel wire frame basket into his low back, sending him to his knees in agony, unable to rise or cry. Then, as he squirmed on the hard tile floor, she pulled back the cart and pushed with all of her might, sending the steel tube bumper at the bottom front of the cart into his kidney and short ribs.
She then nudged him with the cart, using it like a prod as she snarled, "Get up, you in da man's way."
Notably she did not swear, as is usually the case with welfare mothers, so she may well have been a working parent.
The boy lurched to his feet in deep breathless pain and then limped along holding the cart as she prodded him with it and smiled to me.
I was building a display of #10 cans of Libby's green beans, and do recall that it looked right nice, nigh indestructible, and well able to withstand some hoodrat child bouncing off of it as he was shoved and slapped through the door by his mother, which is a very common mode of entry into such fine emporiums...
