By Stacey Patton | Whupping children is so deeply entrenched into black culture that folks often won’t have a rational conversation or be receptive to new information about the potential physical and psychological harms of hitting children. That’s because when we were children, being whupped was presented to us in the context of “love” and “protection.” As such, many folks’ opinions and feelings about whuppings are based on their repression or forgetting what it was like to be a child. They’ve either repressed or forgotten the betrayal, pain, bewilderment, fear, resentment, sadness, and anger they felt while being on the receiving end of an adult hitting their body. They’ve turned pain into a positive. So when they talk about whuppings, there appears to be a sharp disconnect between what they likely experienced as a child and their staunch adult defense of the harmful practice. Read more →

A Q&A with Stacey Patton

People think that hitting a child is a form of teaching. We think it will protect them. And people grow up to invert the violence they experience as children as something that was good, particularly in African-American culture. As a people, we attribute our success to having had our bodies processed through violence and quite frankly what it does is confirm a long-standing racist narrative about Black bodies. The only way to control us, the only way to make us “good,” law-abiding, moral people is with a good whupping. It seems that we unconsciously agree with that narrative. Read more →