Many of us remember our parents “giving us something to cry about.” But recently, Black parents have been recording their toddlers’ challenging moments with humor. They’re adding gospel praise music over these moments, creating comedy gold instead, and this is more in line with our history than whooping or harsh discipline.
Whooping actually didn’t start with us. Europeans first punished their children with severe beatings and lashings, the more severe the better, but we disciplined children in OUR culture much differently.
Before enslavement, our children were never beaten, and historians tell us there’s no evidence of physical discipline of children in precolonial West African societies before missionaries and traders brought the practice with them. Children in many West African cultures were considered to be connected with the afterlife, and whooping children was thought to scare off the soul.
For us, whooping children into obedience was a form of protection from white terrorism, enslavement, and death in spaces where we weren’t safe. We still carry much of that generational trauma today.
Whooping our children is rooted in white supremacy and is NOT how we historically cared for them. Our culture was built on love, not violence, and as we continue to free ourselves from oppression, we must leave behind harm as a way to teach our young ones.