I’m willing to admit that this response may cause a lot of controversy.
If you haven’t heard about this case before, it all started with an 11 yr old boy who made a Facebook post claiming how gangsta he was. His family discovered the post and decided to make a post of their own. The boy was smacked in the face and spanked with a belt to the butt over 50 times, first by the mother and then the grandmother. The child was required to hold on the the arms of a chair and not move while being spanked.
Before we get into the incident itself and the right vs. wrong debate, I need to point out how much i’m bothered by the portrayals of the incident. Michigan’s NBC affiliate said he was abused for ‘posting false information to his Facebook page’. Meanwhile CNN focused on the fact that this was a public shaming as the beating was posted to Facebook, and that there could’ve been alternative punishments such as taking away the boy’s Facebook page.
I will be the first to admit that I don’t know the entire story here. However, I did see enough of the video to hear and understand what the parents reasoning was. The parents claimed that the child was trying to act like a gangsta, starting down a road of violence and gang behaviors that is all too common for inner-city black kids. They wanted to teach him a lesson before the world had a chance to teach him that lesson. By that I believe they meant that they would give him a beating he would never forget, but not the kind he’d never survive–such as the kind of beating you’d get on the street. This reasoning was completely lost or even disregarded in the news reports I reviewed. In other words, the news refused to allow any sort of justification for the action, instead looking at the act itself and instantly labeling it unjustifiable. This is the problem with the media: We have a tendency in our media to remove context from a situation in an effort to make everything black and white or even to adjust the perception of situations to suit our particular audience or ratings needs. There is no question this kid was beaten severely, but there is also no news outlet that is willing to entertain a reason why. I get it. The savagery of the attack is what we are supposed to focus on. If you look at it in the dimension of relatable ‘objects’ or ‘ideas’ we are seeing a child being brutally spanked and even slapped by several adults–behaviors that we tell ourselves are never okay. In fact, several news outlets went on to say that spanking is never okay.
Guess what? Spanking is sometimes okay. If that means CPS is gonna bust down my door and take my kids away now then so be it. The fact remains that sometimes spanking is the proper course of action for disciplining my child. Note: I didn’t say your child because the relationship between you and yours is as foreign to me as gefilte fish in a jar on ice. I’m with my kids constantly and know their needs and their limitations. I know what buttons to push when I need to leave a lasting message. Would I do what that family did to that kid? Not at all. While I understand the need for a good spanking, the length and scope of it went beyond what I would call acceptable, but once again, I don’t know their situation. I don’t know what passes for a spanking in that neighborhood. My mother once beat me with a brush until it broke and then got upset because I broke her brush. I know many kids who had to go out back and pick out the stick momma would beat them with. All of these stories are part of the Afro-American cultural lore and, in a very fundamental way, exist as a result of the slave culture (a conversation for another time).
I’m not prepared to say that what that family did was right. I will say it was stupid. Posting it sent exactly the message they wanted to send, but also likely punked the kid in such a way that he’ll be forced into violence in order to regain any semblance of a reputation. I am also not going to say that spanking is wrong. It is a part of multiple cultures, no matter how much it is being pushed out of the mainstream media (and in some senses White-American) culture that immediately criminalizes all acts of spanking without heed of context.