Sparing Kids from Corporal Punishment
Rutgers alumna – scholar, memoirist, victim of abuse – runs nonprofit to help African-American families find alternatives to hitting as a means of discipline
"When you hit a child, you're committing an assault. And while black families hardly have a monopoly on spanking and other forms of corporal punishment, too many black parents believe there's no other way they can keep their children safe in a racist society."– Stacey Patton
The scars on Stacey Patton’s face represent more than a fleshy record of violence at the hands of her adoptive mother.
For the African-American scholar and journalist, those marks bear somber witness to a cultural tradition with roots in slavery and the Jim Crow experience.
Patton has been determined to open a national conversation about that tradition since her days as a graduate student in history at Rutgers, when she began to delve deeply into the nature of slavery and its legacy in contemporary American society.
Today, the message she wants her audiences to hear is this: When you hit a child, you’re committing an assault. And while black families hardly have a monopoly on spanking and other forms of corporal punishment, Patton says, too many black parents believe there’s no other way they can keep their children safe in a racist society.
“A whipping has never saved a black child in any point in history,” says Patton, who writes about her own harrowing experiences in That Mean Old Yesterday, a 2007 memoir about growing up in New Jersey’s foster care system that traces the history of physical discipline of children in African-American families.
“Whipping your child will not keep that child safe on the streets, will not keep him out of jail, will not keep him from getting shot by a George Zimmerman,” she adds, referring to the racial encounter which left black teenager Trayvon Martin dead on a Florida sidewalk.
It’s a refrain Patton repeats in black churches and book groups, at academic forums around the country, at child welfare conferences and on the web site of Spare the Kids, the nonprofit she launched to provide black parents, families and communities with alternatives to corporal punishment.
And it’s a refrain increasingly being heard on the national scene, as Patton appears with the likes of Chris Hayes, Gayle King, Charlie Rose and Melissa Harris-Perry on television, and shares her theories in the pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times, among other news outlets.
While she’s adamantly opposed to hitting children as a way of keeping them in line, the 36-year-old historian, now a senior enterprise reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education and a resident of Washington D.C.,says she understands that the practice is an unwanted legacy of slavery and Jim Crow terrorism.
During her early years at Rutgers, where she received her doctorate in African-American history in 2011, Patton began delving into that tradition, and how it has carried over through time and space. She worked with history professor Virginia Yans, who ultimately became her dissertation adviser and with whom she remains in frequent touch.
Reading books like historian Wilma King’s “Stolen Childhood,” a chronicle of slave youth in 19th-century America, and studying narratives by former slaves and blacks who came of age during the first decades of Jim Crow, Patton recognized patterns from her own childhood with a Pentecostal adoptive mother who believed she had to whip her young charge – with a tree switches, a belt, a hanger or an extension cord -- to make her submissive and to prepare her for the realities of being a black girl growing up in modern America.
“I was getting the full weight of history beaten onto my body,” Patton says now. “My adoptive mother administered those whippings, but they did not originate with her. My academic training helped me understand where this practice came from, and it became clear to me that was the story I needed to write.”
Why her focus on black families when studies show 90 percent of American occasionally or frequently hit their children?
Patton keys in on societal disparities, noting that African-American children are more likely than others to be channeled into the foster care system, and to remain there longer. She also laments that black comedians regularly joke about beatings as part of their routines, while preachers endorse the practice from their pulpits and hip-hop artists and black rappers from Tupac on celebrate their mothers for having hit them.
“So much of our culture tells us this is the right thing to do,” Patton says. “Even today, people think problems in the black community are there because not enough parents whip their kids.”
Not surprisingly, her efforts at reform are not always embraced. Black audiences tend to become defensive, responding that keeping their children in line with physical intimidation is the only way to keep them off the streets and out of prisons and morgues.
But she argues that this only creates a false sense of protection that plays racist narratives about black behavior and pathology.
“These are very sensitive issues, and I’ve been called all kinds of names,” says Patton, whose views have recently been carried by the BBC, Al Jazeera and NPR, among other media outlets. “But I’m going to keep putting the message out there, because some parent is going to hear it or read it and be moved by the content of what I’ve said and find a better way to raise their kid.”
If she can keep one child to having to experience what she endured, she says, all the scars will have been worth it.