Abuse

Hear  me clearly when I say that I do not condone, endorse, defend, nor can I justify the actions of Ray Rice or the dude who beat his child with the switch.  I CAN and do understand why they behaved the way they did; I understand how Black men across the country are filled with rage, unable to process their emotions, and developmentally stunted so much so that the only thing they know is to perpetuate the violence that was inflicted upon them.  If there had ever been any significant study done on the effects of slavery in this nation, a slavery that is different than any other crime against humanity in the history of the world, there would have been investigation into the repeated and persistent torture and abuse that slaves suffered and how it affected them.  Because white people, and let’s put the blame squarely where it belongs here, again, because white people are intent on denying, ignoring, and negating the impact of slavery on the mentality and psychology of contemporary African Americans, the practices learned and handed down from generation to generation, the practices we learned at the end of the white man’s whip, those practices include beating, whipping, spanking, and punching to control people.  Black men are particularly affected because they are socialized and raised to be emotionally immature.  They are not given an outlet to express their emotions.  They are raised and socialized to be super macho, super manly, super emotionally retarded.  They don’t know how to even identify their emotions, let alone express them in a healthy way.  There are millions of Ray Rice’s and millions upon millions of men exactly like the other dude. 

Human beings, more specifically the human brain, has a need to justify and rationalize that its experiences, the factors that contributed to the influences that shaped them and BELIEIVE that were right.  It’s the mind’s defense mechanism.  It works to make people feel safe, to rationalize and soothe their feelings of insecurity and fear of judgment.  Slaves were beaten, BRUTALLY beaten, abused, and tortured for white people’s perverse pleasure, entertainment, and ego.  Slaves learned that abuse is the way to control people.  They passed those messages down generation from generation.  They beat their children because that’s all they had to control.  They beat their children because that’s all they knew how to do. 

My grandfather beat my mother and my uncle the way white slave masters beat slaves, with the same force and brutality.  He didn’t do it because he was a mean person, he was a very gentle soul.  He beat them brutally, BRUTALLY because he believed that was the way to make his children behave, conform, and stay in line like mindless slaves.  He was brutally beaten as a child.  He never thought that it was wrong or bad because his father was brutally beaten by his father, who was born a slave.  My mother beat me.  Daily.  She beat me when things went wrong at work.  She beat me when she was frustrated with the married men in her life.  She beat me to beat my individuality and uniqueness out of me, to make me be just like me.  She denies it now.  She claims she never even spanked me.  She swears she was a perfect mother.  Her mind is in conflict because some part of her understands that it’s wrong to beat your child that severely but there is also a part of her that tells her that what she did was right because it was done to her. 

My uncle probably got the most severe beatings from my grandfather.  He is an alcoholic now with EXTREME rage and anger boiled up in him.  He has severely beaten and abused all the women in his life.  He beat and abused his sons repeatedly.  His sons have perpetuated the same violence in their lives.  My uncle has been dangerously quiet about Ray Rice and the other dude because he is guilty of the things they did and worse.  It has to be causing emotional conflict.  He knows that he should say that what they did was terrible and wrong but he knows in his heart that he has done far worse than what they did.  What we do to Black boys by telling them not to cry, by telling them to be a man, by telling them that they can’t show emotion or they will be sissies is we create the inner rage and frustration that makes Black men rationalize and justify that punching a woman is okay because they desperately want to control something in their lives.  They want to be this one-dimensional and stereotypical “head of the household” and king of the castle that society tells them that they should be by virtue of their penis but they feel frustration and they lash out at the things that they are told that they should be able to control, the women and children in their lives.  It’s a pathology born in slavery. 

I cannot, will not, and do not condone what these men have done but I understand how their behaviors have evolved.  I get how Black men who are abusers are among their friends saying, “Yeah, I would never hit a woman, I would never hit my child like that,” when in fact they’ve done that and worse.  I understand how Black men feel that punching, beating, and whipping is all they have in their arsenal to control the rage that they feel.  I totally understand how Black mothers who feel angry, alone, frustrated, and who need to justify the abuse inflicted upon them repeat the patterns. 

Let us pray that the cycle can be broken.  Let us pray that there is within each and every descendant of slaves a tiny spirit of liberation that whispers that abuse and violence is wrong and it must end.  Beating your children doesn’t keep them out of jail, LOVE does that.  Nurturing does that.  Discipline does that but discipline doesn’t have to mean abuse.  What we suffered, we being you, me, and the collective Black race, was abuse.  Rather than saying, “Well, I was raised that way and I turned out fine,” let us now say, “What happened to me was wrong and I will not perpetuate the same thing on my children.  I will break the cycle of abuse.”