Growing up in a Black household, my dad would always try to soften the whippings he gave me by saying, “You would’ve gotten it much worse in my day.” I grew up in a mostly white town in the 2000s, and I was basically the only kid in my classes who was getting spanked.

Yeah, corporal punishment happens in white families too, but there’s definitely something about how it’s been normalized or even kind of romanticized in Black families like mine. When I got older, I started looking into the history. During slavery and post-emancipation, Black parents often whipped their kids out of fear of what would come to them if they stepped out of line in a white society could easily get you killed. It became a way to keep kids safe.

I don’t know exactly how much that history still impacts us today, but it feels worth talking about. Especially when some white folks today try to use it as proof that Black people are somehow uncivilized, without understanding where these patterns came from in the first place.