This is such an excellent point, and it is not abstract. The law existed that stated is a white man killed a black man, he must reimburse the owner of the black man. Enslaved humans were not cheap, averaging at some points $15-35K. In some cases the government reimbursed the owner. The New Orleans rebellion of 1811, the government paid reparations to the owners. [Yes, reparations were paid to white slave *owners* in America.] I wrote a recent story on the government paying reparations to foreign governments in the 1880s and 90s for minority immigrants killed by violent groups of white supremacists.
The other critical insight is how violence was so radically difference between black American parents and white American parents. The white parents, especially in the South, beat their children to “teach a lesson.” That was the attitude of the white slave drivers in the Deep South between 1800-1860 during the cotton boom. Whippings were often daily or weekly for not meeting arbitrary picking targets per pound set the day before at weigh in.
Your parents unfortunately used white terrorist techniques to prevent actual white terrorism and death. I was very luck growing up white with pacific parents. My mom once washed my mouth out with soap during a bad period before my parents divorced. She later in life deeply apologized and I could see how it cause her pain. But that period was difficult, and my older brothers probably did the swearing. My father once spanked me after the divorce when I was 11, during the time he had to take care of us four kids. My older sister and brother told him not to. He later in life apologized and I saw how he felt bad. I had called him a child abuser or something after the spanking when I went up the stairs to my room. I was more embarrassed than pained.
I’ve maintained our pacifism as has my wife. Our children have never been hit. It’s obvious when gauging reactions in public. A woman said, “Your daughter is touching that stuff,” when I was in the bookshop and she was maybe 2. I said, Oh, and shrugged it off. She independently handled something and put it back. Another woman seemed to accuse me of hitting her, as my daughter bumped into an open cabinet his her forehead, caused a big bump with a cut. I said to this woman in the supermarket it was an accident, and she said, Sure it is. How quickly she could only believe I was an abuser. I’m so sensitive to violence that even reading
Texas is a Southern state and it was only white women who said things to me. (There’s violence up North where I grew up, but not as pervasive and frequent in terms of spankings and children.). One day at the bus stop a few years later, the women were talking about spanking, one white mother from South Carolina whose super nice and I would liberal, and the other conservative from Louisiana (with a liberal husband). Both are educated. We live in a very multicultural neighborhood. One asked about spanking, and both said they did it is they had to. I bit my tongue, though my instinct was to say, You should never hit a child, it’s bullying. Pick on someone your own size. But their attitude expressed a an accepting culture to this type of “punishment.”
It is a type that psychologists have shown teaches nothing but resentment. Children under 5 don’t even know what they are being hit for. The human brain does become rule based until between 3 and 4, so there’s no use teaching generalized rules and hitting does not connect to the prefrontal cortex where rules are formed. That type of logical connections takes years to fully form. Hitting children is thus useless under five and only shows how quickly an adult can lose their temper for word.
Black American descendants of slaves when through long periods of violence, which became worse both by technological advancement (the bullwhip stating in 1805 or so as an ‘improvement’ over the cat and nine tails in Virginia), and in regularity (daily instead of randomly from the 17th century). They hit their children in return as a warning mechanism as reaction to the violence they received, probably from the deep frustration of being able to stop it. This insight I had not thought of before, how similar violence comes from different sources in America based on race.
You’ve broken a cycle of violence and told others, connecting it a deep history of violence, wrote clearly for us, and offering critical insight how it is connected to that history. You are awesome on all fronts (as usual).
