"Too high a price on making sure our children are disciplined"

In all the commentary around Adrian Peterson and his son, one of the more interesting threads has been about the particular history of African American parenting and corporal punishment. Charles Barkley weighed in of course; so did Michael Eric Dyson. Jamelle Bouie pushes back against Dyson in this thoughtful post.

But the most provocative thing I’ve seen is by Brittney Cooper. She goes past the “black parents spank” point to an important difference among Americans: it’s not just that black parents are more disciplinarian and white parents more permissive due to correlations with class, religion, regional identity, etc. It’s also at least partly because white and black kids are raised with a different understanding of their relationship to the world:

Parenting black children in a culture of white supremacy forces us to place too high a price on making sure our children are disciplined and well-behaved.... If black folks are honest, many of us will admit to both internally and vocally balking at the very “free” ways that we have heard white children address their parents in public. Many a black person has seen a white child yelling at his or her parents, while the parents calmly respond, gently scold, ignore, attempt to soothe, or failing all else, look embarrassed.