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 Abusive Black Mother son clown

Source: Daniel Llao Calvet / Getty

 

A few years ago, I interviewed a few dozen Black men about the impact of being humiliated and beaten by their mothers for my book, Spare the Kids: Why Whupping Won’t Save Black America.  Many of their stories broke my heart. Some were in tears as they described how those early experiences showed up in adulthood in their relationships with Black women.  

A few of those men even admitted to avoiding intimate relationships with Black women because they had been so traumatized by their toxic mother, grandmothers, sisters, and aunties.  My big takeaway from those conversations: Some Black mothers are creating the men who hate us.

Look no further than child-shaming videos that have gone viral on social media in recent years.

In one YouTube video under a caption that reads: Momma Gonna Knock Him Out,” a mom put her son on display in front of an audience at a back-to-school PTA meeting and told teachers that she would “catch a case” if she got a phone call about her teenage son misbehaving.

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Black mother from Beaumont, Texas dragged her seven-year-old son out of a school cafeteria, cussed him out, beat him with a belt, repeatedly called him a “nigga,” and threatened to ‘break his face’ for disrespecting his teacher.

Another Black mom marched into a Florida City school and whupped somebody else’s son as he sat at the lunch table.

“This is what you like to do.  You want to show your friends that you a class clown but you get your ass beat at the house,” says a frustrated mom who was called to school about her misbehaving son.

As they walk out of the classroom, she tells the teacher that she’s going to knock him out and then bring him back.

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Another mom screams at her second grader while chasing him around a dining room table for getting bad grades.  She laughs at him as he cries and pleads with her not to whup him and says that god didn’t make him that smart.  Toward the end of the video she adds Gospel music for auditory flair and humor.

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Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok contain a deep trove of viral content like the sampling you just saw above.  Black mothers are recording and posting videos of themselves publicly humiliating their sons in the name of “teaching them a lesson” to correct problematic behaviors, especially in school.

The most recent is an Instagram reel where a mother dressed her teen son as a clown when he acted up. You might be wondering if that isn’t creative parenting and preferable to corporal punishment. Great question.

And my response is that the psychological damage might differ from physical punishment, but it can be every bit as problematic. Think about this: the goal is to humiliate the child—often in front of their peers. And the mothers are recoding these interactions, and then posting them online, where they will potentially live forever as eternal reminders of humiliation that can haunt them as grown men.

Are the results always bad?

Consider this 2018 video of a Black mom showing up in her son’s classroom dressed as a clown. It was so popular that it inspired a news article.

The headline in DailyMail read, “’Oh so you wanna act like a clown today?’ New Jersey mom dresses up as clown and visits her son’s classroom at the KIPP Collegiate Leadership Academy in Newark to shame him for acting up in class.”

The article praised the mom as “creative,” stating that, “This is the hilarious moment a fed-up New Jersey mother decided to shame her son by dressing as a clown to visit him in class. Video shows the mom, dressed in polka dots and a multicolored wig, entering her son’s classroom. The boy appears to take the hint as he’s chastised amid classmate laughter.”

The charter school’s principal ensured further humiliation for the boy by uploading the video to Instagram where he “enthusiastically praised” the mother’s approach to discipline. It garnered more than 30,000 views.

 

Later, the principal posted for a photo with the student and teacher to show that the student had learned a lesson.

And the newspaper captioned the photo as showing that “the shamed pupil … learned a valuable lesson thanks to his mom.”

The problem with these digital displays of parents and educators shaming and humiliating their students is that these incidents can pop up anywhere at any time to embarrass the young folks for the rest of their lives.

Let’s be clear: it is not only Black moms who are doing this. But just as with spanking, the stakes are higher and the consequences potentially more dire in Black families and communities. We’re dealing with a well-documented school-to-prison pipeline, fed by the fact that Black children are more likely to be punished, suspended, and expelled from schools for behavior for which students of other backgrounds offer experience less harsh responses, as data from the ACLU shows.

Beyond the obvious carceral consequences, we have to ask if these incidents (along with physical punishment, which remains popular and prevalent), might contribute to misogynoir as these boys become men.

This dynamic isn’t new, but the fact that we now have devices and a digital universe for sharing content that literally reaches all parts of the globe within seconds—and hovers in cyberspace forever—forces us to consider these tough but necessary questions.

I am aware that Black mothers are too often given a bad rap. This analysis is not an invitation for Black women to try on shoes that don’t fit or to be attacked for not having better parenting knowledge and skills. But the fact is that Black children suffer the highest rates of child abuse in comparison to other groups of children.

Child abuse statistics, abusive moms raising sons

Source: Courtesy of National Data Archive on Child abuse and Neglect / NDACD

 

And the primary perpetrators of abuse and child fatalities are Black women. The data bears that out. Black women kill the most children. Those are real facts and the digital child-shaming is interconnected, which is why we need to talk about them honestly and address them head-on.

Child abuse statistics, abusive moms raising sons

Source: Courtesy of National Data Archive on Child abuse and Neglect / NDACD

 

As a kid growing up in the 1990s, my adopted mom frequently threatened me by saying that if I acted up in school, she’d come to school and match my energy. “Wherever you show out, I’m gonna show out with you.  If you want to act like a clown, I’m gonna act like a clown and embarrass you in front of everybody,” she threatened.  She yelled at me, called me names, and slapped me in the face.  My classmates were often stunned as they witnessed her violence in the moment, but days later that often teased me about it.

In a private school I attended, one boy’s mother came and beat him with switches in front of everyone—a move that was technically illegal, but for which I don’t believe she experienced any consequences. I can’t begin to imagine how much worse the impact would be if I could enter my name in a search engine and see and hear videos of my adoptive mother publicly chastising and humiliating me.

We must examine why these mothers are engaging with their sons in such toxic ways, especially in educational spaces.

My theory is that some of these moms probably had negative educational experiences themselves. And we all know the inherent, deeply rooted fears that Black mothers have around their Black sons in school, at home, in the neighborhood, and at the hands of cops and law enforcement. This creates a perfect storm for these behaviors.

So, a kid acts out in school, the teacher tells the parents, and sometimes it seems the only way the parents know to respond is to show up to school and act out themselves—intending to shame the misbehaving student by cussing, beating them, making a spectacle of themselves in the name of discipline and good parenting.  This performative behavior sends the message to school staff that the mom is a good parent, that “she don’t play,” that she is in partnership with the school and won’t tolerate misbehavior.

And, as the “likes” and comments to these often-viral videos reveal, the parents often receive a lot of support and validation for behaving in this way. Many people side with the teachers or principals and really believe that recording, posting, and circulating their child’s humiliation is the best way to respond to their behavioral issues.

But they’re not considering the long-term psychological effects of what it does to a child to be embarrassed this way. Classmates tease them, adding a whole new layer of public shame and spectacle.

While the kids are struggling to understand and navigate racist schools and educational practices, teachers come in with their own issues that they project onto these students. Which leaves the kids between a rock and a hard place when their mother sides with the institutions to make them look bad.

So if these Black boys are treated this way by their mothers in their formative years, does it make sense that at least some of them will exhibit misogynoir—the term coined by Black feminist author Moya Bailey to describe the unique gender hatred directed at Black women.  

I wrote about this in the column, Are Black Mothers Beating Their Sons Into Misogyny?,” where I focused on the link between childhood beatings and adult male behavior towards women.

As I stated then, “I know about the research linking spanking children to aggressive behavior in adulthood … Decades of scientific research has concluded that despite the commonly held belief that corporal punishment used by loving parents is harmless, even the mildest forms of spanking a child can have harmful side effects that reach into adulthood, including mental health issues, the inability to reason or regulate emotions, criminal behaviors, aggression, and spousal abuse.”

Children learn relationship skills at home and in their interactions with parents. Whether physically spanking or psychologically humiliating their sons, I believe Black mothers play a unique role in shaping the often-toxic masculinity and problematic attitudes and behaviors we see in many Black men. I am not blaming the mothers, but rather acknowledging the power they have in shaping these boys neurologically and psychologically into men, and the responsibility to use that power in more helpful and constructive ways.

If mothers are emasculating their sons, what kind of men are they creating?

Maybe the boys whose mothers dressed them as clowns, or who dressed as clowns themselves and then showed up in their son’s classroom will see the videos as adults and laugh them off. Or maybe those experiences will sculpt their psychology, their perspective on women, and the ways they treat their partners. Maybe they’ll forgive their mothers, but other women in their lives will pay the price for years of pent rage and untreated trauma.

These videos reveal more about the parent than they do about the child’s misbehavior. Even if these moms reap the benefits via digital affirmation and popularity, their actions are problematic. It turns a problem—students acting out in school—into a much larger, murkier issue with the potential for consequences that might be unintended but are powerful and far-reaching.

Prior to the pandemic, I visited Facebook’s headquarters to meet with their community standards team.  We had conversations around child-shaming content. I’ve shown them how it’s a problem, they’ve acknowledged that it’s a problem, but they haven’t done anything about it. And I don’t expect they ever will but because beating and shaming children is a popular kind of porn.

So, it’s up to us—those who care, those who know that there are better ways to address childhood misbehaviors, learning challenges, and kids acting up in classrooms. It is our responsibility to support these Black mothers when they’re faced with parenting challenges. It is within our power to empathize with them, to nurture them, and to share and brainstorm alternative ways of correcting their child’s behavior that don’t inadvertently feed the school-to-prison pipeline or set the stage for future mistreatment of women.

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