We wanted to give a heads up that this episode includes talk of abuse and acts of violence. You can find resources on our website, what happenedinalabama.org dot. Listener discretion is advised. Hi, this is Lee Hawkins, and we're about to dive into episode seven of what happened in Alabama. This conversation is about corporal punishment in homes and schools. Beating, spanking, whooping, whatever you call it, that's what we'll be talking about. This is very personal to me because it's how I and so many of my peers were raised. We were taught that it was not only normal, but necessary. Today we're going to get into the short and long term effects of corporal punishment on the physical, mental, and emotional development and well being of children, often following them into adulthood. Its a heavy and important topic, but youll get a lot more out of it if you go back and listen to the prolog. Thatll give you some context for the series and this episode. Do that and then join us back here. Thank you so much. In February 2019, I had my final interview with my dad for this project. We talked for over 3 hours.

I had a deadline to hit, and because I had so many interviews already recorded, I did one final interview with him just to get specific questions answered without having to go back through all that tape. He did the final interview, and he answered some extremely difficult questions with compassion, regret, and especially grace. And so how did you get into the whooping thing? Like, you fake beating us with your belt? What made what like, where did you get that from?

That I can't say. I don't know, man. It was just some kind of a stress that I had. Evidently, it's hard to say how this shit went, man.

Asking my dad directly about this, I realized that families often repeat certain patterns and cycles from generation to generation without understanding why or where they come from. That four year process of interviewing my father about his upbringing in 1950 era Jim Crow Alabama shined a powerful light on why I was raised the way I was. But while I gained a better understanding of some of the historical factors that shaped my upbringing, I still needed to understand the forces that prevented my father from breaking the cycle of belt whipping when we were kids. But what were the stresses that you were going through?

Things that I had seen my mom had to go through with people and shit, and that was hard core shit. And so when I thought you guys did something, that was when I would, you know, get out of control like I did, man, because that is out of control. I don't give a fuck how you put it.

It was validating to hear dad declare that hitting children with belts was wrong and something that he profoundly regretted and was genuinely sorry for. Because I struggled for my whole life to understand the sentiment that black children especially, need to be beaten. Even as I accepted it, I didn't need much more than to hear my dad acknowledge that, no, we didn't deserve it, black kids or not.

If it was up to me and the way I felt about things, I wouldn't have ever done nothing like that. But I don't know how I got out of control like that. Something was back there in my life that did that, and I know it.

My mom told me that there were nights that my dad came to bed and cried. After those interviews, though I never saw those tears, it doesn't surprise me. Revisiting painful memories that led my father to try to whip us into perfection out of deep love and concern was obviously excruciating for him. Despite my belief in honor thy mother and father and occasionally unnecessary guilt, I didn't feel obligated to shield him from the pain he caused my sister Tiffany, and me. At times, I accepted that the burden of his actions was not mine to carry. Expecting a victim to accept the blame for a perpetrator's actions, fearing that a grown man might cry, just isn't fair. I was determined to lead my dad down the path, to finally put these generational demons to restore for both of us and for future generations of our family. If he cried, he cried. When I heard that dad cried, I saw it as a sign of empathy, but not a reason to quit researching. As children, I wept, and Tiffany wept through the hundreds of belt whippings we received. In fact, our mother would tell us, stop crying or I'll give you something to really cry about.

I now realize that perpetrators rarely recognize the extent of a victim's pain because they aren't the ones being beaten. My father's tears didn't change the reality of what they had done to us. His crying may have meant that he finally grasped that his childhood impacted mine more profoundly than my parents had ever acknowledged. Our pain stung so much more than the feeling of a belt to the behind. Social justice activists talk so often about how violence impacts black bodies. But my research and my memories of my own childhood have shown me that violence, including within the black family and the community, can also have potentially devastating effects on black minds, especially the minds of children. With my mental health journalism training, I now understand why I was always on edge. Like my parents, they feared the world, and I feared them. Sometimes I'd go to bed fully clothed, with three layers of clothing on for extra padding, preparing for the possibility of being pulled out of bed for a forgotten chore. This made me high strung and hard to stay calm. Around age eight, I started blinking excessively when nervous. One Sunday in the choir stand, I couldn't stop blinking.

After church, one of my dad's friends mentioned it. I think Lili's got some kind of nervous tick, he said. Dad dismissed it as teasing, ranting to my mom about it the whole ride home. But his friend was right. My nervous system was firing like crazy. Though I excelled in spelling and reading, I struggled in math. That year, my parents thought I was clowning in class and believed more beatings would improve my scores. They'd yell, you're being the class clown for all those white friends of yours. They didnt realize I needed extra help from a teacher or tutor. Instead of focusing on math, id sit at my desk and worry about the belt whipping I could get for writing down a wrong answer, which made me blink even more. Neither my father nor I connected my nervousness to the beatings. We saw the belt as temporary pain, but it hijacked my entire system. As an adult, I've dealt with stress, but nothing compares to the constant stress I carried as a child. I don't know how I never developed an ulcer. Imagine an adult experiencing the unpredictability of being overpowered and whipped several times a month, then having to perform their best the next day.

That's what I went through as an eight year old. What broke my heart as a child was that my mother told me that she gave my teacher permission to hit me if she wanted to. My teacher never did, but she clearly knew I was getting the belt at home. That trend of many schools failing to protect students from violence, or even exacting violence themselves, impacted me in so many ways. One clear way was the reality that my dad rarely, if ever, got hit by his parents. But he did get hit plenty of times at school, which I believed normalized the idea of child beating in his mind at a young age. And today, Alabama is one of 17 states that still allow corporal punishment in k twelve public schools, with the schools mostly striking black children and those with disabilities. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law center and the UCLA center for Civil Rights remedies reported that black boys are nearly twice as likely to be hit compared to white boys, and black girls are struck at over three times the rate of white girls. This all despite the fact that black students behave similarly to white ones.

Today, hitting schoolchildren is legal and most prevalent in states where enslavement was legal. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas represent over 70% of all corporal punishment in us public schools. According to the SPLC. Children at some schools are hit nearly twice a month, notably during the 20 1516 school year. One Mississippi school reported 871 instances, affecting 57 students, averaging 15 times per student. Another school in the same state noted 60 instances for just four students, also averaging 15 times per student. A few years back, before my dad died, my dad and his sister, Aunt Toopy, talked about the beatings they received at school while growing up in Jim Crow Alabama. Did they whoop the kids in the school? Was it a strict thing where you.

Could get yeah, we got our ass kicked every time we were late. I know that. And when the corners you got your ass kicked. They had belts in school them days. They had a board of education. If I was you go right to the principal's office and he carry your butt up about three times with that panel. Well see holes in it? That panel was a piece of old wood and it had varnish on it, and they had holes where they had real holes in it, custom made. And it said board of education. And either of you being over and man, that thing, them holes in that thing will leave little dots on your ass.

Being hit at school burned a permanent memory in my dad's brain. He normalized it when he became a father, handing down the Alabama born anxiety to another generation. To me, after the conversation with my dad where he apologized for whipping my sisters and me, I tried to have a similar one with my mom, but it went very differently. We didn't beat you, she said. We spanked you. I was disappointed to hear her deny how severely she and my dad beat my sister Tiffany and me. But I also understood why she would say what she did. Theres almost a collective agreement in society that so called spanking is supposedly lighter than a beating, kinder and gentler, and never abusive or harmful. Its much easier to stomach the narrative that there are acceptable forms of violence to use against children, even though that same violence would never be acceptable to use against an adult. Which is why I give my dad so much credit for being honest and not trying to minimize what they did. My dad finally understood the full spectrum of damage the american whip had caused generations of our family. We often think the worst of corporal punishment are the welts and the physical pain.

But through my own experience and my research, I know the real pain is from the belt's access to the victim's mind. My parents didn't know. These beatings and the mental stress of having to constantly look out for danger all around me made it harder for me to focus, triggering my nervous system into fight or flight, causing bouts of anxiety that followed me into adulthood. This led me to find experts on the effects of corporal punishment on the body and the mind.

The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. Their brain, their physiology is still under development. And so what happens in childhood doesn't stay in childhood.

That's doctor Andrew Garner. He's a primary care pediatrician in Ohio who has studied the effects of corporal punishment on children. I wanted to talk to doctor Garner to understand the physiological changes that occur in children when they're hit. Whether you hit them with your hand, a belt, a paddle, regardless of how hard or how often you hit them, it's all corporal punishment. I'm someone who refuses to get nostalgic about the beatings of my childhood. I would never high five my friends and say I needed it, I loved it or credit it as the reason I stayed out of trouble or became a productive citizen. It's not funny to me, mainly because it took years for me to rewire my system. But I don't want to unfairly judge people either, especially those who don't have the information. Once I delved into history, I gained a deeper and clearer understanding of why so many people I've known, especially black and white people from the south, have often celebrated and even laughed fondly about the use of corporal punishment. Many have no idea that when we really look closely at America's historical foundation, hitting children is akin to setting up a system of white supremacy or a mini plantation in their living room.

Later in this episode, I speak with Professor Jeff Ward, a professor of african and african american studies at Washington University in St. Louis, to discuss how corporal punishment has extended beyond the home into schools across the south, mainly the states and counties where slavery was legal and lynching was most prevalent. We talk about the institutionalized use of corporal punishment and how deeply ingrained it is in our history. But for now, let's get back to doctor Garner. The conversation mentions violence and abuse against children. Sensitive listeners, please take care. I think there are many people who believe, well, if I just hit the kid a few times on the butt with my hand, that's a spanking. If I hit a kid with a belt, that's a beating. Or if I don't, if I hit a kid with a belt, but I don't hit them hard, as hard as the guy up the street who's hitting his kid with the extension cord, then that's not a beating.

It's all violence, right? So, you know, corporal punishment is a negative consequence for unwanted behavior, but that negative consequence is the use of, for, and is intended to cause pain or discomfort. So that's violence. So whether or not you're trying to split hairs between it being a spanking or a beating, it's still the use of violence to coerce and control and modify another person's behavior. And we know that in order to continue changing that behavior, the violence needs to escalate over time. So it's a slippery slope.

I can recognize this slippery slope in my own life. My parents started out with a few hits when I was little, and over the years, it escalated to something much more serious, to the point where getting hit with a leather belt for five minutes was normalized. In fact, their punishment increased to slaps across the face and attacks that were even more severe. And this was from two parents who, like most of the parents we knew, felt like if they truly loved their children, they needed to kick it into high gear and show us that life wasn't gonna be fair and that nobody was coming to save us, especially because we were black. I can see how this happens.

You may think that in the short term, you're doing a good service to your child because you're trying to teach them something, but in the long run, we know the outcomes are worse. There's clear data, increased risk of child abuse because you have to eventually increase the negative stimulus to try and change the behavior. Part of the problem with corporal punishment, it's a double whammy. In addition to the anticipation, like you're saying, what bad thing is going to happen to me, there's also the loss of safety. Because one of the things that. One of the ways that we buffer adversity is through relationships. And now there can be a loss of trust in the relationship. And that, to me, is really interesting, that it's not just the fear of the pain as you were talking about, it's also the loss of trust that, when's this going to happen? When am I safe? When am I safe?

Well, never. I was never really 100% safe in my home or outside in the world. Never. There was never a time that I felt safe. And I also feel like my parents did that by design. I don't think they wanted me to ever feel safe because I don't think they believe that a black person in America is ever safe. So I believe that they wanted me to feel the hyper vigilance and the hyper cautiousness that they and the generations before them felt because they didn't have believe enough in the system of America. Another thing is that when you said, you have to increase the punishment if you're gonna use this system, that's exactly what happened to me. And I know my dad. I know that he lost control and did not know what he was doing. And I think at that time, he got to a point where he realized, what have I done? What have I become?

I think what we break down sometimes is trying to decide what's more important. You know, is it the connection or is it the structure? Well, they're both important. You need to have connection. So kids trust the instruction you're giving them. But the way I think about it is it's a lot easier to teach a kid what they should do than to keep them doing something you don't want them to do.

But it's also forcing us to understand that children are multiple times smaller than adults. And so we, if we apply some empathy here, we have to understand that even if you're hitting a child once or twice, you're still multiple times larger than the child. And the child may not have a bruise, or the bruise may go away, but it's really this person who's supposed to be taking care of me, who is the only thing in this world I love. And this person who is providing meals and food and shelter for me is hitting me. He's gonna hit me again. But for some reason, children have a different standing in society. They're the most vulnerable in the society, but they have the least protection.

Yeah, it's crazy. The thing that separates kids from adults is they're still under construction. We know if there is significant adversity and there aren't opportunities to turn off the body's stress response, that can result in a thing we call toxic stress. Toxic stress is this inability to turn off the stress response, and it can literally change who we are. At the behavioral, at the cellular, even at the molecular levels, we know that adversity can become biologically embedded and change even the way our genomes work.

And this is just. Even with just hitting a child once or twice occasionally, right?

Absolutely. I mean, that's the point, is that we have to understand the way brains develop. Brain development is an experience driven event. It's the experiences that happen that drive brain development. And so the question is, what are those experiences in childhood? Are they adverse in the sense that they're leading to expectancies of bad things and always being on edge, or are they nurturing? To the extent that people get me, I have agency and things are going to be positive in the future. So those early experiences are truly foundational and they can influence the way we see ourselves and the way we see other people and the way we see our future.

For me, belt whipping taught me not to ever trust anyone, including and especially my parents. I loved them, but I never fully trusted them and rarely confided in them. And that turned me into an adult who simply refused to trust another human being. Despite the active social life I've always had, my childhood groomed me to be a rugged individualist, putting all my trust in God and myself. I never put even an ounce of faith in the idea that another person would not be capable of betraying me or letting me down. And in relationships with girlfriends, especially if they wronged me in any way, I developed a very unfortunate ability to be able to walk away from them and never look back and never miss them. And I often wanted to be able to be vulnerable, feel some level of paralysis or regret, but I always could just keep going. The beatings also made me perfectionistic. My mantra became, if you want something done right, do as much as you can by yourself, because most people will almost always fall short and disappoint at a very young age. I just adopted the posture that I was on my own and that I should not count on anyone or expect anyone to come up with a net and try to catch me if I fail.

And I also believe that you should always keep people out of your personal business, because in most cases they'll take your plans, your confiding in them about your most vulnerable feelings or moments or the smallest mistakes and weaponize them to try and hurt you. And that's how my father was. And yes, he came from a family of Jim Crow survivors and had family members murdered. But I believe a lot of this view of the world I've seen in my family, especially in my case, came from being beaten as children. These beatings, and yes, I've finally given myself permission to call them abuse, just wreaked havoc on my capacity to receive love without skepticism. Even now. I mean, speaking this, im wondering if this revelation will somehow be used against me by somebody down the line, but at least I can recognize it now. My new mantra is im free and im safe. And to be fair, im a lot better than I used to be. And I cant say that the skepticism hasnt helped me a great deal, especially in the media business. But I wouldn't wish that level of steel heartedness on anyone. I asked doctor Garner to break down what happens to a child's nervous system when they get hit or know there's a possibility they're about to get hit.

He said there are three biological pathways.

The most simplest and the most evolutionarily primitive is freeze, right? So you may see that the deer in the headlights type thing, right. And so the first temptation is to freeze. If I be small and don't move, maybe the threat will go away.

The second, which you might recognize, is fight or flight.

And that's where you have a release of all kinds of biological meteors, cortisol and epinephrine, that basically make your blood pressure high, make you ready to fight, fight or run away. Those hormones are very useful in the short term, so if you see a bear, you can run away fast. But if that stress response isn't turned off through the presence of safe, stable, nurturing relationships and that constant bathing in those physiologic mediators or stresses there, that results in changes, changes at the molecular level, changes at the cellular level, changes at the behavior level. It literally can change who we are. And we call that toxic stress.

The third response is to affiliate. That means our ability to collaborate with others to seek help when there's a threat. It's part of the reason humans have existed so long as a species. But Tiffany and I didn't have that support. There was no escaping the belt.

Where are my friends? Who's going to help me through this? The problem is, for a young child, the friend is the person who's beating you. So you've really sort of lost that ability to turn off the stress response from an affiliate response. You're really stuck in flight or flight. And if you're constantly bed with those hormones again, that's going to lead to a child who's going to be more defiant, more aggressive, not be able to think things through, not be able to think about the broad perspective, because you're constantly inflight or flight mode, you're constantly in survival mode instead of relational mode, right?

Yeah. And if you can think about this to bring some empathy in here for people to understand. Oh, if you were hitting a dog, and a dog who depends on you for everything is experiencing this toxicity and this toxic environment. You can actually see a lot of times when dogs are abused because you'll go to pet them and they kind of squirm. Sometimes they might bark, sometimes they might even try to bite you. And that's because they've been abused. Children are the same, right? I mean, children can have some of the same effects that we see in dogs that we empathize with. Children who are treated the same way in their home can have that same impact.

But heres the good news, and this is what really fascinates me, is that the more we learn about the biology of adversity, the more we learn about toxic stress and how adverse experiences become biologically embedded and really affect life course trajectories. That same biology underlies how positive experiences get embedded. And that is the good news. Adversity is not destiny in any way, shape or form. In the last few years, theres been a real interest in this thing called biobehavioral synchrony, which is a big phrase, but what it means is in those moments of magical connection that you have with another being, and particularly between parent and child, theres literally an alignment of the brain waves of the autonomic functions of hormone levels and behavior. We know this intuitively, that emotions can be contagious. If a childs crying, the sibling might start crying. And specters may join an angry mobile go in the negative way, but can also go in the positive way in a sense that engaged and trusted caregivers, they literally have the ability to hack in remotely and turn off the child's stress response.

Doctor Garner explained that you can see this in action if you look up the still face experiment on YouTube. It's a famous psychological study that was first conducted in 1975 by the psychologist Edward Tranek.

Basically, they take a young child, about a year old, and usually it's a mother, and they bring them into the laboratory and they have three two minute blocks. The first two minute block is engaging. So they're just playing back and forth, literally. They call it serve in return. The baby cues, the mom responds. And it's really this bio behavioral synchrony. You can literally see it happening before you. And then they tell the mom to turn away and then turn back and to not engage for two minutes. And if you watch the video, is viscerally painful because the child noticed there's a rupture in the synchrony and does everything they can to try and get back engaged, everything they can to get back engaged. And then they tell the mom to turn back again and now to start to repair. And it's palpable. The children's relief immediately. Oh, we're back again. You're back again. I'm safe. You got me. The important thing is, is the repair, right? And the most recent evidence suggests that it's the latency to repair that's associated with secure attachments and distress tolerance. That ability to say goodness is coming, we're going to get back together again is really, really important.

And so, again, that's great news for parents. We're not going to be perfect. We're all going to make mistakes as parents. We can't always be perfectly engaged. The important thing is it's all about repair. It's the ability to come back and become back engaged and basically be saying to that child, your perspective is important to me, the relationship's important to me, and it's way more important for me to be kind than right.

Yeah. And I think that that's one of the challenges for me as part of people from the african american community who had my experience for me, knowing that my parents loved me and knowing that that love could be shown. But then the next minute, I could be being beaten with a belt, and then they're loving me again, and then I'm beaten with a belt going back and forth. I do wonder, I do believe that there were some kinds of protection outcomes that came from the love that was shown. But the unpredictability of it was very difficult because the relationship to violence was weird, like, because violence was almost framed as love.

Yeah. That's one of the big paradoxes, I think, of corporal punishment, is that having been a victim of corporal punishment, that increases your risk of being a victim of other physical violence down the line, which is sort of counterintuitive. But I think it gets at what we're saying there is, that it leads to what those expectations of what love are you?

And throughout my research, I found disturbing instances where enslavers used Bible verses to justify corporal punishment and enslavement. This deeply troubled me as both a Christian and a black man. Ive often heard the phrase spare the rod, spoil the child, which, contrary to widespread belief, isnt even in the Bible. And even still, this metaphorical use emphasizes guidance and care rather than punishment. Doctor Garner's wife is a Methodist pastor, and I talked to him about how people have often manipulated and weaponized scriptures and proverbs to justify and advance slavery, whipping, and their own agendas. As a result, generations of people have come to believe that it is moral, righteous, and holy to beat children.

I think it's very upsetting when these scriptures are being used in a way to propagate violence, when clearly that is not what Christ's intention was. He said, bring the children to me. Bring the children to me. Right. He didn't say, bring them to me so I can whip them. He said, be like a child. Be like a child. Be empathic, be full of wonder, right? And somehow we sort of lost that. So discipline comes from the latin word to teach, so it doesn't mean to punish. And of course, there are multiple types of punishment, which actually runs the spectrum from a loss of privileges. So if you lose your driver's license, if you speed too much, to possible incarceration, and then all the way to physical harm and even death. So punishment are those negative consequences that are imposed for undesired behavior. But punishment is only one form of discipline. And the more we know about it, the more we know it's actually not as effective in the long term and actually can cause potential harm.

And what I love about this research that you've done and everything that you're sharing with us today is that you're showing that a child's brain is being wired as we go, right? That we're creating the future adult every day when we're working with that child. What do stress toxins do to the body in terms of health?

Toxic stress, which can be precipitated by any number of different forms of adversity, is associated with basically all of the leading causes of death, right? So if you wanna look at asthma, you wanna look at cancer, do you wanna look at suicide and mental health issues, you wanna look at obesity, you wanna look at substance abuse, right? There's no doubt that when we are programmed to expect adversity, that we're going to find ways to try and cope. And so if you think about it, people overeat and abuse substances and are promiscuous for a reason. In the short term, they turn off the stress response, but in the long term, the worst health outcomes down the line, right? And so your point though, that the brain is being made over time is really important, and so are the relationships. One way, I think, to try and frame all this is affect regulation, how we handle our emotions. Because if you have an angry parent who's spanking a child, the message to the child is when you get angry, it's okay to hit, right? And so that's not what we really want for our kids in the long run.

We actually want them to learn that it's okay to have strong emotions, it's okay to be angry, it's okay to be frustrated. But when you have those emotions, what can we do with them? How can we channel them?

Doctor Garner has worked with parents and treated children as a primary care pediatrician for more than two decades. He co authored the book thinking developmentally nurturing wellness and childhood to promote lifelong health and the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on preventing childhood toxic stress and promoting relational health. As a speaker, he focuses on early brain and child development, preventing childhood toxic stress, and promoting early relational health, and he considers himself to be an advocate for all children and their families. And what do you tell parents when they bring their children in to be treated about corporal punishment?

One, to heal any wounds that they've had as a parent. Because we've talked before, parents tend to parent the way they were parented. So I'm going to want to know what the stressors are in their life, what the stressors were when they were kids. What a good question often is, what did your parents do that you want to make sure you do for your kids, but then also, what are the things your parents did that you want to make sure you never do for your kids? As kids get older, I'm going to help them understand that it's really not the behavior you want to focus on, that a child's behavior is always telling us there's something they need or something they want, and what we need to do is try to interpret it and help them figure out a better way to have that behavior met. And so this starts really early with temper tantrums and three or four year olds. It's really not about the behavior, it's the emotion that's driving the behavior. And if we can help parents understand that, then we can help parents help their child say, look, you're allowed to be angry, you're allowed to be frustrated, you're allowed to be disappointed.

But when that happens, we're not going to yell and scream. We're going to do the things that bring us joy. We're going to try and spend some time doing some legos or some coloring, teach them how to cope instead of just saying stop. The problem with corporal punishment and all punishments is it's basically saying, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And then the child then in their own mind thinks there's something wrong with me because I feel this way. And the message needs to be, you're allowed to feel that way. But when you feel that way, do this instead. If the parent is able to say, I'm so sorry I lost it, I'm so sorry I used those harsh words. I'm so sorry I was demeaning. I'm going to try better and we're going to work together to build this relationship, then that's what those kids are going to do someday. I tell kids that empathy is a superpower. It is an absolute superpower. Not everyone has it, but we can teach it. And when you have it, that allows you to repair, that allows you to have relationships.

After speaking with Doctor Garnere, I want to believe that if more well meaning parents knew hitting their children can also harm their brains and emotional health, as opposed to just being temporarily painful, fewer would do it. However, in a country where hitting children is part of a centuries long pattern of violence, and amid a system that offers the smallest people the least protection, I understand why many believe hitting children is beneficial, especially for black children. But now that I'm out of that situation, I do view it as abuse and a legacy of my country's legal system and culture and the enslavement and torture of my people. And it's not just in the home. In 17 states across the US, corporal punishment is legal in public schools. Most of these states allow educators to hit students three times in the rear with a long wooden board. And in all states, except for just a few, corporal punishment is allowed in private schools. To help me understand it more, I reached out to Professor Jeff Ward at Washington University in St. Louis. He's a historical sociologist and the director of the Washington Slavery Project. Some of his work connects the dots between the history of lynching in southern states with the modern usage of corporal punishment in schools today.

Ive had a couple conversations with Professor Ward. The first time was about 2020. I spoke to him again more recently to learn more about the logic of racial violence, how it intersects with our judicial system, and how we can break the cycles of racial violence. You know, before, when we talked, we talked a lot about racialized social control. Can you give us a definition to hold on to here?

I think a good place to start would be to recognize that we live in a racialized social system, a society where rewards are allocated along racial lines, where meaning is constructed along racial lines. Things like, you know, reliability or beauty or intelligence. Morality are riddled with racial logic because we live in a society where race has sort of been infused in the way we relate to and understand each other, the way the society has been organized. And in that context, social control becomes racialized. And social control generally describes the definition and enforcement of norms. Social control can be informal, you know, a sideways glance or a disapproving look. But we also have systems of formal control, and that brings in the state and our regulatory systems, our courts, our criminal legal system, and so forth that are a part of the system of social control. And, you know, all of that complex is racialized.

I remember reading Professor Ward's work and being shocked by his citation of a 1901 Alabama constitutional debate over the legality of whipping prisoners, in which a county official remarked that, quote, everybody knows the character of a negro and knows that there is no punishment in the world that can take the place of the lash with him. And he noted that juvenile court records from 1930s era North Carolina revealed that court ordered whippings were reserved almost exclusively for black boys and girls, given, quote, widespread feelings among white county juvenile court judges that whipping is the most effective way of handling delinquent negroes. Another court official noted a common diversionary practice of, quote, sending delinquent black boys downstairs with a big police officer to have them flogged prior to release.

So this was an example we used from the historical record in the article I mentioned, where we examine how histories of racist violence, particularly lynching, relate to patterns of corporal punishment in contemporary public schools, where we found that net of other factors, every additional lynching in the history of a county increased significantly the odds that a child would be corporate punished in a school in that county. This was after accounting for things like how the funding of the school, the racial makeup of the school, whether it's urban or rural, how experienced the teachers are, how religiously conservative the residents of the county are, and so forth. And in that article, we use the story you're referring to to provide some context for how this relationship could come to exist. How is it that contemporary schools likelihood of using violent strategies of school discipline has anything to do with the history of slavery or lynching in that county? What's the story there? What are the mechanisms that connect the past to the present? And we cited that example because it speaks to the racial logic of corporation punishment. The idea that African Americans are not fully human, are not sentient beings, cannot be influenced through appeals to things like morality or decency or logic?

White supremacism historically asserted that black people could not think deeply about anything. And so what this judge is saying in this case, and we found numerous examples of this, judges, legislators, you know, rationalizing corporal punishment, and was saying that you have to appeal, you have to reach, you have to address African Americans through pain because you can't reach them through the brain.

Yes. And what I love about your research is that you've really just blown the doors off of this and shown that the public record is full of governments rationalizations of violence against blacks, even after emancipation. You show that African Americans have always been framed as warranting more violent control strategies. And this is deeply rooted in the idea that we are not fully human. Is that something that you just have seen all through your research?

Well, yeah, it is. It has to also be said that, you know, racialized social systems are contested. You know, this idea, this attempt to dehumanize African Americans, never actually fully succeeded. It resulted in a tremendous amount of oppression and pain and violence and death and so forth. But simultaneously, you know, my research is also showing that black communities and their allies are countering these measures. But even with respect to the juvenile justice system, in my book, the black Child Savers is mostly about how generations of black women organized, beginning in the 1890s, to dismantle this Jim Crow juvenile justice system. And they were fundamentally motivated by their own recognition that black children and people were, in fact, fully human and fully capable of realizing the benefits of a more enlightened approach to social control, one that focused on child welfare and development, the system that was being developed for white kids who were not being subject as much to this brutality. And so they did create other kinds of institutions and practices that also have to be kept in mind as we think about how this history unfolded.

You talk about the connection between corporal punishment and the history of lynching, which is really an incredible contribution to this body of work. Are you still seeing the trend in which historical areas where lynching was the most prevalent tend to correspond to the amount of corporal punishment that's being done in a particular school district?

There certainly have been study after study showing that area histories of lynching and other racialized violence predict contemporary patterns of conflict and violence and inequality. Things like black victim homicide rates today and patterns of vote suppression and white supremacist mobilization and white political conservatism. Things like black infant mortality or racially disparate infant mortality, differences in heart disease. I mean, all kinds of contemporary outcomes have been shown by social scientists to be associated with histories of racial violence in specific areas. So I would imagine that the relationships we saw with respect to corporal punishment in schools have not suddenly gone away.

Understanding how governmental institutions have historically ensured that black children are subjected to corporal punishment, including in schools, helps me see why my parents feared they had to use violence to protect me. They were conditioned by a system of legal white supremacy to equate violence with love. Like agents of the state, they and generations of black parents saw violence as a necessity, convinced that nonviolent reasoning wouldn't work with a black boy. As a result, while my parents were opposed to police violence. They turned our living room into a whipping station, becoming indirect agents of the very police brutality our people protested each generation. My family had a hypervisible white police officer who symbolized the need to beat black children. For my father's generation, it was Birmingham's white supremacist commissioner of public safety, Bull Connor. In my generation, it was the officers who brutalized Rodney King and epithet using Officer Mark Fuhrman from the OJ Simpson trial. For millennials and Gen. Z, it's Derek Chauvin who murdered George Floyd. It felt as if my parents unconsciously partnered with America's most racist police element to enforce violence and keep their black son in line. As I delved deeper, I saw similar patterns among some black educators and religious leaders.

Despite the disproportionate use of corporal punishment against black children, many administrators and school board members advocated for its use. Legendary psychiatry professor Alvin Pusan once told me he once traveled to the south to lobby for the repeal of corporal punishment, only to find that black educators and leaders were some of its most vocal proponents. One of the school board members who once adamantly advocated for corporal punishment in Mississippi was also a prominent pastor in the black church. He was one of the many people I studied who used the Bible to justify their pro corporal punishment stance.

I think one of the issues here, which relates to what we're talking about in terms of black religious leaders, is there's an issue here of sovereignty, where local community figures in a context of generally diminished power, economic power, political power, are holding on to a form of power that they do have, which is in the home through the church, and saying, look, don't let this social research fool you, and don't listen to these people who aren't from here and don't know our ways and aren't part of our church. We know what works. We've been whipped and we're fine. And listen to me, you know, and I think there is a fair amount of manipulation on this issue that is about really about power, about holding on to power, holding on to power in community context, but also asserting power, as you mentioned, in the context of the home, in a society where, you know, there is so much humiliation and alienation and refusal of influence on things like policy and practice and so forth. We commemorated Doctor Martin Luther King Junior, and I was part of an event at my university where we specifically focused on his theme, beloved community.

And our conversation is making me think about some of the basic fundamental tenants of this concept of beloved community, which include that we are stuck in a society marked by a chain of violence, where we are just in this situation, where violence is seemingly a constant. It's almost how we communicate. He talked about how our society is organized by fear and resentment and that fear, the politics of fear and resentment. We, for good reason, often in that context, think about white reactionary politics. But our conversation today is also about how fear and resentment contribute to other communities and their politics that are part of this larger chain of violence. If we are ever going to realize this idea of a beloved community, that is a community organized by mutual understanding and universal goodwill and kingdom, King stressed that to get there, we'd have to reckon with these realities of how our politics of difference breed violence, breed fear and resentment. We'd have to get to a place of mutual understanding and goodwill and, for example, to see how we have common interests in the an issue like corporal punishment. Whether it affects us directly or not, we have interest in creating a society where we aren't reifying a culture of violence, starting in the high chair or assuming that there is also going to be an electric chair.

How do we get to that place where we collectively disavow violence as a means of social organization?

Jeff Ward, thank you so much. This has been powerful, and we'll keep the dialog going, but thank you for the wonderful work that you're doing. Fabulous. Keep up the good work.

Thank you, Lee. It's great to talk to you again.

All right, brother. For years I had an inner voice that told me my parents hate me so much. Around us in America, from black comedians who entertain and electrify crowds with their jokes about beating black kids tells us that there is often great contempt for black children, that they hold the lowest standing in society and therefore should be violently punished with impunity. It takes a countercultural conscious black parent to see that every black child deserves life, liberty, happiness, and positive reinforcement every day. These interviews helped me understand that the first step towards breaking this toxic belief that violence with black children is a necessity is recognizing that they possess bodily integrity and innate intelligence and are neither superhuman nor subhumanous, even if the broader society doesnt always see them in that light. We must be careful about internalizing the historical belief that black children are built differently than white children and can endure more pain. The reams of science proving that corporal punishment has harmful long term effects apply to them, too. I believe that my parents and others unconscious internalize these classically american beliefs about black children. We have experienced every facet of America, from its deepest injustices to its greatest achievements because of that it's easy to embrace the prevailing philosophies of this country that we played a heavy hand in building.

We are deeply interwoven with its history and its belief system. But those who continue to advocate violence against black children in home and schools must reject those racist beliefs and instead embrace a new paradigm that sees and nurtures the full potential and worth of our children. Theres a gospel song that says he saw the best in the when everyone else around could only see the worst in me. We need more black parents and communities to take the lead in seeing the best in our children. I hope that armed with information about the generational and ongoing cycle of governmentally codified violence against our children, combined with the ever evolving new neuroscience showing that even the anticipation of being beaten can trigger the brain in ways that lead to anxiety in adulthood, more parents, black and of all races and school administrators will make a conscious decision to retire the hand, tree, branch, belt and wooden boards of the slavery and Jim Crow eras. We need to breathe life and affirmation into all children, ensuring they grow up with the support and validation they need to thrive both at home and in society. If corporal punishment was designed to protect black children, did it really help when it came to growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood?

Black kids in the american dream that's the next episode of what happened in Alabama. What happened in Alabama is a production of american public media. It's written, produced and hosted by me, Lee Hawkins. Our executive producer is Erica Krause. Our senior producer is Kiana Mokadam. Our story editor is Martina Abrahams Ilunga. Our lead writer is Jessica Karissa. Our producers are Marcel Malikibu and Jessica Carissa. This episode was sound, designed and mixed by Marcel Malikibu. Our technical director is Derek Ramirez. Our soundtrack was composed by Ronan Landa. Our fact checker is Erika Janek and Nick Ryan is our director of operations. Special thanks to the O'Brien Fellowship for public service Journalism at Marquette University, Dave Oomhafer, John Liuzzi, Andrew Amouzu, and Jiang Fu. And also thanks to our producer in Alabama, Cody Short. The executives in charge at APM are Joanne Griffith and Chandra Kavati. You can follow us on our website, what happenedinalabama.org or on Instagram at APM studios. Thank you for listening.