Illustration Copyright Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis/AP Images
By Chocolate, Pomp, And Circumstance | Originally Published at Chocolate, Pomp, and Circumstances . September 14, 2014
Imagine: You’re at work. You’re scrolling through Facebook or playing Candy Crush instead of paying attention to your conference call – your boss comes into your office, tells you, quite angrily, that you are in trouble, and starts to hit you with a branch from a tree.
This sounds absolutely insane because you know that this would never happen, and if it did, that you could sue your boss to smithereens for a charge called “assault”.
At this point, I’m going to assume most have heard about the Adrian Peterson spanking case.
He was briefly jailed for “spanking” his son until he bled, leaving scars – and yet many still think that this is an okay practice if “done correctly.”
Why is it that, so many people, when confronted that something within their worldview is unhealthy, uncouth, and unfit in this modern world, shut down and begin a long line of excuses and defenses?
Why on earth would anyone condone the beating of anyone, especially a child, for any reason?
Allow me to break down all of the reasons spanking is wrong and should be called and thought of as assault.

Legally:

When someone hits another person, it is assault. Whether I’m at a bar and I have a disagreement with a stranger, or if I am home and have a disagreement with my husband, or if I beat my neighbor’s kid, me hitting and/or beating them because I do not like what they said or did is assault, and is poor self-control on my part. These assaults are also illegal, and I could be charged with a crime.
The fact that it is legal in any capacity to hit your children when you are mad at them harkens back to master/slave relations. Slave owners could legally beat their slaves (whether this meant with a belt, their hands, or whatever else they saw fit) because slaves were not seen as people under the law. They were seen as property and had no rights. Do we really want to relate our children to slaves? This black woman sure as hell doesn’t.

Philosophically:

“I was beat/spanked/paddled and I turned out fine! See?” I would argue that you did not turn out fine, you turned into someone who thinks it is okay to hit a defenseless child when they do something wrong because you have power over someone smaller than you.
Not to mention, what does this actually teach kids? It teaches kids that they can and should physically hit others when others do something that they empathyeducates – The Euphemism of Spanking (Hint: It’s Actually Assault):

10 Arguments Black People Need To Stop Making That Support Racism
By Tiffanie Drayton | Originally Published at Clutch Magazine. September 2, 2014 It makes sense that White people use completely illogical arguments to derail conversations about racism, because the current racial hierarchy reinforces White dominance and “White privilege”– so they benefit from it. What makes absolutely no […]
100+ by empathy / 10h