African American Parenting Style

I think with fond memories of the big tree that grew in my grandmother’s yard, with branches that were the perfect size for switches. I hear her booming and shrill voice now, commanding, “Go and pick a switch” (Cooper). For many African Americans this is a walk down memory lane. The use of switches, hands, belts, and many other objects are utilized to physically discipline children, in the African American community, it is often referred to as receiving a whooping/whipping. The difference between African Americans and White Americans on how children are disciplined is very drastic. While the majority of the African American community feels children should be raised under strict disciplinary rules; the White American community tends to follow …show more content…
2010). To follow an authoritative parenting style disciplinary actions are needed for children to successfully learn how to apply and follow rules, in their future. Parents use this method over others because it teaches great discipline, and keeps their hopes up of children staying on the good side of the law. In the African American community children are taught obedience and discipline through methods as; whippings, beatings, cursing, verbal and emotional abuse while speaking in a yelling manner. While the White community uses methods as uses calm, polite tones, time outs, and discussing manners. This drastic difference is vastly talked about in text from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me” and Brittney Cooper’s “The Racial Parenting Divide: What Adrian Peterson Reveals about the Black vs. White child-rearing.” Does following a stricter disciplinary action plan, help save African American children from state violence (Government)? Cooper and Coates would both agree the answer is no, so is it time for African Americans to change their profound ways of traditional physical disciplinary actions, to a more lenient form as the white community …show more content…
Coates also vividly remembers, “the sting of [father’s] black leather belt…as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns” (15). Coates knows that his father is punishing him to learn to follow rules because if he doesn’t the police will get to him, beat him, possibly destroy his body, or lose him to the community around him. Even though Coates understands the reasons why the African American community whips their children he to wants to take a different approach to raising his child. He uses a personal experience to address state violence while speaking to his son throughout the book, “Between The World and Me.” A college friend of his named, “[P]rince Jones had made it through and still [the state] had taken him” (Coates 77). Coates is asserting that the state does not care about the African American race. They shot and killed Prince Jones, within yards of his fiancée’s home. Prince was an educated man that had, scholar all throughout school and a mother for a doctor, well disciplined and an obedient child but still his body was taken away from him. Coates speaks to his son telling him, “then that you would not escape, that there were awful men who’d laid plans for you, and I could not