Black Women's Empowerment

An Honest Look at Black Single Mothers and the Link Between Misogyny.

A fan of BB&W sent me a link today to a very powerful piece about how some black single mothers raise their sons, and how the methods of harsh and humiliating punishment is fueling the growing hatred manifest in many black men toward black women. Using the scene in Straight Outta Compton, where Dre’s mother slapped him a threw $50 in his face as an inference into why he grew up to beat girlfriends, wives and colleagues senseless in later years.

I run across Media Take Out clips like everyone else, so to deny that some black parents relish in some of the most brutal corporal punishment isn’t happening it to not be intellectually honest. Black parents brag about how they beat their kids. And is our community better for it? Not even. But what I have notice that alongside the rise of out-of-wedlock births has come a raise in palpable hatred of black women by vocal black men.

Take a look at the quotes and first-hand accounts of black men being abused by their mothers, and how it affected their future relationships.

Brian Kevin Alsup, a 22-year-old valet from Baltimore, said his mother was verbally abusive, and started beating him when he was 2 or 3, using her fists, a packet of clothes hangers, a plastic T-ball bat, and other objects.

“She would use mostly her fists or whatever was around that could hurt me, but not possibly kill me. Some stuff she took out on me because I was there. She’s thrown a glass bottle at me. She picked up a dining room chair and was about to hit me with it, but I screamed and she put it down,” Alsup said.

His mother used verbal and physical abuse simultaneously. “She would tell me I wasn’t shit. She called me the b-word. She called me motherfucker. She called me a fat pig. She called me stupid. That I was a fuck-up,” he said. “A lot of stuff that I spent a good part of my childhood suppressing and trying to forget. Wanting to hit her back was always going through my mind. Feeling like I hated her. Which I told her while she was on top of me beating me one day. Feeling like I just wanted to die.”

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Keith McNeil, a 40-year-old reservations manager for Alcoholics Anonymous was “popped,” beaten with belts, switches, shoes, or a broom anytime he gave his mother “attitude.”

“She often laced her comments with profanity,” McNeil said. “I usually experienced the full gamut of emotions, including fear, stress, guilt, and anger. I certainly felt that being whooped was normal, and that I ‘brought it upon myself.’ I felt like she hated me. She would be so intense and so angry as she whooped me, that I felt that I was receiving someone else’s punishment. In my mind, I remember wondering what I possibly could have done to deserve such treatment.”

Here’s my take:

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