No, she’s not the Mom of the Year

If this country must praise a slap heard around the world, I mourn for its rock-bottom expectations with regard to black motherhood and parenthood in general

By Kevin Bard

APRIL 29, 2015 — I had a feeling this would go viral. Why shouldn’t it? A black woman in Baltimore slapping her “thug” son for not obeying the rules in the middle of yet another anti-violence protest against the police.

For some, this public shaming is vigilantism done right. Besides, isn’t the idea of seeing a nigga-ish black man get beaten too irresistible to question, no matter who delivers the blows?

Black resistance to police brutality has always been tempered by concerns for property damage. As Freak Out Nation puts it, “In a city devastated by violence that has left 15 officers injured — six seriously — from thrown bottles, rocks and bricks, as well as dozens of businesses, homes and cars damaged or destroyed by looting or arson, this Mom has had it.”

Hence, Toya Graham’s apparent Mother of the Year award/hashtag.

If this country must praise a slap heard around the world, I mourn for its rock-bottom expectations with regard to black motherhood and parenthood in general. A racist system doesn’t really care if you are violent or not. A racist system also doesn’t really care if you are violent to your children or not.

In Ms. Graham’s interview with CBS News, as reported in The Hill, she says, “That’s my only son, and at the end of the day I don’t want him to be a Freddie Gray,” earning obvious praise from the Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts. But if her son’s spine were to be broken someday in the future while under arrest, whose fault would that actually be?

This correct-the-thug argument has a three-fold utility: it justifies beating children, police brutality, and the prison-industrial-complex – all in one swoop. It perpetuates the unwritten idea that black men who use nigga are incapable of understanding anything other than the violence that that word often entails. This narrative also suggests that certain black men must be constantly restricted. As Commissioner Batts puts it, “Take control of your kids.” Or the Baltimore police will do it for you.

I am no sociologist, but I will nevertheless venture that African American child abuse is often correlated to the anti-social behavior that the police often target – with violent consequences.

Perhaps it is easier (and more profitable) to police structural racism and multi-generational poverty than it is to actually solve them. Is this a standing American recommendation?

You teach with words and behavior, not fists or batons. Violence is actually the absence of a communal language, and what is happening right now in Baltimore (as a result of the horrific killing of Freddie Gray) proves that point. Who cares if Gray was running away? Thugs runaway from the rule-makers all the time. He was playing the role of a black man on the way to receiving corrective violence. As was Toya Graham’s son. Two peas in a pod, for some.

But what if moral lessons are somehow generated by a mother’s slap, or a father’s fist, or a cracked back, or a cop’s lethal chokehold? Then I can say, will all certitude, I want nothing to do with morality.