The Ass Whippin’ Olympics

C.W. Hamilton
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

Want to try an interesting experiment at the next predominantly Black house party?

First, let everyone get a little tipsy; for maximum realness, wait until most of the room has finished their second drink.

Then start telling a story — it doesn’t have to be true, just make it up — about a recent visit to the grocery store where you saw a 10 year old white boy screaming at the top of his lungs because his mom wouldn’t buy him a candy bar. Make the story good; say that the kid started stomping his feet and knocking magazines off the rack at the checkout line and called his mother a bitch.

Then wait. Wait for it. Wait…for…it…

“If I had done that, my momma woulda whipped my ass,” Negro A might say.

“If I had said that, my daddy would have punched. me. in. the. throat”, Negress B brags.

“My momma would have knocked me clean into next week,” Negro C insists loudly and proudly.

You have just witnessed The Ass-Whippin’ Olympics, where Black people compete to determine whose parent tolerated the least disrespect, as evidenced by how fast they would “snatch you up”. It’s all sort of funny — for the record, Negro C wins the gold medal, since his mom was the only one whose ass-whippin’ defied the laws of both space and time — and it’s actually intended as a warm-hearted tribute to the parent and an awkward moment of Black consensus about our moral superiority as parents….

Except it’s not.

It’s a legacy of slave-era parenting, where slave parents had to train their kids to never attract the attention of white people and to avoid, at all costs, the drunken uncle of white supremacy. Throughout slavery, for the 100 years that followed it, and even today, Black parents have always known intimately what could happen to their beloved children if they refused to eat on slave ships; cried; talked back to massa on the plantation; flirted with a white girl at the store; stood up to police.

It’s also a classic bit of transference. Our ancestors were brutally beaten, abused and murdered, during and after slavery, for any and every reason, for any misbehavior small or large. Is it any surprise that there’s a strong vein of brutality in how descendants of slaves raise their children, knowing there was no room for error, no presumption of innocence?

Sometimes the Ass Whippin’ Olympics are hilarious. When your African American friend the plastic surgeon tells you how, when he was 12 years old, the cops brought him home after he’d been caught shoplifting and his mom chased him down the street with a belt — which he only escaped by climbing up a tree — it’s sort of comical in a slapstick kind of way.

But it’s also creepy, weird and slavish.

C.W. Hamilton

Written by

I trade in half-full glasses and other trash metaphors. Writer by design, lawyer by trade, West Indian for life!

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