How to Talk to your Child about Bullying -- Apologize!

How Do We Talk to our Child about Bullying?:

Start With an Apology from your Parent(s)

By Reginald Leamon Robinson

I just read a blog article entitled, DO and DON’T: How to Talk to your Child about Bullying, in the Huffingtonpost.com (October 8, 2013).  As I’ve felt in the past, I was left feeling like the authors of such articles still can’t get down to the source of the bullying.

Ever since I saw the stop bullying campaign on television, particularly on HBO, I always wondered if this feel-good approach would really help children who are either doing the bullying or suffering from it.  Well, I just read all 11 panels on this site, and I can tell that based on my ongoing research, children are not born to bully or to suffer bullying.  Rather, it is parents who create such experiences for their children by engaging in a parenting style, which is principally learned through how they were raised, that Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good would call “poisonous pedagogy.”  Based on power plays and the need of an adult child parent to victimize their children, in effect killing in their children today what was killed in them when they were children, parents who create bullying experiences for their children, regardless of whether they are doing to others or attracting it to them, require obedient children as a very high value.  It doesn’t matter if these parents are liberals, moderates, conservatives.  Parents who embrace poison pedagogy do violence to their children’s vitality, spontaneity, and authenticity by breaking their children’s will.  In addition to good, respectful, and obedient children, such parents want orderly, cleanliness, and emotionally controlled children.  You’ll know when you’re around such parents or adults if you take your children into public spaces, and your children in moments of joy and happiness will squeal or shriek.  Often as that child's parent, you’ll get that look that says control your child.  As a parent, and a single dad, I’ve received such looks and glares when they heard my child’s voice.

Anyway, my point is that we keep focusing on how to talk to our children if they suffer bullying.  We might ask: what can I do to help Mary and Paul not have these emotionally and physically painful experiences, in which they pretty much get to relive the powerlessness that they’ve suffered through at home for at less 7 or 8 years or more at home?

Home is where we as parents create those children who will bully and those who will suffer the impotent fury and discharged anger of a child who has been maltreated in the earliest years of his or her life.  By impotent fury, Alice Miller meant that we will recreate the traumatizing experiences when we’re bigger, stronger, or more powerful than the person or persons who are the target of that fury. Just consider that most of the elected officials in the House of Representatives (and the Senate) come from homes in which their parents shoved rules, law, order, obedience, and power dynamics down the throats of elected officials like Speaker of the House Boehner, and now that he’s in a position of public power, he’d rather shove his power, rules, order, and values down the throats of public citizens, revealing that not only he does not care about the average citizen, but he also intends to bully others who he perceives as less powerful.  He won’t surrender, for that means certain existential death.  At the same time, adult children like Boehner who still suffer from their internalized maltreatment and children who bully at school or elsewhere are discharging the anger that has built up within their psychological, physical, and emotional bodies.  I can imagine that they are always ready to bully, to fight, by always seeking out other children who they perceive as smaller and weaker.  Every time they bully someone, they release a bit more of their internalized anger.  Speaker of the House Boehner and other elected officials, who forced our federal government to shutdown because they couldn’t defeat the Affordable Care Act at the November ballot box and in the federal courts and before the Supreme Court, now wish to de-fund the Act so that they can serve their new masters -- special interests, which means that ironically they have exchanged their parental abusers for corporate masters who treated such officials as little more than hired guns or expendable objects.

So if we wish really to end bullying, we must begin to address the issue by first and foremost faulting the parents and caregivers who create these bullying children in the first place.  So based on Alice Miller’s For Your Own Good at page 59, consider the following.  It’s how parents create bullies to torment the very children who have been broken at home before they get to school or other public places.

1.  Adults are the masters of the dependent child.

2.  Adults determine in a godlike fashion what is right and wrong.

3.  The child is held responsible for the anger of adults.

4.  Parents must always be shielded.

5.  The child’s life-affirming feeling pose a threat to the autocratic parent.

6.  The child’s will must be “broken” as soon as possible.

7.  All this must happen at a very early age so the child “won’t notice” and will not be able to expose the adults.

At the very least, informational programs on bullying, including this blog article on How to Talk to your Child about Bullying, has shielded parents from any accusation that they created (or co-created with the proxy abuse of the other caregiver) the bully who torments our already maltreated children.  And how do such parents achieve the 7 steps of poisonous pedagogy?  They must at the very least engage in physical, emotional, or psychological violence.  If such violence begins when the child is between 0 and 3 years of age, she’ll respond with freezing (one of the four responses to trauma, viz., fight, flight, freeze, fawn), and to freeze is to dissociate, which is the primary response of the infant child.  And she’ll “forget” what actually happened.  Unfortunately, this dissociation does not kill the repressed anger.  It’s been stored in the child’s body, and at some point, unless that child gets real, non-humiliating, and non-manipulative love from someone, including siblings and extended family, that child will unconsciously act on her anger and fury.  In our context, one result is school or public bullying, which can be traced inevitably back to that child’s earliest, and perhaps in the worse case ongoing, experience with childhood trauma.

So, to the implied question of how do we speak to our child or children about bullying, I’d say that parents should begin by apologizing to their children for having slowly or violently broken their children’s will, thus contributing to their need to re-experience unconsciously either power and control over someone who is smaller or weaker than him or her, or to relive the painful suffering and humiliation that flow inexorably from poisonous pedagogy at the hand of their parents.

With a sincere apology offered to the child who has suffered the humiliation of bullying, parent(s) can begin to have an ongoing dialogue with their children, in which at the very least parents don’t attempt to regain the powerful high ground by lying, by faulting the child’s innocent developmentally appropriate behavior, or by shutting down the child’s natural anger and rage when she realizes that the first bullying experience she ever suffered and had to accept as love came from her mother, father, or both.

With an honest, sincere dialogue between the parent and child, perhaps the family begins to heal.  At the very least, the child begins to heal and has the potential for a different relationship with her parent.  And healing would naturally require the bullying parent to accept that he was maltreated when he was an infant or toddler or child.  In addition, that parent must begin to fault his parent(s), and this process according to Alice Miller does not mean that the adult child has to hate his parents.  However, it also doesn’t mean that they will become engaged in a path-breaking dialogue either.  Chances are great that the adult child who confronts his parents will meet with “How dare you? Don’t you know what sacrifices we made for you, so that you could live well, go to the best school, and enjoy leisure?”

Unfortunately, based on the intergenerational transmission of violence, such amenities can’t replace real love, compassionate tenderness, and non-violent parenting toward the adult child.

While it’s not a magic bullet, an adult parent’s sincere apology to their bullied child and an honest sharing of some of what the parent did to the suffering child will re-create a neutral, humanity-recognizing space in the parent-child relationship, in which real healing for both the parent and the child can take place.  That child can gradually reclaim her vitality, spontaneity, and authenticity, the very source on which her self-esteem must rest.

With such self-esteem, she’ll not need unconsciously to relive her shame and humiliation by drawing to her confirmatory bullying experiences that “say” she’s unworthy.

Does Black Mothers' Brutality Toward Little Black Boys Explain Why Gangsta Rappers Call Black Women (or their Mothers) Bitches and Hoes?

HOS, BITCHES, AND THE SEARCH FOR AN ENLIGHTENED WITNESS:

GANGSTA RAP LYRICS AND THE REAL TRUTH OF BLACK MOTHER-SON LOVE

By Reginald Leamon Robinson1

You stankin’ funky nasty trifling bitch You!2

It is now de rigueur to deny that the antimaternal verbal content of the dozens of other black tropes [like bitches] bears any relation to problems in the actual mother-son relationship. I find this politically correct denial simply preposterous.3

I. INTRODUCTION

In Nasty Bitch, Bust Down,who’d been a practicing psychologist,4refers to women as nasty bitches, hot twats, and hoes. In dealing with these women, black men like Down must dicksmith,5 which undergirds hyper-masculinity. Black men who get played just have sex. Dicksmithers must über fuck. They must reduce women or black women to hoes, bitches, and cum guzzlers: “cum was drippin’ out of her nose all ova her clothes,” and “when I shot my nut . . . she went a slurpin it.” They must demean them: “Her pussy hole smelled like sour cream and onion.” With black men, sex must distort, wound, or cripple: “She was limpin, her pussy was stretched out of shape.” Bust must exploit, and so he refuses the common courtesy of giving her oral sex, too. He’d gotten his. For him, man-fucking requires domination, perhaps a way of garnering love, respect, control, or power: “While I was fuckin her I said you gon’ respect me bitch!” And dicksmithing perhaps gives black men a license to “kill” black women: “she went to choke, she couldn’t take this dick/But I didn’t give a fuck I tried to kill that bitch.” In the end, Nasty Bitch concludes with Bust, having been sucked off by a women for drugs (i.e., rocks), called her: “You stankin’ funky nasty trifling bitch You!”

Nasty Bitch’s lyrics move us well beyond tropes, as Orlando Patterson argued in Blacklash.6 For Patterson, tropes like bitch confess nearly the unspeakable: black mothers and their son do not share the much declared and oft professed special love bond. Blacklash argues that black mothers emasculate their little black boys, leaving them in doubt about their identity, and requiring them at least unconsciously to expurgate any toxics that may have destroyed their natural impulses. How do black mothers emasculate their little black boys? Beyond slavery, Patterson can’t quite answer this question. Yet, since slavery, black mothers have broken little black boys through brutal violence, obedience training, and morality that cause what Alice Miller calls “emotional blindness.” By “emotional blindness,” Alice Miller means repressed “feelings and memories that renders a person unable to see certain sets of circumstances.”7 One result, which Kenneth Clark discussed, was hyper- masculinity.8 The other was the bad nigger, the street character who everyone feared because he unconsciously did violence to proxies and surrogates that he’d suffered. Did that include black women? Perhaps intimate partner violence flows from this soul-murdering or existential death caused by black mothers’ parenting style. If asked, mothers will say: “Of course, I love him. As mothers, we always love our children.”9 Likewise, of his mother, Dr. Mahalia Ann Hines, Common says: “she is a mother, a grandmother, my best friend.”10

Given the foregoing, is the black mother-son bond real? Likewise, are Bust Down’s lyrics in Nasty Bitch symbolically humiliating, a form of violence, black women? Without generalizing, if black mothers-sons love bond is more fact than myth, does that bond reveal serious fissures when rappers like Bizzar say: “we will smack a bitch and smack a ho”? Scholars, commentators, and bloggers who have critiqued tropes like bitch and who have generally denounced vilifying lyrics have examined the historical roots of rap and its leftist politics,11 which deployed the counterhegemonic perspectives of marginalized minorities, especially black men.12 They’ve critiqued derogatory lyrics from a gender perspective,13 even though some have argued that female rap artists say “bitch”, too.14 Still others argue that words like bitch can establish at the very least an artist as masculine and misogynistic.15 In the end, none of these perspectives answers these questions.

Let’s recast these questions, so that they dovetail into the central focus of this chapter. Why do little black boys who are arguably raised by black mothers with love, nurturing, and a deep respect for their authenticity, spontaneity, and vitality grow into adults who call black women “unproper bitch[es],”16 or nasty hoes? Few scholars venture into this forbidden territory, when they address why rappers are preoccupied by “gunplay, killing other men, being tough and invulnerable,”17 or as the Geto Boys say: “I, bitch I just want to fuck you.”18 For example, Michael Eric Dyson waxed on about our  collective “American social imagination, the violent man using the gun to defend his family . . . becomes a suitable metaphor for the notion of manhood.”19 What’s forbidden? Within the black community, it’s verboten to fault parents, especially black mothers. Nevertheless, I argue that black mothers, who rely on cruelty as love as a parenting style, brutally beat and break their little black boys because black parents required absolute obedience, loyalty, and respect from their children,20 and in order to survive and to hopefully get loved, these children repressed their cruel sufferings and thus become emotionally blind to their traumatic childhood history, which gets revealed to us in part by their perhaps near autobiographic lyrics and by their deep rage and anger toward black women who are by proxy their brutal mothers.

That thesis is rather disquieting. Why? Little black boys mortally fear the loss of their mothers’ love, and in the hopes of keeping it, they’ll strongly and blindly identify with their black caregivers’ justifying morality. They’ll believe as follows. If bad, they must be punished. If punished, they must suffer humiliation and shame. If humiliated, they must suppress his physical and emotional pain. If suppressed, they must accept the received morality that relieves mothers of guilt, viz., “If I didn’t love you, I’d not beat you!” If immoral, they must identify with their mothers’ morality, so that they can either be good or earn love. If so identified, they must accept her beliefs, which require them to ignore their body’s pain and to distrust their feelings. Ignored pain and distrusted feelings darken humiliation, thus distorting their existential truth. If so distorted, they must believe that white racism, the principal cause of black mothers’ brutality, caused blacks to suffer constitutionally, to languish economically, to lag educationally, to falter spiritually, or to be denied socially. By keeping little black boys emotionally blind, by requiring them to fault white racism, the dark secret of parental brutality causes blacks to experience existentially genocidal, and despite their black mothers’ distorting morality, these little black boys’ pain, anger, rage, and humiliation, although repressed, still reside in their bodies, where all trauma exists. Within gangsta rap, that trauma resurfaces, carrying an unconscious compulsion to repeat,21 and getting symbolically expressed as vilifying, disrespectful, humiliating, and violent lyrics.

In this chapter, I advance this thesis by analyzing gangsta rap lyrics, and in so doing, I’ll read such lyrics through Alice Miller’s framework to illustrate analytically why black men actually and unconsciously hate and rage against their mothers, which means that a real mother-son love bond is part of the dark secrets that negatively impact and perennially destabilize the so-called black community.

Endnotes

1.  Copyright © 2012 by Reginald Leamon Robinson. Professor of Law, Howard University School of Law , Washington, D .C. B.A., (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa), Howard (1981); M.A., The University of Chicago (1983); Exchange Scholar, Political Science and Economics, Yale University (1984-1985); J.D., The University of Pennsylvania (1989). I initially presented that essay at the Hip-Hop and the Law Symposium, which was held at West Virginia University College of Law, Spring 2009. I wish to Professor andré douglas pond cummings for not only organizing the symposium and for inviting me to present, but also for him, Professor Pamela Bridgewater, and Professor Donald Tibbs, Ph.D., extending me the offer to contribute that presentation to this book, which is path breaking and paradigm shifting. In addition to the editors who showed infinite patience with my creative process, I also owe great thanks to Professor Crisarla Houston (UDC) who read and commented on my drafts. Last, but not least, I’d also like to thank my research assistant, Ms. Erin Medeiros (class of 2013), for her consistent attention to detail and excellent research. Of course, the politics and errata belong exclusively to me.

2.  Bust Down, Nasty Bitch, in NASTY BITCH (Original Release Date Dec. 13, 1991, Lil Joe Records, Inc.).

3.  Orlando Patterson, Blacklash: The Crisis of Gender Relations Among African Americans, 62 TRANSITION 4 (1993).

4.  See Bust Down, http://www .soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=233325 (last visited: March 25, 2013). According to this promotional page:

Bust Down was the first New Orleans Rapper to achieve national recognition! . . . . After going platinum and not receiving a penny from his record label, he became disenchanted with the music industry, enrolled in college and earned a degree in psychology! After years practicing psychology, he could no longer quell his burning desire to create and perform, so he has re-entered the music arena and is currently working on his new album! Bust Down is the quintessential lyricist; his music is a magical blend of old school style with cutting edge tracks topped with a flawless delivery of catchy melodies and ingenious rhyme schemes!

5.  See T . DENEAN SHARPLEY-WHITING, PIMPS UP, HO’S DOWN: HIP HOP’S HOLD ON YOUNG BLACK WOMEN 88 (2007) (“In this space, the mythic dominance of black men and their perfected craft of ‘dicksmithing’ appear uncontested by all, irrespective of race, class, and gender.”).

6.  Patterson, supra note 3, at 15.

7.  Id. at 14.

8.  See KENNETH B. CLARK, DARK GHETTO 70-74 (1968).

9.  COMMON WITH ADAM BRADLEY, ONE DA Y IT’LL ALL MAKE SENSE x (2011).

10.  Id. at 5.

11.  See generally Sebastien Elkouby, Is Hip Hop Destroying Black America?, www .raprehab.com/is-hip-hop-destroying-black-america/ (last visited: March 14, 2013).

12.  See Ronald J. Stephens & Earl Wright II, Beyond Bitches, Niggers, and Ho’s: Some Suggestions for Including Rap Music as a Qualitative Data Source, 3 RACE & SOCIETY 23-40 (2001). 

13.  See Sherryl Kleinman, Matthew B. Ezzell, & A. Corey Frost, Reclaiming Critical Analysis: The Social Harms of “Bitch”, 3 SOCIOLOGICAL ANALYSIS 47 (2009).

14.  See Elizabeth Monk-Turner & D’Ontae Sylvertooth, Rap Music: Gender Difference in Derogatory W ord Use, 10 AM. COMM. J. *2 (2008).

15.  See DANIEL CLAPS, “FUCK BITCHES, GET MONEY”: DISCURSIVE ASSERTIONS OF MASCULINITY AND SEXUAL ORIENTATION IN HIP-HOP LYRICS 2 (Höstterminen 2010).

16.  Ying Yang Twins, Hoes, UNITED STATES OF ATLANTA (Year).

17.  Byron Hurt, Hip-Hop (Abridged): Beyond Beats and Rhymes 3 (2006), www.mediaed.org. 

18.  Geto Boys, This Dick’s For You, TILL DEATH DO US PART (year).

19.  Hurt, supra note 17, at 3.

20.  See Reginald Leamon Robinson, Dark Secrets: Obedience Training, Rigid Physical Violence, Black Parenting, and Reassessing the Origins of Instability in the Black Family Through a Re-Reading of Fox Butterfield’s ALL GOD’S CHIL DREN, 55 HOWARD L.J. 393 (2012).

21.  ALICE MILLER, BANISHED KNOWLEDGE: FACING CHILDHOOD INJURIES (Leila Vennewitz trans., 1990).