You continue to impress me, and I am glad about that.
Personally, I am convinced that self-defense is human nature, while aggression must be taught and learned. My mother’s slap, and Mr. McFadden’s parents’ spankings were the reasoned, necessary steps necessary to hone and sharpen the natural human instinct known as self-defense.
As I said, my mother was protecting me from aggressive violence that she knew, and I did not know, was being taught to other children outside our home. My mother was determined to protect her children from assimilation in any way necessary. My use of the n-word, was the first time I’d exhibited a sign of assimilation and her slap kept me from making the same mistake again.
If my mother had not slapped me, I would have remained vulnerable to assimilation – and continued to gravitate towards people who used that language, learned to make their excuses, overlooked, and eventually absorbed their lessons on aggression and violence as my own. Luckily, my mother did slap me, and after that, I stayed as far away as I could from people who used the n-word, Kike, and any other racial slur.
When my second daughter was born, her big sister often bit her. I was genuinely perplexed and tried everything I could think of to persuade my seventeen-month-old child not to bite her baby sister, but nothing worked. One afternoon, my toddler bit her baby sister and I picked up my toddlers’ arm and bit it – hard enough to hurt. My little toddler looked at her arm, looked at her baby sister’s arm, then me and we both burst out crying. In that moment, I swear I could see my little girl making the connection between her arm, her baby sister’s arm, the biting and the pain. Until that day, my toddler had no way of knowing that biting hurt, because she'd never experienced pain. I think she was simply interacting with her new baby sister. My toddler never bit or hit anyone again – ever.
Perhaps the most disturbing facet of white supremacy is the violence necessary to sustain it always comes home to roost inside white families. As you say of your ex-girlfriend’s parents, white children are taught violence and aggression and no self-defense lessons whatsoever.
Clearly, Mr. McFadden’s parents taught him self-defense – not violence – and in the doing, protected him from assimilation. Clearly, Mr. McFadden put those lessons to work in his life (to the betterment of us all).
Violence and aggression only seem powerful because they are so prevalent. However, self-defense is far more powerful – and enduring. To wipe violence and aggression out of American culture, we must learn to teach self-defense to our children. And that is a subject, I hope you and me and others begin to think and talk about.
