Because I feel like kids of color don’t hear it enough: domestic abuse is not a part of your culture.
A lot of us were raised with the idea that “its normal for wives/children to get hit! it helps them learn– only white folk don’t get beaten when they misbehave”. That’s not true, white people aren’t the only ones who deserve a safe and abuse free environment. Black and brown people can and do have loving families.
If you’re in a situation where you are enduring abuse and people use your culture to justify it, I want you to know that what they’re telling you are lies.
as someone who studies this: statistically speaking, child abuse (including “spanking”, because all forms of hitting children are abusive) is pretty much equally prevalent in households of all racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. so yeah, don’t let people use the “culture” excuse on you, but also, don’t believe others are experiencing it less just because it’s less normalized in their culture to talk about it. we all gotta work together to fix this shit.
I unfortunately see this attitude online as “if you don’t beat your kids, you’re training your kids to be disrespectful to authority like those damn white children.”
But white people literally instilled this during slavery. This is a byproduct of the violence of the transatlantic slave trade. I can’t speak for other colonized regions, but I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if cultures with no history of child abuse integrated it after colonization. This attitude in America of us having to beat our children into submission is our fault.
And white people also use culture to justify it! My mother used to use being Italian all the time to justify her rage issues. Meanwhile, in the Motherland, Italians are chill. It’s not culture, it’s trauma.
