I remember being spanked as a child, the last one being the most memorable because I had to strip down naked, exposing my bare 10-year-old body to the black leather belt that I had grown to hate. That day I didn’t shed a tear—I was too embarrassed to cry.
Any child growing up in a Black household has probably been whooped a time or two in an effort to be taught a lesson on how to respect your elders, the importance in obeying firmly-stated rules, and that there are consequences to every action. After the lashes were over and the tears stopped pouring down your cheeks, parents often made a point to tell you that they loved you and that they didn’t enjoy dishing out the punishment. As we get older we understand that it was ultimately our wrong actions that led to our pain, and that our parents were trying to protect us from potentially putting ourselves in a situation where someone who doesn't love us could harm us. But at the time, getting hit certainly doesn’t feel very loving, and little do we know that every lash in the name of love could've potentially became a part of the foundation of what we perceived love to be.
In the documentary Human, director Yann Arthus-Bertrand explores the dark side of mankind while shedding light on the best of it in an attempt to answer the universal and ancestral question of who we are and the purpose of our existence.
In one heart-wrenching clip, a Black male serving a life sentence for murdering a mother and her son gives us a valuable lesson on how beating children may communicate the wrong message about love.
“I remember my stepfather would beat me with extension cords, and hangers, and pieces of wood, and all kinds of stuff. After every beating he would tell me, “It hurt me more than it hurt you. I only did it because I love you.” It communicated the wrong message to me about what love was.
So, for many years I thought that love was supposed to hurt, and I hurt everyone that I loved. And I measured love by how much pain someone would take from me, and it wasn’t until I came to prison in an environment that is devoid of love that I began to have some sort of understanding about what it actually was and was not.
I met someone and she gave me my first real insight into what love was because she saw past my condition and the fact that I was in prison with a life sentence for murder, doing the worst kind of murder that a man can do—murdering a woman and a child. It was Agnes, the mother and grandmother of Patricia and Chris, the woman and child that I murdered, who gave me the best lesson about love because by all rights she should hate me, but she didn’t. Over the course of time and through the journey that we took it has been pretty amazing she gave me love. And she taught me what it was.”
Though most of us haven’t murdered anyone physically, many of us have murdered people emotionally, whether we intended to or not.
Many of us lack an understanding of love and in turn hurt others, and ourselves, and then wonder why there’s a deficiency of peace and happiness in our relationships, including with our children. And many times it dates back to the long-lasting scars of our own childhood.
There has been many conversations surrounding "beating" children, and whether it's an appropriate form of discipline or abuse. Opinions vary, but there is no denying that it can have an effect on a child as they transition into adulthood. As a result, kids may carry that aggression shown by their parents into their own relationships and domestic disputes.
Via The Huffington Post:
It is time for parents and educators across the U.S. to rethink our use of spanking as a form of discipline. Research clearly shows that spanking is ineffective at teaching children how to behave appropriately in the future. In fact, spanking actually increases children's disobedience, problem behavior and aggression. It also increases their likelihood of developing mental health problems such as depression or anxiety.
A Police One article titled, "Spanking and the Cycle Of Domestic Violence" also referenced a U.S. Department of Justice survey on the Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence, which found that:
40 percent of surveyed women and 54 percent of surveyed men said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker.
While discipline is definitely important in training up a child, it's equally important to keep in mind the long-term impact it may have on the child emotionally and mentally as they grow and develop their own relationships.
Watch the testimony below and let us know your thoughts!
Learn more about the #WhatMakesUsHuman project here.
Those rumors were more than laid to rest when Jodie and Joshua went to the 2023 Oscars together earlier this year, and even more recently, when they celebrated her birthday together last month during the September unveiling of the Lotus Emeya.
Jodie Turner-Smith celebrates her birthday with husband Joshua Jackson at the unveiling of the new fully-electric Lotus Emeya on September 07, 2023 in New York City.
Brian Ach/Getty Images for Lotus
Despite seeming particularly happy and in love, perhaps the writing was already written on the wall even then. In the past, Jodie has been very celebratory publicly about her love for her estranged husband, even boldly recounting their love story for the books in a 2021 interview with Seth Meyers.
When Jodie and Joshua met, it was while at his birthday party in 2018. Their relationship was hot and heavy from the start, with Jodie openly noting that they began as a "one-night stand." During her 2021 interview with Seth Meyers, she jokingly referred to their love story as a "three-year one-night stand." She shared:
"First of all, I saw him before he saw me and when I saw him, I was like, 'I want that.' And then when he saw me, I just pretended like I didn't see him. He had to yell across the room to me, and I was wearing this T-shirt from a movie called Sorry to Bother You and [actress] Tessa Thompson plays a character called Detroit, and she has this T-shirt that says, 'The Future Is Female Ejaculation.'
"And so, he shouts across the room, 'Detroit!' He comes over and… does this really cute, charming thing that he does and just all night -- he just basically followed me around the party."
The couple were together from that moment forth, and even made things "Instagram official" less than two weeks later while on a dinner date. Joshua would later clarify to Insider that the night they met in 2018 was not a 'one-night stand' or a 'three-year one-night stand' like his then-wife joked but instead, it was "technically a three-night stand."
"It was sealed with a kiss that night and then we didn't leave each other's sides for, well, three years now," Joshua continued at the time.
In a July 2021 interview with Jimmy Fallon, Joshua dropped more details about the why behind getting married. He revealed that he didn't know he wanted to get married to Jodie until "the moment she asked me."
"She asked me on New Year's Eve. We were in Nicaragua. It was very beautiful, incredibly romantic, we were walking down the beach and she asked me to marry her."
He added, "I did not know [she would propose], but she was quite adamant and she was right. This is the best choice I ever made."
Joshua Jackson Reveals Jodie Turner-Smith Proposed To Him
Jodie received quite a bit of flack for proposing to Joshua because it goes against tradition and what society sees as acceptable for a woman to do to a man, and proposing isn't one of them. No matter how much time has passed, the viewpoints around who should do the proposing and who should be proposed to are still very traditional.
After being on the receiving end of such backlash, Joshua would later clarify to the media in a separate interview that it wasn't just Jodie's proposal to him that sealed the deal of them getting married, he proposed to her too. She might have initiated it, but Joshua followed through.
"I accidentally threw my wife under the bus because that story was told quickly and it didn't give the full context and holy Jesus, the internet is racist and misogynist," he explained to Refinery29 that same year. "We were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic."
David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images
He continued, "And yes, my wife did propose to me and yes, I did say yes, but what I didn't say in that interview was there was a caveat, which is that I'm still old school enough that I said, 'This is a yes, but you have to give me the opportunity [to do it too].'"
"She has a biological father and a stepdad, who's the man who raised her. [I said], 'You have to give me the opportunity to ask both of those men for your hand in marriage.' And then, 'I would like the opportunity to re-propose to you and do it the old-fashioned way down on bended knee.' So, that's actually how the story ended up."
Joshua and Jodie would eventually marry in December 2019. Shortly thereafter, Jodie gave birth to the couple's first child, Janie, in 2020.
In a recent interview with Elle UK, Jodie shared the ways becoming a mother to Juno helped to heal her of her wounds from colorism she experienced in the past. "It's interesting because I had a lot of resistance to becoming a mother and, throughout my life, I always said if I were to have children, I wanted to have Black, Black babies so that I could affirm them as children with the love that I felt I needed to have been affirmed with by the outside world," Jodie shared with the outlet.
She continued, "Then I fell in love with my husband and we talked about having kids. I did have this mini pause, where I was like, 'She's going to be walking through the world not only having an experience that I did not have, but looking like people that, in a way, I'd always felt a little bit tormented by.' Now that I've got this little, tiny, light-skinned boss, I feel like it’s the universe teaching me lessons. I've been given a daughter who looks this way to heal my own conversations around colorism."
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Featured image by Amy Sussman/Getty Images
