Teach your children well

Whether you’re white, black, or anything else:

It’s now cliche for white folks looking to justify their own paranoia and fears to invoke rowdy black kids on the train, with no parents, acting a fool. Word up, I hate it to. But my ability to see this threw a racial lens is undercut by one observable fact–white kids act a fool in full view of their parents. In the last three months, I’ve seen a white child hit his mother, tell her mother to shut up, and run up and down a subway car, ignoring his parents pleas to stop. Yesterday, on my plane to Denver, I watched a white kid get up and walk the aisle–while the plane was ascending. He kept going even after the stewardess warned him.

That’s Ta-Nehisi Coates arguing for no more complaints about how black kids act in public please. He says he’s been watching scenes like that his whole life. And that white parents are far more permissive than black parents.

He’s got some pretty good stats to back him up. Black parents are more likely to spank and…

…black parents punish their children more than white parents in all ways. If you’re black and you misbehave, you’re both more likely to get spanked and more likely to lose your allowance than your white neighbor, who in turn is both more likely to get spanked and more likely to lose his allowance than the Hispanic kid down the street. So on average, poor people spank more and withdraw allowances less, whereas black people spank more and withdraw allowances more.

Coates concludes:

I know the white kid with his mother is just rude, while the black kid is “scary,” but to me, they’re just annoying–both of them.

Worth keeping in mind over a long hot summer holiday weekend.