THE WHIP HAS KIDS
by SHNAYJAAH VALENTINE JEANTY
Ass whoopings are a contract written entirely in fine print.
Whoopings constitute a binding agreement between the Whooper (“Administrator”) and the Whoopee (“Recipient”), enforceable upon commencement. The Recipient must endure the Experience without grabbing, blocking, or otherwise interfering and must count each lashing aloud; failure to maintain the count requires an automatic restart. The Administrator reserves the right to escalate the Experience, including use of the belt’s embellished side (rhinestones, studs, or metal), for severe infractions at their sole discretion. The Administrator assumes no liability for any resulting physical, emotional, or reputational damages.
The Whoopee does not willingly enter the contract. My smart mouth usually did for me.
At 4, I threatened to call 911 on my father, for the crime of parental discipline. At 7, a school authority figure with a disregard for personal space reprimanded me, and I snarkily asked if she’d brushed her teeth that morning. The formative whoopings did little for my attitude problems. At 12, my mother–a victim of severe physical and financial abuse–reminded me that my disrespect was quite mature for someone who didn’t pay bills, and I replied, “well, you don’t pay bills either.”
At that moment, I learned much about fortune tellers. The belt is the most accurate palm reader–it tells you your near future is in deep shit.
Your parent’s hand raises. Calculates the aim and velocity of the belt’s reading. It’s intended to meet the intersection of your head line and your fate line, the exact center of your palm. The belt goes slack. The sting is solid and fluid and sharp and dull. If your hand flinches before it can hit its target, the belt will usually hit your wrist, or worse, miss your palm entirely and hit your parent’s thigh. A Christian forum recommends a switch about the diameter of your little finger. Cautions against bruising by varying the placement of swats. Advises using the wrist, not the arm, to administer pain. A measured flick, they say. Not too much force. Just enough to make the skin throb, but not tear.
***
In our college dining halls, I laugh with my Black friends as we recall the landmarks of our childhood whoopings over pale “Rasta Pasta” and dry fried chicken. Stop crying before I give you something to cry about. Spare the rod, spoil the child. We find another commonality in our experiences– our parents would lecture us as they whooped us, adding syllables where there was silence. Each syllable earned its own hurt. Did. N’t. I. Te. Ll. You.
Better our parents than a police officer,
right?
***
Whenever I mention therapy, my parents advise not to bother them with white people shit.
Whoopings are fascinating because while they are inherent aspects of Black childhood, they force us to resist our most natural Black impulses–survival and self-defense. The Belt teaches you to submit, to hold in. Once, my brother fled the belt, so my mother chased him with lashings. Their bodies, together, looked like a textbook illustration of the 1800s.
Didn’t the belt descend from the whip? Don’t they hang from the same family tree?
In seventh grade, my mother was ill and asked me to whoop my brother for her after a particularly shocking investigation of his Google search history. A sick glee spun in my chest. There’s power in the hierarchy your arm holds once raised–its condescending glare down at the person below it. And after the whooping, a bitter self-congratulation for ending the pain you inflicted. I felt wise, like an arbiter of justice.
A massa, even.
Corporal punishment, specifically with the belt, has always been claimed and misremembered as a Black tradition. Most members of the Black community have had a Walmart run, for instance, where a white child was throwing a tantrum in the frozen goods aisle, and thought to themselves, that’s why those people gotta start beating their kids. However, the action of whooping is not far off from the whippings our ancestors received from white slave masters for misbehaving[1]. It’s ancient choreography. The whip cracks into its own applause.
In her book, Citizen, Claudia Rankine documents racism not as an event, but as an atmosphere—a daily weather report that Black people are forced to internalize, predict, and navigate. She raises the idea of a Self-Self and Historical Self. The Historical Self is the collective history, shaped by cultural and racial narratives, that influences a person’s identity and experiences, often linked to past traumas and societal structures of oppression. The Self-Self is the immediate, personal identity shaped by lived experiences, emotions, and interactions, but constantly intersecting with and impacted by the weight of historical forces and racialized realities. These two selves are in constant tension, with the historical self intruding on the personal, particularly in moments of racialized experience.
The Self-Self walks into a store. The Historical Self makes the clerk watch you.
The Self-Self signs up for a class. The Historical Self makes the professor mix you up with the only other Black student.
The Self-Self tries to exist. The Historical Self reminds you that you have never, not once, been allowed to.
I propose a complication for this concept.
Within Rankine’s Historical Self, there is an inner conflict between what I’ll call the Whip and the Belt. The Whip represents the direct and violent legacy of the historical self—the physical and systemic punishments of the past, such as slavery and segregation, which continue to impact the present. The Belt is where, in an attempt to separate from the pain of historical violence, it is transformed into a more normalized, internalized form of control, as an attempt to maintain discipline or order within a chaotic and traumatized lived experience.
So, to have an Black Historical Self is to wrestle a constant reckoning between the Whip and the Belt. Acknowledging consistent violations of your autonomy and ownership (Whip), while still rummaging for something that is your own in a space where ownership was a privilege (Belt)–perhaps power. It is to forget, remember, misremember, revise, and memorize, while simultaneously educating yourself and others. It is the consequence of a history that feels like a game of telephone. Moreover, I argue that there are ripples of the Belt far past corporal punishment.
***
The belt isn’t merely a weapon. It was initially garment. The belt holds your center in.
Keeps you decent.
Some mornings, my brother was deliberately late for school. My mother would use the belt he was planning to wear that day to whoop him. Afterwards, he’d refuse to wear it, as if the very fabric of the thing had betrayed him. She’d admonish him. I’m not sending you to school to look ghetto with your pants sagging to your ankles. He’d reluctantly loop it around his khakis, fingers swollen and trembling.
Where the Whip demanded compliance through pain, the Belt introduced shame. It was a discipline for the sake of survival, but reaffirmed that black bodies needed taming. A statement piece.
Enter respectability politics–the Belt reimagined for public display. A concept initiated in the Reconstruction Era and championed during Obama’s presidential campaign, respectability politics assert that for Black people to be deserving the same social benefits white individuals receive, we must adopt their whims, characteristics, and standards of goodness. Respectability politics tightly cinch a body, conforming it to the hollow of its oppressor.
The message is clear. You must present as if you’ve always been invited. Pull your pants up, and maybe they’ll let you sit at the table.
My mother reserved my seat. She strictly prohibited burgundy braids or gold hoops, slapped away my slang, and taught 50 new vocabulary words daily. She told me I’d understand when I was older.
Older came, and I understood. We exist in perpetuity of a “post-racial” American delusion. A successful colonization. When they go low, we go high. When they swing, we smile.
In 1981, Black poet Audre Lorde spoke about anger.
“My response to racism is anger,” Lorde said. “That anger has eaten clefts into my living only when it remained unspoken…Black women are expected to use our anger only in the service of other people’s salvation or learning. But that time is over.”
My poet friend (a huge CAConrad fan) recommended writing this essay while wearing a tight belt. I don’t own a belt. The garment is a weapon. I elect to be ghetto, to resist, to let my pants sag–particularly when I’m wearing underwear with a cute waistband.
My hips are fucking activists.
I am unbuttoned and slouched in my dorm lounge, worshiping my stomach’s bloat from my morning Dunkin’. My indecency is gorgeous.
***
Carlton Arms is farthest–seven blocks–from Columbia University’s main campus. My sophomore year of college, Columbia Housing was generous enough to rectify this distance by gifting me a Paisley.
Paisley was from one of the quieter states that cost you the “A” on your fifth grade U.S. map quiz. Paisley woke up at 7AM, her cheeks flushed with protein shakes and positivity, and retired at 8PM to her fairy-lit fortress of self-care. Our dorm was a room segregated. Her half, a garden of fairy lights, pastel posters, and personal artwork. My side, barren and devoid of sentiment.
At first, Paisley actually seemed nice. Her undying optimism was foreign, but oddly endearing.
But, one night, she nervously entered the dorm as I was laying on my bed.
“If you wanted to move out, I totally wouldn’t mind,” her hands joined her shoulder in a shrug. A quiet whip. It wasn’t a suggestion. Paisley’s reasons ranged from fixable–my alarm, coconut air freshener, and lamp were too loud–to nitpicky–my shoe wasn’t neatly lined up on my side of the room like hers was–to offensive–she was worried my low-income status would lead to envy, due to all the decorations on her side. She suggested I get a single, or perhaps search for a roommate I had “more in common with.” Days later, she randomly asked me not to steal from her.
For the first time on my college path, I felt a tender divide between me and the student body. I could imagine her, the wealthy university donors, and the admissions team who awarded my scholarship, all weighing my use. They’d all, directly or indirectly, brought me into this world. And they could take me out.
I became a body segregated. Rage was a bus, and I’d just been shoved to the back of it.
***
Three years ago, on a Zoom call in my childhood bedroom with my poetry mentor, I excitedly expressed my whip versus belt theory via poem. His right palm raised. Cradled his forehead before sliding down his face in exasperation. A quiet whip. He then challenged me to write a poem about race without using the word “white.”
He entered a well-intentioned rant about how everyone is already expecting this kind of work from us. How if you use the word, you spoil the poem.You know we work twice as hard to get half as much, right?
We work twice as hard to get half as much. A well-known adage in the Black community. Still, the act of instructing kids to bust their asses and expect half the recognition only perpetuates the same work ethic we were taken advantage of for in chattel slavery and the Jim Crow era. Didn’t the whip demand a performance, too?
I didn’t finish the poem. I wanted a thesis paper on the white boy who called me “Niggernayjaah” and “gorilla” for four years straight. I wanted a musical, a Netflix adaptation, and a Happy Meal toy with his pimpled face on it.
White people don’t deserve your anger, my mentor said, and he’s right. I deserve my anger. I deserve my tears. I deserve a sonnet that repeats “white” so often, iambic pentameter chokes on itself.
***
According to a Harvard Graduate School of Education study, whooping “elicits a similar response in children’s brains to more threatening experiences like sexual abuse.” The sound–the thwap–sticks like gum under desks. Pain bends time. Past is present is future. The echoes convince you it was your fault. Maybe you spoke too loud. Or stood too grown. Or wanted too much. Maybe you imagined the whip.
I think about this when white girls undress me.
Every white girl I’ve fucked has yanked off my belt. My imaginary belt. My Blackness. Like an accessory. Spicy-white, they call themselves, one-twelfth Black. Their family tree blooms with strange fruit. I tell them I’m Shnay. Jaah. They tell me they could say the n-word, like, if they really wanted to, but they won’t just for me, with Malcolm X’s grin. They add syllables to my name where there is supposed to be silence. Sha. Nay. Jaah. Each syllable earns its own harm. They raise their hands. Twirl my braids between their fingers like they’re souvenirs. A quiet whip.
My friend tells me not to stir the pot when they do this–you’re lucky you’re pretty enough to land a white girl. My middle school memories tell me I’m too dark to land anything at all. My Hinge matches tell me I’m sexy for a darkskinned girl, I’m not ghetto and manly like most. My audiences listen to my poem on harmful racial dating preferences and tell me people like black girls now, that my ordeals are a mere fluke in the Black experiment.
So I christen myself “Val.” I choose the simplicity of one syllable and silence. I decide the value of a Black woman is negotiated & conditional and measured by how well she fits into the oppressor’s guava vape-flavored mouth. The Whip demands compliance, but the Belt tells me I’m choosing it.
***
The last whooping I ever received was at 14.
On the second day of ninth grade, my mom picked me up late from school to find a stranger talking to me. In true helicopter mom fashion, she interrogated me on the way home, accusing me of being romantically involved with him. In true smart mouth fashion, I entered the contract. Once we got home, she dragged me by my shirt out of the car, into the house, and into our room for a meeting with her studded belt.
By the 50th lash, I hyperventilated, my shoulders rhythmically heaving to hit my earlobe. She called me lucky. Between lashes, she told stories of her motherland, Jamaica. How her mother used to beat her skull, her forearms, her abdomen, with pans and glass. How she didn’t stop until my mother drew blood. Until she was more blue than Black. On the 140th lash, I learned that my grandmother once slashed her left cheek with a fork for looking in the mirror too often.
Hands outstretched, I looked at the reddened geography of welts on my wrists. Looked back up at the four-pronged scar on my mother’s cheek through the lens of my tears. How proud she was for her dilution of harm. How grateful she expected me to be for the violence I do have.
I sobbed even harder.
The belt swung.
The whip cackled.
[1] Yes, the belt holds duality. Black discipline precariously juggles love and fear. For example, beating your child for a mistake before a cop kills them for the same one. It could also be seen as Black parents reclaiming agency over their child’s upbringing. However, there is a distinction between discipline as protection & discipline as harm, and studies have consistently affirmed that corporal punishment is a harmful form of discipline.
