A Community's Anger Toward Children Who've Already Been Destroyed
A Chicago Community Pulled Up To Whup Children Who’ve Already Been Destroyed
The camera shakes as the crowd surges, and then suddenly there she is, Corshawnda Hatter, a pregnant mother trying to shield her babies from a blur of fists and bodies. This grown woman is swallowed by a wall of children barely taller than her own 9-year-old son. The viral video of that brutal beating has been replayed millions of times across social media.
According to Chicago police, the attack unfolded around 3 p.m. Monday in the 10600 block of South Bensley Avenue, just steps from Orville Bright Elementary School on the South Side. Hatter was walking home with her son and her younger daughter when a group of students began trailing them, yelling, taunting, and circling in. The video shows the moment the crowd tightens around the family before two children rush forward and start swinging on Hatter and her kids until she’s knocked to the ground.
Hatter and her son were taken to Trinity Hospital in serious condition. Her daughter was also attacked. And in the aftermath, dozens of parents and community members stormed the school like a lynch mob demanding that the children be whupped, while police say no arrests have been made.
No mother walking her children home from school should ever be terrorized by a pack of kids. But here’s the part everybody is too culturally indoctrinated, too wounded, and too loyal to their own trauma to confront: the instinct to “whup” these kids is the same violence that trained them to behave like this in the first place.
The cognitive dissonance is infuriating, and the emotional illiteracy is generational. And the community response—the “village” pulling up to the school with belts, mace, rage, and loudspeakers yelling WHUP THEM KIDS—is the most damning evidence of all.
No child wakes up and chooses violence in a vacuum. Children are apprentices, imitators, and mirrors of their families and communities. They are neurological recording devices taking in every single adult interaction around them. The adults in their world literally wire their brains. And what they learn at home, the rhythms, behaviors, rules, and rituals, is exactly what they replay in schools and our streets.
If you look at the conversation unfolding on social media, the posts and videos tell the entire community: “GET UP CHICAGO ITS TIME TO GO TEAR THEM KIDS UP!!!,” “The whole south side of Chicago finna tear them dusty a$$ kids up this morning.” “Whoop them kids!!!” Another proud mama declared, “Fuck peace. Whoop them kids’ ass. Matter fact, you need BEAR MACE.” One person said police should “lock them up and make they parents pay restitution.”
You know what that is? That is the culture of violence speaking through adults who don’t realize they’re the architects of the same violent behavior they claim to despise. A community cannot raise children on brutality and then act scandalized when brutality becomes the children’s first language.
Children’s violence is not a mystery. It is a unique pathology. This is not “these kids today.” This is a predictable outcome of intergenerational trauma. These children didn’t invent what unfolded outside that South Side school. They inherited it. They learned it in living rooms where belts swing faster than language and logic. In kitchens where parents scream and cuss instead of explain. In bedrooms where adults mistake terror for discipline and love. In communities where fights are filmed, posted, and cheered like sporting events.
You think kids don’t see that? You think they don’t absorb it? You think it doesn’t rewire their brains? Children learn what they live. Period.
And yet, when this violence spills into the open and catches a mother on her way home from school and slams her into the concrete, suddenly the community is shocked, outraged, and ready to form a mob for minors. The “village” of adults shows up, not with resources, counseling, advocacy, tutoring, mentorship, or wraparound services—but with belts. With fury. With a sound system blasting “WHUP THAT TRICK.”
How many of those same adults show up for PTA meetings? School board meetings? Budget hearings? Curriculum revisions? Mental-health petitions? Organizing against disinvestment? Demanding counselors instead of police? Advocating for smaller class sizes or after-school programs? Fighting for trauma-informed training? But this is what gets the turnout? A mob gathering on behalf of child punishment? Make it make sense.
When you look at the videos, the comments, the Facebook posts dripping with violent glee, the community isn’t trying to “fix” anything. They’re trying to preserve the emotional order they already believe in: Adults get to hurt children. Children must never hurt adults. If children do hurt adults, the solution is more violence against children. It’s a closed loop of dysfunction and a snake eating its own tail.
The reporting on this story by various outlets has been surface-level. They lamented the violence. They quoted the community. They said everybody wants accountability. But they’re not saying these kids come from communities intentionally starved of resources. These kids come from homes under constant financial, emotional, and structural stress. These kids live in neighborhoods abandoned by the city but flooded with surveillance. These kids are growing up in a place where adults cope with stress by beating children and calling it love.
Say the part that matters. Say that child violence is a symptom of adult violence. Say that the brain of a 9-year-old cannot handle chronic adversity, instability, fear, poverty, and punitive child-rearing without consequences. Say that these kids are screaming the symptoms of a community that has been discounted, disrespected, disinvested, and dumped on for generations. Say that their behavior is a mirror. Say that Chicago and America have failed these children and their families.
Say that “lock them up” isn’t just a bad take — it is the pure, uncut grammar of white supremacy spoken through Black mouths. It is plantation logic with a fresh coat of paint. It is the state’s favorite ventriloquism trick: Black rage redirected at Black children instead of the systems starving them.
Say that “whup them kids” is not a cultural tradition, not a rite of passage, not something we inherited from Africa — it is the bastard child of the plantation. It is the echo of overseers. It is the choreography of domination we were forced to memorize under threat of mutilation, and now we pass it down like an heirloom.
And as I’ve said for years, with my whole chest: whupping a Black child is the whitest thing you can do to destroy Black children. It is the most direct way to mimic Massa’s logic. It is how you destroy the spirit, the curiosity, the confidence, the safety of a child who was never meant to survive this country’s brutality in the first place. Whupping Black children makes Massa proud because it saves him the trouble. It keeps the plantation running long after the plantation supposedly ended. This is inherited violence masquerading as responsibility. This is white supremacy training us to police our own with the tools they crafted to break us.
If adults keep modeling violence as the only acceptable response to harm, children will always repeat that violence. Not because they’re bad. Not because they’re uncontrollable. But because they’ve never been taught anything else. Here’s the harsh truth people refuse to accept: children who are hit do not learn empathy. They do not learn self-regulation or healthy boundaries. Children who are hit learn one thing: Power chooses who gets hurt. And they carry that lesson with them into classrooms, sidewalks, hallways, bus stops, cafeterias, friendships, relationships, and adulthood.
Those children who attacked Corshawnda Hatter didn’t wake up as monsters. They woke up as mirrors. And the community didn’t respond as protectors. They responded as enforcers of the same violent norms that raised those children in the first place. Everybody keeps shouting, “These kids need consequences!” But adulthood rarely asks the deeper questions:
Where were the consequences when their parents screamed in their faces? When relatives beat them for crying? When adults filmed fights and laughed? When teachers dismissed bullying as “kids being kids?” When the district closed mental health clinics? When the city slashed after-school programs? When trauma piled up and nobody intervened?
Children absorb the negligence. They re-enact the brutality. They mirror the madness. They reflect the violence they’ve survived. But instead of healing, adults choose revenge. Instead of accountability, they choose punishment. Instead of addressing root causes, they choose to scapegoat the very children they created.
This isn’t a village. This is a trauma loop. A true village doesn’t gather outside a school to scream WHUP THEM KIDS! A true village gathers resources. A true village fights for healing. A true village gets those children therapy, not trauma. A true village holds parents accountable for the home environments these kids are coming from. A true village asks: What conditions produced this behavior, and how do we change those conditions? Not: How fast can we beat the “lesson” into them?
The only lesson these children have ever been taught is that violence is how power is expressed. And now the adults are proving them right. This moment is shameful. We cannot raise children in chaos and then expect them to flourish. We cannot discipline our way out of generational trauma. We cannot beat our way into safety. And we absolutely cannot pretend that hitting children is a solution when it is the foundation of the problem.
If you want this to stop, it won’t be belts, mobs, Facebook Lives, chants, or moral panic that fixes it. It will be therapy, protection, stability, community support, investment, and adult accountability. It will be the courage to say: We failed these children long before they failed us. Until we face THAT, Chicago will keep replaying this same tragedy, over and over again, dragging our children and our future down with it.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
SEE ALSO:
Op-Ed: I Get Karmelo Anthony, I Carried A Knife To School Too
