What you've written here is, like others are saying, profoundly great in terms of writing quality but terribly heartbreaking, haunting even, at the same time. I feel like I understand your pain and experience in a way that's not often available to be felt by anyone other than those who directly experienced it themselves... only a voice of authenticity and wisdom could communicate the things you did, in the way you did, so that a stranger with a different childhood experience could relate to so many of the feelings you've described. feel like this incredible piece of writing you've shared with us here today is so important for that reason, how straightforward and honestly it explains the impact early abuse has on the rest of a person's emotional and psychological life.
Explored through the lens of your experience as a black person from a financially stable, educated family is eye-opening for those of us who aren't as knowledgable as we ought to be about some features of the family and parent-child dynamics more unique to black families. That thought brings me back to the one I keep having lately, the one about how darkness, and pain, ultimately and inevitably finds itself among all corners of the world, among all walks of life, in all people, respective of their specific characteristics. The particularities to how it manifests in various communities and subcultures, the specific form and shape it takes varies, but the universality of the fact that it does, in every one of them, is what makes the experience of life, of suffering, as ultimately a shared one.
The kinds of rationalizations your father made for beating you are not dissimilar to the excuses made by others for doing awful, terrible things - this idea that one person from the next can be somehow different or less valuable or less deserving of respect, dignity, compassion, or understanding simply because of their "station" or place in life. Because of the ones they have that I don't (we need to do this to be more like them), or the ones I have and they don't (they aren't like me so they are less human), or by mere fact of being different (they differ from me and I don't like people I can't completely relate to) - all versions of the same story, the story which allows a person to commit inexcusable acts against other, based on the illusion that one person can be anything more than a little different from the next.
It's easy to forget as a white person just how many of my fellow citizens don't get to go a day without being reminded of how society fucked and continues to fuck them, just because they are black. To then be reminded of that in your own home, by your own father, in such a violent way is so fucking wrong. And even more unfair, that he is obviously aware of the inequalities you share but then uses it as an excuse for doing things that drive further separation between parent and child who needs them, even worse by fact that the child is already in a vulnerable position in society because of their race. On top of being faced with the realities of race-based disadvantages inherent in your society, to have that be then used as excuse and reason for why you're being mistreated in your home, by a parent who should be supporting you through the difficulties of life instead of adding to them willingly and purposely.
It makes me sad for humanity that the kinds of limitations imposed on people by systemic inequality and institutionalized racism (not just here, every country has some version of this to varying degrees) promotes a very compelling illusion that personal power should or even can be attained by physical, coercive, and violent means. That we need to respond physically to attain personal empowerment, that "power" is something attained only through the taking of it from someone else. For many people in the world, including here in America, that has some truth to it. Minorities especially are placed in an vulnerable, limited position - violence often is the only seemingly attainable, viable option for making it through the world.
But your father cannot adopt that as his excuse. He became educated, a judge for chrissakes, a highly-respected and powerful person by anyone's standards, not just among his own but the wider public community. He has no logical reason or rational need to seek power by taking it from anyone else - he created his own - but yet he did anyway. He sought this power by taking yours away from you, when you were most needing to nurture and develop it for yourself. Your voice, your autonomy and self-determination, your confidence and sense of security in the world, etc.
He took that away despite not needing to, even as a sick placeholder for a lack of other choices to feel important or powerful as an individual. He's a judge!! How someone with a profession granting such authority, not to mention the deep respect it commands from the wider community, could feel any sort of need to beat and control their children makes me think about this beyond the lens of black/white race relations in this country. Evil and the insatiable thirst of power-lust and the bottomless pit comprising it is an experience reflected in so many seemingly different, ultimately and inherently similar ways throughout this entire world. Throughout history.
Being a black father as you've explained here made it less necessary for him to hide his parenting methods from your local community -- physical discipline that many of us recognize as actually abuse -- it sounds like this is a bigger problem than people realize. I know it's opened my eyes. That you wrote this incredibly powerful piece about your experience is so important - I hope it gets picked up and reprinted everywhere. A public conversation about the ideas you've expressed could get the ball rolling toward changing things, hopefully initially for those suffering the worst of it, but then ideally extend to everyone suffering even a smaller fraction of a similar kind of pain.
Empowerment is not power acquired by taking it from someone else - it's created internally in response to suffering but not bound to it. No matter who we are, where we are, we don't have to respond to the pain inflicted on us in ways that cause more of it for ourselves or anyone else. And we sure as hell shouldn't let the realities of how the darker parts of our society came to be stop us from seeking to change the things that enable them to exist. Root out the things that foster the abuse, harm, and exploitation toward one person by another and neutralize them, piece by piece and clumps of pieces by clumps of pieces. Smaller understandings build up to lead to bigger ones, allow us to more clearly see the overall pictures that have repeated through time among humanity, throughout our entire history, as human beings on this planet.