She’s a few days late (unsurprisingly), but Lauryn Hill has come to her own defense after her daughter Selah opened up about her childhood trauma and revealed Lauryn used to beat her with belts and things of that nature.
Lauryn says she was only trying to help discipline her kids — much as she learned from her parents and grandparents.
She said in the lengthy post:
“If I am guilty of anything it is disciplining in anger, not in disciplining,” before adding, “I discussed with Selah what it must have been like having a child while being hunted by nazis, or what it was like for the children of runaway slaves. The child just being a child puts her and everyone else’s lives in jeopardy. Keeping the child quiet to escape the danger is ALSO saving the child’s life!”
She continued,
“My life has been about protecting my children from all kinds of danger, and that’s only possible when you protect yourself from the danger as well,” asking her critics to “sell a few million copies of a recording and see the wolves and sharks for yourself before you determine what’s appropriate and what’s not.”
Despite the public backlash, Lauryn says that she and Selah are “learning and healing” from their past.
“All of you in a rush to crucify someone, careful who you string up or nail up. You might have an extremely limited view of the actual reality. We all hate abuse and exploitation, sometimes in an effort to fight against it we can easily become the abuser, the exploiter, and THIS is what we have to watch for,” she added. “People are quick to judge the content of Selah’s conversation without understanding the gravity of her life.”
Lauryn also noted that she learned to discipline her kids from her parents the same way they did their parents.
“But if you come for me, come for your own mama, and those absent fathers–come for them too, your grandparents, your great grandparents, your great great grandparents, your great great great grandparents, Caribbean parents, African parents and everyone else damaged and judged for being black and forced to conform and assimilate to western standards of ‘order’ shaped through the filter and lens of anti-blackness,” she said.
See her post below.
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