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It will be undeniably used in the "Why we hate blacks." camp. I understand why, but some of my still-surviving liberal sensibilities can't help but examine another layer to this situation. This layer is touched on in nearly every single anti-Rampage/Raja rant out there, but nobody really delves into the father-son dynamic past Rampage being a shit father.
What Raja Jackson did to that guy cannot be denied. It was a shockingly violent attack that warrants a lengthy prison sentence. With that said, when I listened Raja's tough guy rant after he pummeled that defenseless man and was walking down the street, I just kept thinking his use of "everybody" in "I'm tired of everybody fuckin' playing with me 'n shit" was really just about his dad relentlessly jabbing at him throughout his entire life. I have serious doubts that any other people really fuckin' play with him 'n shit outside of his father, who he simply cannot fuck with on a physical level. I think there's a lot to this.
Rampage even told a story about Raja sucker punching him. Rampage's response was that he "sent him to the hospital." You read that right. He beat the shit out of his own son. What we don't really know for sure is what happened before that sucker punch, but seeing how Rampage constantly jabs at people on camera, I think it's a fairly safe assumption that Rampage was, to some extent, antagonizing Raja and probably has antagonized Raja for most of his life. I know Rampage isn't all bad. He can be funny, but he doesn't ever really seem like he's serious when he needs to be. On some level that has to be psychologically torturous to have a father who "won't stop playin'" when you need him to be a dad.
I'm not excusing Raja's actions. I think he needs to go to prison. What I'm trying to do is see if anyone on the internet who isn't a self-hating leftist that might be considering another reasonable explanation outside of it just being the warrior gene assumptions that a lot of people on the right like to grab onto.
I’m squarely in the Steve Sailer moderate racialist camp of “clearly there’s both nature and nurture elements working together here”. I’m confident that there’s some sort of genetic predispositions at play when considering aggregate black misbehavior, low average prefrontal cortex development, etc. But I’d be shocked if that’s the entire story, and I don’t know many serious racialists who believe genetics are the entire story.
Rampage Jackson, from what I knew about him previously and from what I gleaned from your comment, seems to have basically the modal black male personality. Gregarious, full of bravado, capable of very intense but sporadic bursts of aggression, and otherwise basically carefree and unserious. Sort of what you’d expect of a pre-pubescent child or rowdy teenager given a powerful adult man’s body.
I can imagine that this is an extremely poor model for a parental figure of either sex, but especially a father. A child growing up with such a father — even one that is regularly involved with the rearing of the child — will not have discipline or steadfastness or emotional regulation modeled to him. He will struggle to feel like his father is genuinely comprehending and responding to his needs, rather than putting on a performance of fatherhood for an imaginary audience. He will feel the need to compete with his father for attention and status, rather than feeling safe in the knowledge that his father is prepared to self-sacrifice for the good of the child. And unless the child can find a way to break the cycle and advance past this level of arrested development, this is a problem which is likely to compound across generations.
Whenever the rubber meets the road I feel like I see posts like these.
Yes, 'genetics' is the entire story. There is no moderate racialist camp. Bad parenting doesn't fall out of the sky by chance. And the bad parents don't keep their bad genes to themselves.
Technically we could take someone with Brunner syndrome and, through manipulating their environment, make sure they never have the need to violently express themselves. But that's if we are omnipotent. We're not. No ones life flows flawlessly. There are always moments that call on violent reactions. What separates the wheat from the chaff is how a person responds to these stimuli.
People have to be capable of living in the real world with other people. If they fail that it's not a matter of 'could would should' on behalf of everyone else to coddle these people into not being violent retards. Raja is 25 years old. He should be way past the point of pining for his fathers approval and attention like a dog. And way way past needing to hospitalize another person to do it.
Just think about what kind of an insurmountable failure you would have to be to express yourself like Raja did. At no point did his brain go 'nah, I'll just not do this because attempted murder is bad' or 'I'll probably get arrested' or 'that man apologized to me so it's ok' or 'he probably has friends and family'. None of that.
What Raja did is not the reaction of a fully grown man, if we use the average white person as a comparison. This is the brain of a child in a grown mans body. Which is, as you've mentioned, very similar to his father.
Pretty much all of your post can be true except the second paragraph which is an orthogonal claim. The culturalist claim that I mostly believe (my ballpark estimate is that this sort of thing is 80-20 culture vs genes) is not that Raja is a normal unbroken person and if you put him in a good environment he would suddenly start acting like you or me. The claim is that he was not born this way. It was not inevitable, it was instilled into him slowly over the course of decades.
It should be obvious that there is a non-neglible influence of culture by considering the limiting case. If a toddler were left in an empty room with literally no parenting other than support robots that kept it physically alive but provided no socialization, they would end up completely feral and with all sorts of psychological issues. The child raised by wolves. Even if you later introduced them to society, they would almost certainly never reach the same level of development or civilized behavior.
And this is a continuous function. If you take an uncivilized half-animal man and he has a child and raises them that way you'll likely end up with an uncivilized half-animal person. If you have a mostly civilized but not quite man who has a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked, they're likely to raise children who are mostly civilized but not quite men who have a 1% chance of aping out and trying to murder someone every time they are provoked. Heritability is not synonymous with genetics. It can simultaneously be true that Raja is, in his current state as a 25 year old, an insurmountable and unfixable failure. But it was not inevitable. He was not born broken, he was slowly twisted and mentally disfigured into this state over the past 25 years. All you have to do is look at minorities who get adopted by functioning civilized people and oh hey, 80% of the problems magically go away. Some of them don't, and it's a little tricky to disentangle the genetics from the trauma of whatever caused them to be adopted and being temporarily parent-less as an infant. But the reason I think it's 80-20 as opposed to 50-50 or 20-80 is because the majority of adopted minorities I've seen emulate the culture, behavior, and civilized behavior of their adoptive parents, not their genetic ones. Maybe slightly less intelligent, which does correlate with criminality, but only weakly. And if you look at middle or upper class minorities who live in mostly white areas and act like them, their children usually end up middle or upper class and act like their parents too, because that's how they were raised.
Bad parenting doesn't fall out of the sky by chance. It's cultivated in a chain reaction over generations, as bad parents beget bad parents beget bad parents. But that doesn't force it to be genetic, and doesn't force it to be immutable. The majority of mutability happens while they're children, but that's not some magical things about race: all children need to be raised properly or it will cripple them psychologically and leave them horrible mangled monsters. Even if it's too late to fix Raja now, he could have become a better person if he had been raised better.
Very well put. This tracks pretty well with what I believe, and also what I think is pretty observable. I don't know about 80-20 or 50-50. I'd say it's probably more case by case, but I've known enough nonwhites who were raised by good parents to understand that environment plays a critical role in how they act as adults. I understand and agree with the genetic implications behind the broader statistics about group differences, but they are still generalities that don't guarantee unfavorable outcomes for all people.
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