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Notes -
You seem to have somehow gotten the impression that I’m arguing for leniency or grace toward this man. I’m very obviously not. He should be punished extremely strictly and probably never see the outside of prison walls. I am merely observing the patterns that seem to have landed him (and a very disturbingly large number of other black men) in this position. There’s nothing exculpatory about it.
I have made this point many time myself, right here on this very website. Cultures didn’t fall from the sky, assigned at random to different population groups. To an extent, the culture of American blacks is an expression of their innate capabilities and predispositions. However, it’s clearly not entirely so, because it’s also a very different culture from West Africa. It clearly has very strong elements of the Southern American culture into which American slaves were acculturated. (Honor culture elements, boastfulness, etc.)
There were changes in aggregate black culture between 1940 and 1990, and those changes did materially lead to a decline in life outcomes, in terms of things like criminality and out-of-wedlock births. The genetic substrate didn’t change. (One could make an argument about genetic selection effects leading only the most profligate black men to father children during this time, therefore subtly altering the proportions of various genetic traits within the population, but the time period is too short for this to matter, and also the evidence doesn’t seem to support this.)
If those cultural processes could be reversed — either from within black culture, or imposed from without — there would be measurable difference in life outcomes, even though the genetically-influenced things like average IQ and other cognitive limitations would remain. I don’t disagree with you that the higher average propensity for violent outbursts would still be there! That has been a feature of American black men (on average, in the aggregate, with a great many exceptions) for a long time. But it can be mediated by cultural pressures (and an awareness of the need for those pressures) if a concerted effort could be introduced. (Think of something like the strong legal structures that were once put into place to protect indigenous Amerinidians from alcohol, given their lack of genetic protections against alcoholism.)
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