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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.
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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