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Prior to the incident, Rampage was fairly beloved in online MMA spaces, even on Reddit—despite his habit of casual homophobia and sexually harassing/assaulting women on camera. The usual Who? Whom?, where the people who would usually pearl clutch at Problematic behavior will turn a blind eye depending on the idpol characteristics of the perpetrator. Aww, how sweet and hello human resources.
To be fair, Ramage has legitimate reasons to be beloved by online MMA spaces. He's part of two of the most iconic finishes in MMA history: his slam knockout of Richard Arona (although I contend it was an accidental headbutt knockout) and him getting knocked out by Wanderlei Silva, where a flurry of knees from the Axe Murderer left Rampage's corpse dangling on the ropes, bleeding from the head. He had an entertaining and somewhat homoerotic rivalry with Rashad Evans, where Rampage 10-8'd a door along the way. There's also a general halo effect for Pride-era fighters out of nostalgia.
I'd say the biggest culprit here is the 25-year-old man who decided to violently attack someone in the middle of a stage performance.
On /r/mma and /r/ufc, there was some recent nervous pearl-clutching at Rampage's old oddly prescient joke/remark about saving bail money for his black kids and college money for his half-Japanese kids. That was generally chalked up to Internalized Racism from living in a racist society, but was still proffered as a mitigating factor for Raja—the self-fulfilling prophecy of Stereotype Bias.
I've seen some blame Stu for triggering poor Raja's reactivity by smashing the empty (prop?) can on his head. How can he smesh? I've also seen some blame the wrestler who suggested to Raja to get his receipts (the wrestler has since been fired from the promotion). It's like whenever there's a black perpetrator of crime, there's a sizeable contingent who will make excuses and look to blame anyone but the perpetrator himself. Although granted, in this particular case, it's a relatively unpopular view to blame Stu or the receipt-suggester—even on Reddit, where it's been Noticed that so far, the suggester has suffered more consequences for the incident than has Raja.
I wonder if Stu or his family will pull a Jeff Metcalf. That is, they publicly forgive Raja but denounce the wrong-thinkers who clock the incident as part of a recognized pattern.
I don't know who any of these people are and I don't know why I'm supposed to care.
Guys in two different sets of fake violence 'sports' get into real fight? Who cares?
Oh look blacks are violent thugs? If that is the real point of this post, then yeah I definitely don't care to fight over this one. If someone is going to post this sort of thing, then at least be honest about "this is what I want to say" and don't give a potted history of fake wrestling, some other boxing-substitute and a star of it I never heard about in order to cover it with a fig leaf as the lead-in to "oh look blacks are violent thugs".
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