23rd September: Social Responsibility

Europeans often don’t see any sense in the way Afro-Americans’ equality is emphasized in the U.S. media. In many cases, it seems unnecessarily highlighted, almost in an infantile way (some even thought that it’s illegal to feature a pair of cops in an American movie without one of them being black), while American movies often present an overall peaceful (and even trustful) relationship between Caucasians and Afro-Americans. The latter can be easily seen trough, of course, and it is more or less widely known that even today, there’s a lot of tension between those people. It is far less known, though, that this official altitude is relatively new, and it’s contrasting the former one that used to be quite the opposite. Battle Royal is a surprising reading for an average Hungarian: different forms of public humiliation posed as a cultural event, and considered a good-intended initiation ceremony for black men. The conditions of the narrator delivering his speech are, however, even more humiliating. The speech is scheduled just after the fight; the boy performs it soaked in sweat and blood, in the same gear he was fighting in. The hosts leave no doubt in their comments that they consider him some kind of speaking ape (as well as black people in general), whom they most benevolently allow to express his thoughts in public – almost implying that they could, by all rights, keep them all in cages. All that in the twentieth century. If you ask someone in Hungary about the past of Afro-Americans, you’ll typically hear that they were slaves until the late 19th century and they had a hard time getting all the rights a citizen is supposed to have, which doesn’t sound as bad as it was. It is not really known that their social equality had been a taboo for a long time after the end of slavery, an idea that was officially considered a kind of rebellion.