In my performance of this year’s second Hate Speech Monologuesat the Central European University on Tuesday, September 8, I referred to a racist, white Hungarian man as a “monkey”.In the post-performance discussion that traditionally follows Peter Molnar’s HSMs several students expressed dissatisfaction, equating my name-calling with hateful speech which objectifies the racist, potentially leading to social and physical destruction. In their opinion, I should be the “better person” in the racist encounter by responding to the racist with love, or “compassion,” as a dear philosophy student suggested several days later. Love not hate, was their message. During the discussions that Tuesday night a young woman amplified this stance, suggesting that I look to Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi as examples of fighting hate with love, “not more hate”.
I hereby wish to denounce these accusations and reproaches as forms of victim-blaming, victim-shaming, and victim-silencing.
The HSMs is an opportunity for its participants to reflect and present on, and finally discuss, their experiences as victims or perpetrators of hate speech, racism, sexism or other forms of oppression. This year, I elected to reflect on an incident, in which I was involved, one summer night on a Budapest street in 2014. My friends and I were en route to the Afro-Hungarian nightclub, Savanah. As we walked on the street, I suddenly heard monkey noises behind us. When I turned around, I saw a white man directing his monkey sounds and gestures towards my group of friends. The message was clear: the man was calling us black folks “monkeys”.
My heart started beating rapidly; the blood got hot beneath my skin and began rushing to my head; I was dizzy with rage and reached into my pocket. “Say sorry!” I screamed at the man, as he began taunting me in Magyar. I immediately pulled out my diabetes medication to show this racist the needle with which I could stab him. “I’m giving you three seconds!”
Not long after my threat of violence, the man pulled out his knife. I ran away, out of fear for my own life, leaving him and his racism alive and thriving.
I danced the rest of the night away, still fuming internally with rage and an appetite for justice. After having fled the blade of this racist, I had become angrier, mostly with myself, at the thought that I had not sufficiently challenged his racism. I felt I had allowed him to claim victory. In my head, he had accomplished what he had set out to achieve: offending “the niggers” with impunity.
In my performance, I intended to respond to that racist encounter. My performance would be one of outrage, albeit a physically-nonviolent alternate reaction. It would be by no means kind and gentle. I would perform with the deliberate intention of attacking all such racists and arbiters of oppression. I would aim my verbal attacks at possible racism inside, as well as outside of the auditorium. This would be my revenge, so to speak. There would be no love. No compassion for perpetrators of racism potentially sitting inside the Central European University auditorium. It would be a direct, existential attack, aiming for “existential triumph” as Derrick Bell once described of a black woman who refused to move out of a predominantly white neighborhood just to enjoy the sight of frustrated and powerless white-supremacist neighbors.
I would contextualize the performance by presenting the situation as it had happened, from innocently walking down the street, to being referred to as a monkey, to the outrage which eventually burst into a threat of hate-fueled violence. However, instead of weeping about it on stage like the docile, obedient “nigger” that is often expected of the persecuted black folk, I would turn the situation on its head, as should be the goal of all anti-oppression approaches.
In this satirical performance, in which I presented on "an amazing scientific discovery," I demonstrated how exactly the racist is a monkey and resembles "us humans". I illustrated how that monkey stands "almost like us", how "it" walks almost like us, and how close in resemblance it is to the Jobbik and Fidesz "species" of animals. I presented Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, keeping in mind his anti-immigration racist comments of 2015, as a representative of the Fidesz species and I compared “it” with the racist of 2014, concluding that if one observes them closely enough one could see how Orban and the racist are almost the “same animal”.
My performance was the outrage that any victim of oppression might experience in a similar encounter. From the stage, calling out the racists and identifying them as “monkeys” was the weapon with which I could reclaim my humanity and sense of pride and respect as a human being who is black. If neither a physical fight nor legal action could bring me a sense of existential closure, then my creative comedic name-calling a year later in the HSMs might.
And so it did.
With every giggle and chuckle that came from the audience as I explained how the racist is a “monkey” I could feel the bit of joy in my heart as I, bit by bit, attacked the racist with name-calling and buffoonish demonstrations of how “it” stands, walks and talks almost like a human. By the end of my performance, I felt I had brought an end to the aggravation and agony I had constantly felt whenever I reflected on the experiences that summer night in 2014. Since the performance, no matter how hard I try, I no longer feel troubled by the fact that this racist called me a monkey and got away with it. Because, he no longer has got, just as the several racists in the audience, too, did not get away with it. They were forced into voicing their disenchantment with and bitterness about my objectification of them. They had no time to think about what they would have for dinner that night, or with whom they would fuck, after the performance. They had to reclaim their humanity, and to do so at once! They, after all, had just been called "monkeys" and everyone was laughing at them. I emerged victorious. That I was able to offend members of the audience who, either consciously or subconsciously, identified more with the racist than the victim, seemed to quench my thirst for vengeance. I had “niggerized” the racist. I had snatched away his pride. I beat his dignity to death, and in so doing I reclaimed my own. I was rejuvenated, full of life. I finally became a better person.
Indeed, it is because physically non-violent aggression, as much as physical violence, potentially helps the victim of oppression to cope existentially with her experience as victim, that I cannot apologize for objectifying and degrading the racist, the sexist, or the homophobic. I can only promote and encourage others to use aggression, especially those who might otherwise internalize this hate and suffer the consequences of unchallenged oppression. It is because racism cannot and should not exist in the first place, that any physically non-violent aggressive outrage against it, or any physical violence as the case may be, is just. If we face oppression, we feminists, anti-sexists altogether, anti-homophobia and anti-racists, will not deal with it: we will delete it! The only way that can happen is through direct confrontation with, and a consistently full-fledged attack against the oppressor.
Calling us aggressive or hateful when we do cry out “bloody Mary!” is no discouragement to us, but rather evidence of our sufficient use of anti-oppression force; it is very encouraging. Name-calling us angry black folks, or angry objectified women or persecuted LGBTQI, as “hateful” or “too aggressive” is testament to the necessity of our hateful and aggressive response against oppression. Because these labels potentially discourage the victim and eventually keeps the victim quiet, we, as a matter of principle, are further motivated to continue attacking the oppressor when we are called “hateful” and “aggressive”; we believe victim-silencing techniques that allow oppression the room to thrive ought to be abolished as much as oppression itself and the oppressor himself.
We shall never be silent. We shall, like Mandela and Gandhi, continue aggravating the oppressor. When the oppressor feels the sting of our anti-racist or anti-sexist blade and theatrical performance, and begins ranting and pleading for love and compassion, we shall reply aggressively: "not until you show us love and compassion!"
CEU Alumni 2014
Department of Public Policy
United States
* The opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by the author(s) of the above op-ed are solely those of the author(s) and do not reflect those of The CEU Weekly.
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