Is the immorality of "battle royals" entirely due to their racism?

My own instinct is that the answer is, "No, they're bad regardless of racism."

There seems to be pretty much universal agreement that the battle royal -- where a whole group of men attack each other en masse under some kind of boxing or wrestling related ruleset -- was an immoral institution. These sorts of fights were notorious for lax / nonexistent rules, but also for the fact that the fighters were usually black fighters who fought each other for the amusement of white audiences. According to Wiki, this sort of mass fight originally seems to have grown organically among the American slave population itself -- mostly as an event watched by other slaves -- with varying degrees of support and/or opposition from slave owners. But this changed after Emancipation.

My question for the forum is whether you believe this kind of spectacle is immoral solely because of racism, or whether it's also immoral because of its rules, or for some other reason.

For example, were Broughton's earlier battle royals between (impoverished) British fighters also immoral, before the racist element entered the picture? Are modern team MMA events or mass fistfight sports in Italy immoral?

My own instinct is that the old versions of battle royals were immoral, including the white British ones, regardless of the racism. Even more than boxing, there's an exploitative element to seeing a bunch of poor, desperate people trying to injure each other for your amusement. Admittedly, it's somewhat hard to draw that line considering that boxing is itself a blood sport between generally underprivileged people. But if there's a line, that's probably it. (The Italian mass fights are different because they're technically incredibly violent ball games that are community events.)

The racism alone makes the post-Civil War variant bad on its own, in any case. But it's a slightly more interesting question if race is removed.

 

In my more cynical moments, I wonder whether we *notice* it's brutal only because it's unfamiliar. So we don't have our ingrained appreciation goggles on.

Same reason MMA horrified people for a while until they got used to it. Or Muay Thai. And I'm sure soon the same will happen with lethwei if it becomes popular. Remember that the same people who watched 19th century boxing were horrified at the "brutality" of Lancashire wrestling -- the prototype of modern freestyle and catch -- because people rolled around on the ground like animals. Now it looks like a boring game played in silly-looking elastic uniforms. Same sports. Same injuries. Same techniques for physically dominating another person. But we are accustomed to them.

But since I'm a traditionalist at heart, I dutifully do my apologetics for boxing anyway. And not battle royals.

 

Frankly, I pretty much respect any fighter who steps into the ring to fight other people. Whether it's boxing or not. Johnson would have needed a lot of guts to participate in battle royals like he did. (His fans' frequent citation of those spectacles to show how tough Johnson was would be perverse otherwise.)

But.

The legitimacy of a contest is distinct from the respect we ought to give the participants, IMO. For example: MMA serves a useful social purpose. It weeds out the con artists who made the 80s/90s martial arts scene so exploitative of people who didn't know any better. (By showing what worked and what didn't in a real fight.) And MMA's competitors are often brave people. So the sport gets a "pass", and its competitors deserve respect, too.

Battle royals are different. The individual competitors may often deserve respect, but the spectacle itself does not. In theory, it could have ended up performing a legitimate function (i.e., teaching people how to apply boxing to defend themselves against multiple opponents), but in practice, it seems to have spiraled from an already-low point with Broughton to an even lower, more racist point in the 20th century.

Studying it historically might still be useful for relevant information to self defense using boxing technique against multiple opponents, but the institution itself parted ways with boxing at some point, and got unsalvageable when race came into it.

 

There's a museum of racism Michigan (I think?) that I believe posted black and white footage of one. So somebody back then evidently lacked enough taste to film such an event.