WWE bringing Hulk Hogan back was as unsurprising as it was infuriating

Hulk Hogan’s return to the WWE fold serves as yet another reminder that the company doesn’t care about their fans, but that doesn’t shock me.

Nothing about this company surprises me. That’s a refrain that I often repeat whenever WWE does something boneheaded, whether it be a questionable booking decision or a terrible business move. So, when WWE announced yesterday that they reinstated Hulk Hogan into their Hall of Fame — opening the door for a return down the line — I was upset. I was upset that I expected this company to do the right thing and keep Hogan away.

Over their 66 years as a promotion, WWE has shown their lack of racial sensitivity time and time again; Hogan possibly returning serves as just the latest example. As a black man, this angers me more than any stupid finish or baffling push. The fact that a worldwide, publicly-traded company can bring back an admitted racist after three years – without it startling me – is a problem.

A questionable (at best) history

Unfortunately, WWE does this all the time. After all, it’s not like Hogan would be the only man on WWE’s payroll that has used racist slurs. One trip to the WWE personnel page on Wikipedia will show fellow Hall of Famer Michael “P.S.” Hayes listed as a “producer” (an equivalent of a road agent).

That’s right, the same Michael Hayes that often draped himself in the Confederate Flag during his wrestling career. The same Michael Hayes that earned a 60-day suspension in 2008 for telling Mark Henry that “[Hayes] was more of a n*****” than Henry was. The same Michael Hayes who supposedly said that black wrestlers didn’t need a gimmick because being black was their gimmick. Yeah, that guy still works there.

Of course, the roles WWE have given black wrestlers over the years are just as tasteless. Among others, R-Truth’s “Pretty Ricky” persona, Cryme Tyme, Henry as “The Silverback” and “Sexual Chocolate”, “crazy” Alicia Fox, Shelton Benjamin’s “Momma” Kofi Kingston as a Jamaican and The Godfather were the first characters that sprang to my mind.

Those acts would have felt dated and out of place in the 1980’s. WWE put these gimmicks on their television shows AS RECENTLY AS 2010 and that goes without mentioning the offensive portrayals of other races that have “graced” WWE airwaves (Muhammad Hassan, Kaientai, Umaga, Eddie Guerrero “lying, cheating, and stealing, basically every foreign heel character).

Even now, with acts like The New Day and The Street Profits, WWE struggles with scripting minority characters. There’s a reason the company has only crowned four black world champions (only one, The Rock, has held the WWE Championship).

Heck, the company even ran a storyline in 2003 where then-World Heavyweight Champion Triple H told Booker T that “people like Booker” weren’t meant to be world champion, among other things. How did that feud end? Helmsley, the heel, pinned Booker after hitting a Pedigree and an extended crawl into the cover, a spot that most wrestlers kick out of.

That’s right, WWE booked a storyline where the racist heel was proven right. Booker, by the way, was supposed to win that match at WrestleMania 19, but Helmsley changed the finish. So to review, Triple H was perfectly fine getting booked as a bigot and prevailing at the end. WWE’s Executive Vice President of Talent, Live Events, and Creative ladies and gentleman.

That wouldn’t be the only time that Booker experienced this sort of behavior. Vince McMahon used the n-word in front of him at Survivor Series 2005. The segment was played for laughs — MacMahon used the word while talking to John Cena, who was still doing the rapper gimmick — but it displayed the alarming lack of self-awareness that the Chairman still possesses. If he had it, the idea of Hogan returning wouldn’t have crossed his mind.

The negatives outweigh the positives

Unfortunately, Booker said on his Heated Conversations radio show a couple of months ago that Hogan shouldn’t be blackballed for “saying something that a lot of us say on a daily basis“. This wasn’t the first time that Booker publicly stumped for Hogan (he more or less did the same for Hayes in 2008 as well, calling him “a black guy in a white body”). On both occasions, Booker used the infuriating “black people say the n-word too” defense to justify Hogan’s comments.

Let me make this clear: black people using the n-word in an attempt to disarm the hateful connotations of the word is not remotely the same as a white person using it as a slur or because they somehow feel entitled to use it. LaMelo Ball saying it in the heat of the moment on RAW without a script isn’t the same as Hayes saying it because he thinks he’s “blacker” than Mark Henry.

Hogan’s use of the word wasn’t because he got “too comfortable” with his black friends, although that scenario is just as terrible. He said it as part of a tirade where he expressed a distaste for a group of people who didn’t look like him and weren’t in his tax bracket. If you took the slur out and replaced it with “black people” his comments would’ve remained every bit as racist.

Anyone who defends Hogan — Booker included — conveniently leaves out the fact that Hogan stated that he would only approve of his daughter Brooke dating a black buy if he were an “8-foot-tall n***** worth a hundred million dollars! Like a basketball player!”. Those people also leave out that he also used a homophobic slur on the same tape. They also forget that Hogan used the n-word in 2008 when he visited his son Nick in jail, where he also said that he hoped neither he or Nick get reincarnated as black people. Hogan has shown us his racist heart time and time again.

WWE apparently doesn’t care. They didn’t care when Hayes used the slur. They didn’t care when then-social media manager Cody Barbierri made racist jokes at Alberto Del Rio’s expense, which led to the altercation that got Del Rio fired in 2014. When they took considerable heat for running a show in Saudi Arabia, Triple H brushed it aside with some PR drivel about being a “catalyst for change”. You’ll have to forgive me for not believing someone who allegedly used to call Ricardo Rodriguez “Bumblebee Man” all the time. If they didn’t care about those controversies, why would they worry about any blowback from a Hogan return? They should, but they won’t and that’s why this infuriates me.

I understand that Hogan makes up a significant part of WWE’s history — which is presumably why they never scrubbed his network footage. However, WWE would be making a catastrophic mistake bringing Hogan back and attempting to profit off of his “Real American” gimmick. Hogan lost the right to portray that character when he went on those rants. His apologies, where he seemed sorrier he got caught — a sentiment that he repeated when he met with the roster prior to Extreme Rules — haven’t made things better, especially when he tried to avoid responsibility for his comments.

As long as WWE feels Hogan has some sort of monetary value, however, they’ll risk bringing a racist man like him back into their ranks. It doesn’t matter how much backlash they get. It doesn’t matter how angry people like me get. They’ll simply put out another statement and move forward as if nothing happened, just like they did with the Warrior Award. All they care about is money.

Next: WWE Raw Review, Highlights, Grades, and Analysis

In bringing Hogan back, WWE showed once again that they don’t care about what a significant portion of their fanbase thinks, which isn’t surprising. If they continue to show this level of hubris, it will eventually impact the one thing they do care about: their pocketbooks.