WWE: The KofiMania story is all about race, and it’s been a long time coming

The KofiMania storyline thus far has been one of the most engrossing, captivating and intricate storylines on WWE television in recent memory. It’s filled with little layers and one of the more overlooked layers has involved race.

In a feud filled with parallels and recurring ideas, one constant phrase that has been prevalent throughout this build has been “people like us.”

In a promo with Vince McMahon, Kofi Kingston delivered arguably the most emotionally resonating and powerful moment of the segment when he told Vince “I have never complained about the fact that you have never allowed someone like me to compete or contend for the WWE Title.” It shouldn’t be too hard to read in between the lines and take note of what Kofi’s actually saying. In case it is, by “someone like me,” Kofi is referring to, well, someone like me: a Black man.

A week later, after Vince and Daniel Bryan threw a major curveball into Kofi’s Gauntlet Match, Big E would take to Twitter and deliver his own emotional promo. In it, 1/3 of The New Day reflected on how no matter how loyal or successful you are in WWE, “people like us will only get so far.”

To truly understand the racial undertones painted by the words of The New Day, one must understand the history that Black men have had to withstand in the WWE.

WWE has existed as a company for the past 67 years and in that time, we have seldom seen a Black man hold the WWE Championship. We’ve seen plenty of Black people hold their Tag Team Titles and even a few mid-card titles, but for the most part, the last 50 men to hold the WWE Championship lacked a certain melanin.

If anything, our race has often been on the cusp of gripping that brass ring, only for it to somehow slip away. Bobby Lashley left WWE just as he was entering the WWE Championship picture, while Mark Henry was never in the main event scene until the tail-end of his career. Then, there’s Booker T, who’s rise and fall may the most infuriating. At the height of his popularity, Booker failed to win the World Title at WrestleMania XIX after being told “people like you don’t deserve [to be World Champion].”

And in other cases – such as with Junkyard Dog, for example, or even R-Truth to some extent – a Black WWE Superstar may spend several years in and out of the spotlight and no matter how over they get with crowds, they are never rewarded the vaguest of opportunity for the WWE Championship.

The closest we ever got to seeing a Black man win the WWE Championship was seeing The Rock win the title eight times. Even then, a plethora of critics and fans do not view The Rock as a “Black” champion, even though he’s half-Black, half-Samoan.

Not too long ago, Black Wrestling Alliance made an interesting observation on the matter. The reason why so many people don’t view The Rock as the first ever Black WWE Champion is because WWE never present him as such; he often goes unmentioned even during Black History Month.

Seeing WWE do a poor job at acknowledging The Rock as a Black man strongly reflects how the promotion has failed to put their Black stars in meaningful positions on the totem pole for the most part. This is especially damning considering how WWE fail to acknowledge the first ever Black WWE Champion accolade ever being broken. It’s like even when we win, we get knocked down a few pegs in the process; two steps forward, three steps back.

On top of that, the fact we have yet to have seen a second ever Black WWE Champion in the past 20 or so odd years is concerning. In the same vein, we have never seen a dark-skinned man ever win the WWE Championship.

We’re not trying to make this into a colorism discussion about light vs. dark, but light-skinned African-Americans have always been stereotyped as being “safe” and approachable. Meanwhile, African-Americans with a darker pigmentation are viewed in a rougher light, often suffering biases that push them into a lower hierarchy.

With that said, dark-skinned men have never been afforded a WWE Championship reign while very few have been afforded the opportunity to compete for the title. Yes, WWE have had dark-skinned men win the World Heavyweight Championship, but most of these wins – more specifically Mark Henry’s, although not to take away from his reign – came at a time when the championship had been devalued as a sort of secondary mid-card championship. Thus, their reign was never viewed as even a tier lower than the WWE Champion, yet alone on equal footing.

Then, there is the case of the aforementioned Booker T. Three years after Booker T – after being looked at up and down by Triple H – was told that someone “like” him would never amount to anything more than a a dancing “entertainer” in this industry who would never be World Champion, he won the World Championship. Albeit, he had to do so by rebranding as King Booker.

So, essentially, our best shot at seeing a dark-skinned man become the WWE Champion was a guy who was afforded his big World Title win in WWE until he sold out. That kind of sums up WWE’s treatment of Black men in a nutshell.

We haven’t seen a dark-skinned Black WWE Champion simply because WWE don’t understand that to be a problem enough to prioritize it, even when they have been presented with a Black man who was primed and ready for the title. As far as characters are concerned, WWE is a showcase of stereotypes, but for Black men, that means the ugliest, most disheartening shuck ‘n jive stereotypes are at the forefront.

When WWE presents their Black men as a joke without thinking twice about it, WWE is eventually going to see their Black talent only as jokes who aren’t ready for the WWE Championship.

This would be bring us back to The New Day’s sentiment of why “people like us” have never had a chance in the main event picture.

It feels like The New Day could be acknowledging Blackness and the average Black man’s place in WWE canon as a way to push Kofi Kingston’s win as the first dark skinned African-American WWE Champion. That is assuming he wins, of course. If he wins, then this is a perfect storyline. If he loses, this could be viewed as a modern equivalent to the 2003 injustice of Booker T following WrestleMania.

Some people – like announcer Jim Ross – would argue that this storyline does not need race as a focal point, but I would disagree.

Race is necessary because it adds another layer Kofi’s underdog story in a way that separates it from the average underdog story. This isn’t the same underdog story as that for Becky Lynch or Daniel Bryan, even if his storyline does parallel Bryan’s 2013-14 run in many ways. When someone like Vince McMahon or “The New” Daniel Bryan calls Kofi Kingston a B+ player or implies that he’d be unmarketable as a WWE Champion, race adds a new element for the reason why.

Knowing the implications of such a storyline becomes even more infuriating to watch as the viewer. Thankfully, not infuriating in the way that the Booker/Trips storyline of 2003 was; that was infuriating because the storyline was mishandled so spectacularly. It’s infuriating to watch the Kofi storyline because you desperately want to see Kofi prevail in the end the more he gets screwed over. You want him to prevail not only as a tenured veteran, but as a Black man who simply isn’t afforded the same opportunities as his peers.

Especially for a company as tone deaf as WWE can be sometimes, race needs to be addressed when they’ve done such a poor job addressing men of a certain race over the years. It’s been an elephant in the room for so many decades now and if WWE want to use that elephant to craft a meaningful, compelling storyline, then more power to them. If they play their cards right and gives this storyline the ending it deserves, we could look back at this storyline fondly in the years to come.

Like it or not, race is a factor in the KofiMania storyline and truth be told, it’s been a long time coming.