WWE: Jordan Myles situation shows why diversity is necessary in wrestling

WWE’s attempt to release a racist t-shirt for NXT star Jordan Myles put their checkered past (and present) on race and inclusion into focus.

Growing up, I was a huge baseball fan; in fact, it’s still my favorite sport now. Being born and raised in Maryland – born in Baltimore and raised in the county suburb of Randallstown – I was obviously drawn to the hometown Orioles, but another team more than 2,500 miles west also caught my eye: The Seattle Mariners.

What drew me to the Mariners wasn’t their name, logo or their jerseys. It, in fact, was their sweet-swinging, five-tool centerfielder, Ken Griffey Jr. I still loved watching players like Cal Ripken, Roberto Alomar, and Mike Mussina, but what attracted me to Griffey wasn’t just his prowess on the diamond: it was the fact that this person who excelled at every aspect of a sport where black participation hovered between 16-17 percent in the 1990s looked like me.

The same occurred when I got into wrestling in 2001, smack dab in the middle of WWE’s godawful Invasion storyline. Again, I recognized how awesome wrestlers like Steve Austin and Kurt Angle were, but that didn’t keep me from gravitating toward guys like Booker T or The Rock. Heck, the reason why The Dudley Boyz were my favorite team at the time was because of D-Von Dudley.

It may seem insignificant to some but for people of color, women, members of the LGBTQ community, and everyone that intersects in between, seeing these diverse faces thrive in an environment that has historically been dominated by white men not only benefits our self-esteem, it serves as a rebuke to the regressive theories that still plague us to this day and inspires generations of young fans to follow the same path.

But there’s still plenty of work to be done in that area, as the Jordan Myles situation has shown us. By now, you’ve probably heard or read about what went down: WWE designed and attempted to release a t-shirt for the NXT upstart that was all black and decorated with only a pair of cartoonishly large lips and equally enormous teeth stylized in the letters of his name.

It didn’t take long for Myles and others to point out the disturbing parallels between the shirt and minstrel show characters from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The company eventually took the shirt off the market before selling a single one and released a statement that more or less threw Myles under the bus, but it should have never gotten past the thought bubbles inside the mind of whoever conjured it up.

This all could’ve been avoided if someone on the marketing or design team had, you know, carried a modicum of knowledge about blackface or, better yet, employed a black person in a prominent position to say “yeah, this ain’t it”.

The shirt was proof of either WWE’s ignorance of the painful history of minstrel performances – the term “Jim Crow” that was used to describe segregation laws spawned from a blackface character – or a complete disregard of it. Given the company’s history, it’s safe to assume the latter.

After all, this is a promotion that has crowned only two black WWE Champions in the 46-year history of the title. When you add the World Heavyweight and Universal Titles, that number increases to a whopping four.

Some of the storylines aren’t much better. Who could forget babyface Roddy Piper painting half of his body black during his feud with Bad News Brown? How about the repackaging of the One Man Gang to Akeem “The African Dream” – a gimmick created to mock Dusty Rhodes – which falls under the Iggy Azalea category of cultural appropriation. Or X-Pac going full blackface during the Attitude Era?

And we can’t leave out the company booking Triple H as a racist during his feud with Booker T in 2003 – I don’t care what Bruce Prichard says, that character was racist – and having him beat Booker following a Pedigree and what felt like a five-year rest break at WrestleMania 19.

It also shows in the wrestlers they push and who they hire. While they label Sasha Banks as frail and keep wrestlers like Bianca Belair in NXT, ladies like Lacey Evans get fast-tracked to title matches despite being as green as the goblin that hates Spider-Man. Perhaps it was the mutual glibness/affinity for blackface that caught the company’s eye.

To the surprise of no one, Evans wasn’t reprimanded for her tone-deaf paint job. The company took the same laissez-faire approach with Randy Orton’s liberal use of the n-word during a Twitch live stream – some fans focused more on his All Elite Wrestling (AEW) comments.

On the contrary, “All Lives Matter” Orton still gets prominent TV time and a steady push while guys like Lio Rush get lectured for their lack of “respect for the locker room”. Respect that wasn’t shown to most of the “independent contractors” who had to listen to the world’s second-most racist/homophobic Jack-O-Lantern, Hulk Hogan, apologize for getting caught on tape being who he was – as opposed to the act itself – because Vince McMahon, a man who is no stranger to using the n-word himself, believed Hogan’s value to the company superseded his hateful rhetoric.

Add these transgressions up and you get a company that hasn’t learned anything over the last half-century and if you want to know why so little has changed over the last few decades, you needn’t look any further than WWE’s corporate leadership page. You won’t find a lot of diversity along racial lines in that section and wouldn’t be a stretch to presume that the writing team is, with few exceptions, equally as uniform.

Sure, the WWE roster has more variety than it ever has in terms of nationality and ethnicity, but much like the NFL, NBA, MLB, or any other entertainment product or company, hiring a few worker bees that happen to be people of color, women, or members of the LGBTQ community means nothing if the people in charge still represent the status quo that perpetuates many of the issues these marginalized groups face.

To be fair, this isn’t a WWE-centric problem: You can look throughout the wrestling landscape and find a similar lack of non-white male representation and much like with WWE, it often reveals itself in the product.

It’s why a company like Ring of Honor – which is owned by thinly-veiled propaganda peddler Sinclair Broadcasting Group – once featured a faction named The Rebellion, led by Caprice Coleman and Kenny King, knelt Colin Kaepernick-style during the Code of Honor for heel heat and still employs The Briscoe Brothers despite their obvious homophobia. It’s also why AEW felt comfortable bringing in Jake Hager despite championing itself as an all-inclusive promotion.

Even WWE’s main competitor from the 1990s, World Championship Wrestling, struggled with this problem, from hiring discrimination enthusiast Bill Watts to attempting to present Booker T and Stevie Ray as wrestling slaves with a southern plantation manager. Do you think any of these and other instances occur if a POC booker, writer, or executive is around? The answer is: probably not.

You don’t need to be black to understand why mass-producing a blackface t-shirt isn’t okay, just like how you don’t need to be a woman to be frustrated with the lack of female screen time in relation to the men and the distasteful stories they’re still given when they do make it to TV or how you don’t need to be gay to see why segments like HLA or the Billy and Chuck “commitment ceremony” were pretty icky.

But those examples combined with a caucasian-dominated presence near the top of WWE and other promotions shows how insulated a company can become if the people at the top of the totem pole don’t allow other worldviews from a wider range of voices to filter in.

You can find plenty of studies and articles that espouse the benefits to diversity; most of the advantages are profit-motivated. But beyond the dollars and cents, putting decision-makers in place that aren’t merely white and male increases the chances that issues like the Myles t-shirt doesn’t creep up again and that the wrestlers that look like Myles – among others – get a real chance to thrive in the industry they’ve dedicated their life to.

Just as importantly, it would mean everything to the minority fans who have stuck by an industry that has historically spat in their faces and told them it was rain. No matter the forum, most fans want to cheer for someone who represents them. For older black fans, this was The Junkyard Dog or Ernie Ladd. For fans of my generation, this was Booker T, Kofi Kingston, MVP, or Shelton Benjamin.

Nowadays, the demographics have shifted to the point where younger fans have their choice of wrestlers to hitch their wagon to. But for wrestling to truly progress to where controversies like the Myles t-shirt or any of the aforementioned storylines and issues are a thing of the past, it must embrace a future where the people at the head of the promotions are as assorted as the rosters they have put together.