WWE: Bobby Lashley recalls racist threats due to storyline with Lana
In a new interview with Sports Illustrated, Bobby Lashley talks about experiencing racism in light of his onscreen romantic angle on WWE TV with Lana.
Bobby Lashley is someone of several different facets – WWE Superstar, army man, mixed martial arts specialist, former amateur wrestler – but above all else, he is a black man. It may be easy for some of us to look past his blackness and view him for his accomplishments instead, but for some people who withhold racist beliefs, they can’t look past that part of Lashley.
Lashley himself recently spoke in depth about how racism has revealed itself to him in light of his recent storyline romance with Lana. Of course, the characters who both Superstars portray are fictional and so is their relationship, but of course, at the sight of a black man being romantically linked to a white woman, racists have spewed both physical and verbal threats in Lashley’s direction for it.
In a new Sports Illustrated interview with Justin Barrasso, Lashley goes in depth in regards to the “tremendous amount of hate” (per his own words) that he’s received ever since first taking part in this interracial coupling with Lana onscreen. He had the following to say:
"It’s from the fact that this is interracial, because I’ve had guys saying the n-word to me and, ‘I’m going to kill you, we’re going to get you when you come down south.’ I just kind of sit back and laugh about it. I’ve even experienced some people that are in the business of wrestling—tweeting things and posting pictures, and I just sit back and laugh. A lot of times we feel that the person being hated on or being bullied should be a frail person. But now you take somebody like myself and Lana, who is a gorgeous woman, and we don’t look like the typical people that are bullied."
Lashley then went on to say he was grateful for his thick skin and dreaded the thought of having to go through all of this without it, but no one (thick skin or otherwise) should be subjected to such horrible threats and dialect from those with a dated, backwards ideology.
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Say what you will about criticizing the Lana/Lashley storyline purely as a storyline in how its written (whether those criticisms are justified or not) but check any and all racist comments and threats at the door. It’s uncalled for in 2019 and always has been uncalled for.