WrestleMania 41 is coming in hot. With just a few weeks away from the biggest event in all professional wrestling, an interesting conversation is bubbling back up to the surface. Triple H is once again coming under online criticism for the lack of booking Black men as singles stars. With the most important annual event in all of wrestling on the horizon, the issue couldn’t be any harder to miss.
As of this writing, seven matches are scheduled for the event. Of those seven, five are within the men’s division. Those five matches contain 11 performers on the roster. Of those 11, only two are men of color. Ironically, they are cousins in Roman Reigns and Jey Uso. With 15 days left until the start of Night One, more matches will be added to the card, but it’s hard to see that will feature additional non-white male performers on the roster.
This isn’t a new conversation. Last year, the conversation about Triple H’s booking of Black men started once again after Bobby Lashley and MVP left the promotion. A tweet on April 1 points to the fact that at that time 976 days passed since a Black performer won a singles match on a main roster PPV and 605 days since a Black man competed in a singles match on a PPV featuring the Monday Night Raw and SmackDown rosters.
The situation is even more dire when you look at male performers of Asian descent. They are infrequently used on PPVs and weekly television shows alike. It’s a glaring hole that doesn’t seem to be a priority to fix for the promotion.
WWE's practice of focusing on white men is a glaring issue
Yes, The Street Profits are the current WWE Tag Team Champions and The New Day are poised to challenge for the WWE World Tag Team Champions. Does that mean that Black performers are only good enough to stand out in the tag team division? To make the situation even worse, the tag team division is so undervalued that those belts are rarely defended on PLEs, and no one would be shocked if that held true for WrestleMania 41. Those two teams count for four of the seven Black men combined across the SmackDown and Raw rosters. Where there’s smoke, there’s certainly fire.
Detractors of the conversation will also point to WWE NXT, where Black men are holding both the singles titles, with three individuals in Oba Femi, Trick Williams, and Je’Von Evans set to main event WWE NXT Stand & Deliver. NXT consistently does an excellent job featuring minorities on the show. The women’s division consistently stands out as the main attraction. But the success seen on that show makes things look even worse for what is happening on the main roster.
The moments that are happening in NXT should not be ignored. There’s ample reason to praise the representation shown on that brand. But two things can be true and it is certainly true that there’s a lack of representation happening in the men’s division on SmackDown and Monday Night Raw.
WrestleMania 41 is going to be the biggest event in wrestling this year. With that in mind, WWE puts its top stars forward to draw fans and dollars into the product. It’s telling that WWE doesn’t put men of color in these positions as singles stars. When the lights shine the brightest, they’d rather feature white men in the top spots – and that fact cannot be ignored.