In my 21 years as a wrestling fan, a lot of things have either bothered or angered me. But nothing has ever bothered me as a longtime wrestling fan more than the true lack of diversity in many wrestling promotions which includes, AEW, ROH, and WWE.
The diversity issue has always affected me as a wrestling fan ever since I was watching WCW back during its heyday in the late 1990s when I saw majority white male and few black male wrestlers.
Recently, AEW released their official poster for their new show coming up next Wednesday Night on TNT called “AEW Dynamite” which made the name a very divisive and polarizing choice amongst casual and longtime wrestling fans.
As happy as I was seeing Kofi Kingston becoming the very first pure black WWE Champion at WM35 this year, I have to say that this win was not only a historic one, but was a major one for the black community as numerous black wrestlers from Ariel Monroe to Cedric Alexander as well as many black wrestling podcasters commented and congratulated Kofi for his historical achievement.
Kofi has had a very memorable historic run with feuds against Daniel Bryan, Samoa Joe, AJ Styles, Kevin Owens, and Randy Orton. But the main issue with Kofi’s historic title run is not necessarily with him, but the fact that it brought the bigoted white (mostly male) wrestling fans out of the woodworks saying things like “n****s like Kofi don’t deserve to be WWE Champion” or “Kofi’s not serious enough to be WWE Champion”. They wouldn’t be saying all these vile things if a white guy like Brock Lesnar was WWE Champion.
However, there’s a massive problem with the true lack of diversity in the wrestling industry and a recent example of this is when AEW released their official promotional poster for “AEW Dynamite” and many black wrestling fans on Twitter noticed that there were a bunch of mostly white guys featured on the poster and there wasn’t any black male wrestlers featured at all on the poster that sparked many black wrestling fans on Twitter to call AEW out for their hypocritical BS and also for their clear racial biases when it comes to signing wrestlers because many wrestling promotions like AEW and WWE go out of their way to sign white guys more quickly, but deliberately become reluctant to sign black wrestlers especially black male wrestlers in particular.
I can’t stand it when wrestling promotions like AEW come out and say one thing such as “we want to be as diverse as possible”, but then turn around and not promote true diversity at all as seen in their most recent promotional poster. Much like WWE, ROH, and AEW, there are also numerous indie wrestling promotions that clearly don’t have much diversity on their roster either because it’s mostly white guys and very few black guys on those rosters. It’s not AEW, WWE, ROH, or the indie wrestling promotions job to promote true diversity as it is their job to maintain the wrestling status quo (mostly white guys and few black guys) to keep the mostly white male wrestling audiences happy because they’re definitely not in favor of true diversity in wrestling either.
Note: If you go to AEW and WWE’s website and look at their rosters, they’re about 95% white. That’s definitely not true diversity amongst both promotions and their rosters.
Wrestling promotions like AEW and WWE can have their so-called “diversity” because we’re so over begging for a seat at someone else’s table and instead we are creating our own wrestling promotions like F1ght Club Pro Wrestling in The DMV area that will not only benefit black wrestlers, but also black wrestling fans as well.
The Conclusion - But not all hope is lost for black wrestlers as there have been some new wrestling promotions started by black people that have predominantly black rosters and I expect the future of black wrestling to reach heights that it’s never been reached before.
By Kwame Shakir
Tags:
Wrestling
