10 Times WWE Blatantly Used Racist Stereotypes
They lied, they cheated, they stole. And they had hard heads.
Morgan Freeman once sagaciously stated that the way to stop people discriminating against race was to stop talking about race altogether. Whilst it's not quite so simple as that, they're wise words nonetheless.
Sadly, so long as wrestling is around, it seems it can never be a possibility.
Just this past week, WWE found themselves embroiled in a damaging PR storm following Jinder Mahal's unequivocally racist derision of Shinsuke Nakamura on SmackDown. Whether he was playing up the racial stereotypes for heel heat or not is entirely irrelevant; the lallation clearly pushed the segment beyond the boundaries of good taste.
The company argued that Mahal is a fictional character, designed to cover sensitive issues relevant to the real world. But was it really necessary? That real world could do without artificial racism in its light-entertainment.
A look back throughout the history of the company, and it becomes clear that WWE are generally the antithesis of Freeman's philosophy. More often than not, they haven't just described people by race, but defined them by it. Talent, personality, experience: none of that really matters when constructing a persona. It's what's on the outside that counts.
10. Kamala, The Ugandan Giant
Kamala was actually a creation of Jerry Lawler's for his Memphis territory, an uncouth, uncivilised sub-Saharan African stereotype exaggerated to its maximum extent from a Frank Frazetta painting of the same theme. It was as reductive as it could possibly get, with James Harris' character presented as more animal than human, with a faint grasp of the rules of wrestling and entirely incommunicado save for a series of unintelligible wails.
Vince McMahon saw no issue whatsoever with porting the gimmick over to New York wholesale, with the addition of a handler Kim Chee, a pith hat wearing explorer straight from the Heart of Darkness. For his second run with WWF, Kamala was deemed ideal foil for The Undertaker, a native African apparent slotting besides the usual 'monster' role just perfectly.
Perversely, Kamala came out of the feud sympathetically, terrified at The Undertaker's ominous shroud of darkness whilst clearly under the yolk of his 'helpers'. Nevertheless, he was stuffed in a casket, and the kids loved it.