WWE currently employs 12 black wrestlers. There are three character situations to be found among them:

1. The performer plays or has played a character based on a racial stereotype.

2. The performer does not have any discernible character.

3. The performer is largely absent from television and/or has never played a significant role in WWE’s fictional universe.

For some performers, all three situations apply. Take JTG, who has become sort of a meme in the professional wrestling community. Until a few weeks ago, he’d been employed by WWE for eight years, but hadn’t been on an episode of Raw since December of 2012, and hadn’t been on any WWE programming since September of 2013. Not even Rusev’s ravenous appetite for black wrestlers had been enough to draw JTG to television. Despite this, each time WWE has had a mass firing of workers, known colloquially as Black Fridays, JTG remained employed until late June…

On the rare occasions that WWE decides not to create a clearly stereotypical persona for its black wrestlers, it makes them into “natural athletes,” a.k.a. Guy Who Is Strong. But this too is a stereotype, albeit a bland one. In the WWE Universe, all the wrestlers are athletes, as wrestling is fictionally considered a legitimate athletic sport. So promoting a black wrestler as a Natural Athlete falls in line with the racism displayed by mainstream sports media famously written about in the Boston College study “Brains Versus Brawns.” In an analysis of National Football League commentary, it was found that sports media figures are more likely to refer to a white athlete as a student of the game or a technician, while they will refer to a black athlete as a “beast,” an “animal,” or a “machine.”