Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Paging Dr. Love

Photo Credit: WWE.com

Xavier Woods' fiery rhetoric last night may have hearkened back to a time when black militants roamed the halls of WWE arenas in the late '90s. While his words reminded people of Malcolm X in real life and Faarooq in WWE parlance, his wardrobe was a callback to a different era and a different gimmick. All he was missing was the red facepaint and slicked back hair, and he would have been truly cosplaying as Brother Love. On a more serious note, I hope this new stable doesn't go the route of the old Nation of Domination and play for boos. Any black power group that is looking for equality, especially in the wake of that article by The Atlantic, needs to be portrayed as a babyface group, or at the very least a sympathetic group. Even if the "WE THE PEOPLE" crowd may boo them, the sizable percentage of the audience that is consisted of people of color need to be able to relate to them without the cacophony of all three decidedly white announcers in the broadcast booth saying "they're going about things the wrong way."