by Jeb Tennyson Lund
OnlineOnslaught.com/CitizenScholar.net

Consider the character of Eddie Guerrero. He is currently a champion, and a champion of the people. Yet not too long ago, he was the bad guy. He was bad because — let's face it — he was "Mexican." Sure, he was a cheating heel, but the way WWE modified that role is most telling. They made it as ethnic and "un-American" as possible.

Pay no mind to the fact that Eddie was born and raised in the United States. No, he bore the taint of "Mexico." He lied and cheated and stole, like every shiftless dirty Mexican. Heels do that all the time, without a modifying racial identity. Eddie was a heel, but he was more so because he was a Latino heel. He stole, and the hype surrounding his stealing things capitalized on the erroneous notion that Mexicans come here and steal things and earn nothing. And he used Spanish — the bastard! — when speaking. How were people (remember, "people" are "white Americans") supposed to understand him? He was as orientalized as possible, without giving him "mist glands" in the throat.

Worse, in case he wasn't Mexican enough for the audience, someone made sure he drove to the ring in an El Camino with rims and hydraulics on a couple of occasions. The subtlety was masterfully nonexistent. El Caminos, rims, lowriders… they did everything short of giving him a lawnmower, saying that he was your gardener and telling you that he stole cash from the second-drawer of your dresser. Now we consider these stereotypical aspects to be a celebration of Eddie. We love what he drives to the ring. We love his impromptu celebrations in Spanish. We love that he cheats to win and grins while doing so. We forget that we were supposed to hate all of this and hate him for it — and that these accoutrements were part and parcel of a sort of loathsome stereotyping.

We forget that Tajiri was supposed to evil, then a face, then evil, then a face, then God knows what. We forget that we were supposed to loathe him for his mistreatment of Torrie Wilson — the nerve of that Jap, to not only sleep with our tall pretty blonde women, but also not feel lucky that he got to sleep with our tall pretty blonde women. We forget about that, because now he's supposedly nice again, though I defy anyone to tell me why. No one needs to give character to the foreigners, because foreign people do foreign things, because they're foreign. They are what they are, because they are "them."

Into this admixture, we now potentially have Orton and Benjamin. We are supposed to care. I wonder why we should, and I fear that we won't. In their case, race shouldn't have been an important, motivating and decisive issue, but if WWE insists upon making this a central issue, I would wish they made it a serious one. Yet, in other cases, on the other show or in another vignette, race won't be treated seriously. (It will be some happy crutch, or the set-up line for those Jerry Lawler jokes that you and I always write down so we can later throw the paper in the fire and spit on the ground.) WWE gives us so many mixed signals that it's hard to tell when to be offended or excited. Stereotypes are hyped, clung to, and abandoned. How can Orton v. Benjamin (or even Triple H v. Booker) mean anything when the current Smackdown champion is a fan-favorite in spite of being saddled with a once — and potentially still — ethnically offensive identity?

This angle isn't a case of bad storytelling because it's racist: it's bad storytelling because it emerges from an institution steeped in a moral and ethical fog. While race is a positive identifying factor for characters in one instance, it can be a negative factor in others. WWE plays the race card so often and for so many different reasons that indignation becomes weak or nonexistent. On one hand, you may not care because you've seen it before. But on the other, you may not care because you simply don't know if you should.


Two Men, No Direction
In the case of this angle, you shouldn't care about race at all. This is not to say that racism is not appalling, just that it's completely unnecessary here. If, like me, you hate racism in any form, this may be hard to see. After all, how could any man or company find comfort in exploiting one of the most hateful aspects of human societies for the sake of a paltry ratings point or buyrate?

That sort of ambition verges on evil, to my way of thinking. What disgusts me about this angle, however, is that implied or overt evil was wheeled out for the sake of sparking interest in something that was itself already interesting. I want to see Benjamin throttle Orton. I’m incredibly curious how two still-green guys handle themselves in the ring — when Orton has no veteran wrestler as a crutch, when Benjamin will need to adapt and anticipate someone who is occasionally baffled (and baffling) in the ring. These two have the potential to elevate themselves in a vastly more startling and impressive manner than in their last pay-per-view bouts, because this time it will be a clash of equals.

One racist implication can sabotage all of that. This story never needed race. If anything, race should be dreaded.

It's a story we saw over a year ago; it's a story we saw last week; it's a story that minimizes Shelton Benjamin by making him a black man first and a wrestler later, and it's a story that can consume and subsume his and Orton's characters. It's a story one of Orton's mentors was involved in, and following it makes Orton no more than a copycat. Worse, it's a story told in an atmosphere that celebrates and condemns these issues week after week and moment-to-moment, depending on expediency. Its value as a socially motivating factor within the WWE is extremely doubtful. Its value for the men involved in this match is extremely small.

Let us hope WWE has a spate of intermittent wisdom and doesn't replay those comments in a highlight package. Let's ignore it and let it go away. In short, let us hope WWE foregoes the trappings of a simple racial story in favor of two men, both with ability and ambition, who can succeed or fail based on their abilities and characters alone.  
 

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Jeb Tennyson Lund is the Pope of Online Onslaught. If you want to read his sadly less wrestling-oriented columns, go to www.citizenscholar.net.

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