It would appear that things are neither bawdy bawdy nor rowdy rowdy when it comes to WWE for former wrestler Konnan. This weekend the former WCW star took to twitter to complain about WWE’s treatment of its Latino stars:
This would, of course, refer to current WWE employee and wrestler I totally secretly love Rey Mysterio. Though he’s been riddled with injuries, and his knees are currently held together by paper clips and scotch tape, WWE extended Rey Mysterio’s contract for another year back in May. The shady thing is that they did it without telling him first. See, the WWE will freeze wrestlers contracts during injuries, and since Rey’s resting state is what medical professionals refer to as hella broken, they’ve reasoned that Rey owes them a significant amount of time.
Konnan also brought up more current events: the firing of Alberto Del Rio.
To play a quick game of catch-up, Cody Barbierri (a social media manager for WWE) supposedly made a racist comment at Del Rio, Del Rio in turn slapped him, and was then released. Any punishment for Barbierri has not been disclosed by WWE, but they’ve taken a pretty solid stance that we should be directing any anger we may have at Del Rio for his reaction, and not question what instigated it. Anyone with a sense of common decency has been calling bullshit, but sadly those people seem to be screaming into the abyss.
WWE’s track record with racism is, frankly, atrocious. Recently we’ve watched the half-hearted defenses from Mark Henry, the (I guess) well-meaning but still pretty inherently racist accusations from The Atlantic, and, you know, we’ve watched wrestling during any period of time during it’s existence. While threatening someone is maybe not the way to go, and Konnan is not exactly known for his rational, thought-out twitter diatribes, he’s still the most well-known person speaking up. It seems that the culture of racism in wrestling is so ingrained that it becomes this monolithic, unmentionable thing, especially in the WWE. People who have experienced it tow the line to keep their jobs, or don’t bring it up in hopes of maybe one day getting those jobs back. Complaints of racism or even sexual harassment go unmade, and when they’re brought up, the accusers are spun as bitter and untalented, piping up because they’re not able to hack it.
Konnan might be going about this in a pretty douchey way, but he’s also kind of right. Hopefully more will stand up and take his lead, just…maybe not so much with the threats.
