Jordan Myles, previously known as ACH on the indies, arrived at NXT with great promise. He won the NXT Breakout Tournament this Summer, defeating Cameron Grimes in the finals. That gave him a shot at Adam Cole’s NXT Championship, and while he obviously lost, just getting the opportunity was a big deal for someone as early in his NXT career as Myles. Unfortunately, that title match was the last we saw of Myles on NXT TV, and now it’s clear that his relationship with WWE is not in great shape.
Last night and then again this morning, Jordan Myles tweeted an image of what was intended to be his first NXT T-shirt design, tagging both Triple H and Vince McMahon in the second tweet.
https://twitter.com/GoGoMyles/status/1188393687983759360
As Myles and others on Twitter have pointed out, the combination of a black shirt, red lips, and white teeth is extremely reminiscent of racist blackface and “Sambo” imagery used to denigrate African Americans in the past.
https://twitter.com/TheBuck243/status/1188520833075036162
https://twitter.com/SwoleWorld/status/1188431781650935809
Jordan has gone on to state that he’s unimpressed with the fact that WWE already replaced the T-shirt design (with a pretty generic cartoony logo design).
https://twitter.com/GoGoMyles/status/1188437649025044481
Basically he hasn’t minced words even a little bit about what the shirt represents to him:
https://twitter.com/GoGoMyles/status/1188408052820647936
WWE’s T-shirt designs, especially the quickly pumped-out NXT shirts, tend to look like somebody with no design experience spent about a half-hour creating them, with little to no oversight. So I’m willing to believe that some overworked white employee created this shirt without realizing it was racist. However, that’s no excuse. WWE is a huge company, and they should be able to avoid this kind of thing, if they’d bother to try. Even if it’s not intentional, that doesn’t mean it’s not racist, and indicative of racism within the company.
The question is what comes next. Jordan Myles has called on others to protest with him, and clearly has no intention of backing down. It would be wildly out of character for WWE to make a direct statement on something like this, but on the other hand releasing Jordan Myles, or just keeping him in off-TV limbo indefinitely, would only make them look bad and prove Jordan’s point. Hopefully they find some way to resolve this situation.
