Abstract
This paper examines the story arc of a trio of Black male wrestlers called the New Day within the World Wrestling Entertainment industry (WWE) who go from militant nationalists, stereotypical singing/dancing preachers, and finally to self-described unicorns bringing magic back to the WWE. Wrestling is used to explore anti-Blackness, Black masculinity, and conceptions of the human/humanity. Drawing on Katherine McKittrick's Black methodological intervention of textual accumulation to interrogate issues of race, masculinity, and sexuality within their performances, I argue the group's unique position as wrestlers allows us to conceptualize the trio as “writers” of fiction; a position that when read through Kevin Young's concept of storying provides insight into a Black creative practice engaging in alternative worldmaking and rewriting understandings of the human outside of a Western European framework. I advocate that the stories of the New Day not only provide glimpses into new genres of being human, but also forms of Black manhood(s) outside of a patriarchal framework.
The New Day is a trio of Black male wrestlers in the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) industry. The team consists of Big E, Kofi Kingston, and Xavier Woods. Debuting in 2014, they went from a trio of militant Black men, stereotypical dancing and singing preachers, to self-described unicorns bringing magic back to the WWE. As unicorns the group shattered dominant norms of Black masculinity within the WWE through their creative practices. A rupture leading to widespread popularity and a record-breaking reign as tag-team champions. This is a significant feat for three Black men given the WWE's long and present history of racism (Beary, 2014). Perhaps representing how far the group has come, on the June 12th, 2020, version of the WWE's weekly televised show SmackDown, Big E and Kofi Kingston took a knee in the center of the ring and raised their fist in the air aligning the group with the resurging Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). Big E and Kingston's raised fists revealed armbands with the names Breonna Taylor, Shukri Abdi, and Tamla Horsford. Three Black women whose premature deaths and subsequent lack of resolution and accountability for these acts can’t be separated from anti-Black and gendered violence. Centering three Black women is significant given mainstream discourses were focusing on George Floyd, and more broadly Black women are often erased from discussions of institutional and state violence. It is also noteworthy because their original stint as militant Black men ended due to WWE fears of this arc being read as an endorsement of the BLM movement (Koh, 2022). Nonetheless, this act symbolizes the wider discourses of Blackness, masculinity, sexuality, and ideas of the human/humanity the group's performances enable.
Calvin Warren (2018: 1) argues “Black Lives Matter is an important declaration, not just because it foregrounds the question of unbearable brutality, but also because it performs philosophical labor-it compels us to face the terrifying question”. The terrifying question is whether or not Blacks can have life and be considered human (Warren, 2018). A consideration of ontological origins regarding the type of world needing constant declarations that Black life in fact does matter. The argument that Black life does not matter causes Christina Sharpe (2016) to advocate we are living within the wake of slavery, and similarly Rinaldo Walcott (2021) argues the Black diaspora is living in the long emancipation. Two theoretical interventions premised on the belief that the social logics of slavery still shape the ways the Black diaspora navigate everyday life.
Within Western philosophy, the concept of human is consistently constructed as a universal experience, but this discursive construction is routinely linked to the white, western man (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). This philosophical framework emerges from colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade. A system of knowledge structurally positioning Blackness as non-human and setting the foundation for how modern society is oriented and structured (Wynter, 1995). A knowledge system is necessary to legitimize slavery and colonialism and consequently introduces a new social structure still shaping the present. This is not to discount the many legislative rights gained since this period, but instead to highlight that these gains have not broken definitions of the human which exclude Black people.
The exclusion of Blackness from the realm of human perpetuates the normalization of Black death and routine violence enacted on Black bodies in the present (Sharpe, 2016), and these constant acts of senseless anti-Black violence then necessitate declarations of BLM in response. As a society, we are unable to break this loop because these declarations take place in a knowledge system which does not recognize Black humanity, and thus these transgressions cannot be repaired within this structure (Sharpe, 2016). This system of knowledge within the WWE is made visible through acts of representation. Black men frequently circulate as the African savage, the African strongman, the hip-hop artist, or the happy-go-lucky/singing and dancing persona (Beary, 2014). Forms of representation drawing on long established ways of knowing the Black male body through a white supremacist patriarchal lens. Understanding this dynamic, Xavier Woods has stated a goal of the group is to give Black male wrestlers a blank slate to work with (Jericho, 2015). A declaration we might read as a desire to know Black masculinity differently.
Knowing black masculinity differently
The desire to know Black masculinity differently is a response to the limited agency Black men have in crafting their own image and are instead bound by discourses situating Black men as the “brute, untamed, uncivilized, and unthinking” in a white-supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalistic society (hooks, 2004a: xii). These narrow forms of representation impact how Black men see themselves, each other, Black women, and contribute to dominant narratives of Black men. This paper intervenes in these broader discussions of representation, anti-Blackness, Black masculinity, and conceptions of the human/humanity by reading the New Day as generators of Black knowledge construction. I argue the group's unique position as wrestlers allows us to conceptualize the trio as “writers” of fiction, and these creative tales offer possibilities for alternative conceptions of being human and forms of Black masculinity not bound by patriarchy.
Black knowledge construction functions as the gateway to new ways of knowing and being through alternative world making. Black knowledge construction moves us away from trying to capture the Black experience and instead to how “black thinkers imagine and practice liberation” (McKittrick, 2021: 3). To read the New Day as “writers” of Black knowledge construction is to tune into the ways the group disrupts dominant ways of knowing the Black male body. Resulting in a reconstitution of the Black male body outside of western conceptions of Blackness as non-human, and also allowing us to understand Black life outside of dichotomy of victims/resistors of racism (McKittrick, 2014). This disruption of dominant ways of knowing requires a shift to Black methodologies and theoretical frameworks.
Textual accumulation is a Black methodology requiring both writing and imagining across various texts to breach dominant ways of knowing (McKittrick, 2022). The texts in this paper consist of the performances of the New Day, two New Day comic books, the show My Little Pony Friendship is Magic (MLPF), and my own reflective thoughts. By bringing together asymmetrical texts dominant conceptions of data and knowledge construction are subverted (McKittrick, 2022). It is through engaging with the disentanglement of these texts and the subsequent putting together which facilitates the creation of knowledge outside of our current structure. This way of knowing Black life is predicated on the notion of Black people historically and presently using interdisciplinary methodologies “to explain, explore, and story the world” to disrupt racial logics of the time (McKittrick, 2021: 4). The texts mentioned above are put together to form three chapters or stories of the New Day. These chapters cover three pivotal moments in their storyline and are entitled as follows: The Formation of the New Day, Stories of Black Preachers, and Unicorns in the World of Booty. I read these chapters as works of fiction presented through the lens of storying. Storying refers to how Black people use fiction in all its iterations to “free themselves from the bounds of fact” (Young, 2012: 19). Fiction becomes the grounds to work towards freedom by remapping the existing order of our world. Slave spirituals serving as a code for runaways, folktales, twisting of stories, or even a jazz solo work to subvert racism by imagining something different (Young, 2012). Yet, these stories of the New Day are not meant to provide answers, nor do I endlessly explain what their performances may mean.
McKittrick (2021) argues stories of Black worlds don’t offer answers, but instead signal ways of living in an anti-Black world and force us to sit with different ways of knowing. The stories of the New Day put together through the lens of storying become ways to acknowledge Black life, Black ways of knowing, and ways of conceptualizing Black masculinity outside of a patriarchal and heteronormative framework. The sharing of these stories becomes part of a collaborative practice of enacting struggle and finding ways to live in an anti-Black world (McKittrick, 2021). Therefore, in constructing and sharing these stories the emphasis is on what these tales might compel us to do, feel, and imagine. Specifically, I share these stories to stimulate inquisitiveness about how we might dream Black masculinity differently.
A brief note on theory and methods
This paper deliberately does not contain a methods section as to include such a discussion would fail to adhere to the ontological underpinnings of the project. Textual accumulation differs from more traditional scholarship, which moves from data collection to data analysis and ends with an explanation of what we know from this process (McKittrick, 2021). Instead, this paper seeks to explain
This theoretical intervention documents Black exclusion from the various realms of society, but does not seek political, juridical, or philosophical solutions to these problems as Blackness is unable to be humanized within a system that routinely denies Black humanity (Sharpe, 2016). This is a contrast to how traditional scholarship on race and its intersections is conducted, which often names inequity in effort to find a solution to it within existing structures. Textual accumulation driven by Black theory instead seeks to radically redefine how we live and connect with each other. It does so by asking us to sit with what cannot be explained as opposed to be guided by a plethora of evidence (McKittrick, 2021). It is not meant to replace more traditional ways of conducting research, but it does force us to confront what possibilities might open up if we do take this turn.
Instead of being guided by empirical evidence the research in this paper is driven by theory and elements of the Black speculative fiction tradition, which requires the imagining of possibilities that do not fit within our current social order (Brown, 2021). This can be an uncomfortable shift from traditional ways of knowing in the social sciences. Yet, by situating the New Day as “writers” of fiction this work joins other decolonial scholarship choosing to center the creative possibilities of Indigenous and Black communities (McKittrick, 2021; Whitinui, 2021). A departure from scholarship that situates these groups within frameworks of deficit and despair by drawing attention to the ways liberation is imagined outside of social structures that dehumanize Black and Indigenous people and ways of knowing. Thus, this manuscript operates outside of traditional methodology and writing to re-imagine ways of thinking and being outside of colonial frameworks (Adams, 2022; Chen, 2021; Laurendeau, 2020; Mc-Guire-Adams et al., 2022). Wrestling is a catalyst for this reimagining.
Wrestling lends itself to a paratextual analysis as it has a diverse array of mediated texts within its universe. Thinking through how various forms of wrestling texts inform each other could provide important insights into future studies particularly in relation to kayfabe (see: DiArron, 2022). However, the paratextual analysis in this study is specifically connected to Black thought and methodology to disrupt dominant ways of knowing Black life. A necessity within wrestling given its problems with race (Carrington, 2010; Dozal, 2020; Hughes, 2017), women (Opplinger, 2003; Wood and Litherland, 2018), homophobia (Jenkins, 2005; Soulliere, 2006), and the vilification of foreign nationals (Rahmani, 2007). I locate the transgressive possibilities of wrestling in its metatextual universe and its unique connection to theatre and storytelling practices. Wrestling is not quite theatre and not quite sport but draws on a lot of theatrical elements (Chow et al., 2017). Storytelling keeps the fictional world of wrestling going (Jones, 2019), and kayfabe is the practice sustaining the illusion of this fictional world. Kayfabe is a contested concept (see Laine, 2018; Laine, 2020; Litherland, 2014), but I use it to reference the essential labor practices wrestlers engage in on a nightly basis to propel fictional narratives. The New Day's monologues, physical performances, and commitment to performing their characters work to create fiction. These performances are often crafted by creative teams and executives (Laine, 2017). As a result, the agency of individual wrestlers to shape their own characters and storylines is limited.
The New Day discusses this in their podcast Feel the Power, when they highlight their involvement in forming the trio and the concept of the group, but specify management made the final decision in the group becoming preachers who expound the power of positivity (New Day, 2019a). The group also notes that this dynamic shifts as they became more successful. The New Day presents a narrative of not being afraid to voice their thoughts to management, and after gaining some success they were trusted with more decision-making power and control in their character development, promos, and attire when they made the heel turn (see Chapter 3) (New Day, 2019b). Nonetheless, the question of agency is complicated by the business practices of the WWE and the labor practice of kayfabe.
For example, the New Day podcast mentioned above is still sponsored by the WWE and subsequently, the company maintains some control of content. This is similar to the comic books discussed in this paper where the New Day are able to provide insight and reflection on their experiences, but the WWE has final say over the content produced (Jeffries, 2022). The WWE also has incentive to support any creative outlets produced through wrestlers such as the New Day for marketing reasons. Many of the creative outlets of the New Day (see Chapter 3) became WWE merchandise, which benefitted both the company and the New Day. These questions of agency, creative control, and the commodification of creative labor are important. The New Day's labor is to tell stories through their bodies every night, and sometimes those stories and performances will be more controlled than others. Yet, by reading the New Day across and the various texts in this paper, we gain insight into how kayfabe can function as a discursive space (DiArron, 2022). A discursive space where the New Day work with what they are given
Black ontology and the WWE
Rinaldo Walcott (2021: 1) argues “the conditions of Black life, past and present, work against any notion that what we inhabit in the now is freedom”. An argument connecting notions of freedom as something beyond the legislative. Walcott (2021) continues, legislative practices eradicated the status of being enslaved, but failed to dissolve the social relations of slavery. This argument makes the case that legislation is not in itself enough to achieve liberation due to the ideological underpinnings to justify this law still being intact. Ideology emerging from 1512 onward as Western Europe develops a definition of human/humanity to support its expansion and place in the world (Wynter, 1995). The colonialism of Western Europe alongside emerging discourses of evolution shift definitions of the human from a religious orientation to a secular one and lay the groundwork for scientific racism (Wynter, 1995). Resulting in a knowledge system producing and sustaining hierarchies of humanity justified through biological conceptions of the human.
Thus, to understand definitions of the human as universal or primarily through a biological perspective obscures how these meanings have been socially constructed (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). The nature of Black subjugation is continuously changing but is predicated on the social logics of slavery rendering Blackness as the antithesis of human.
Consequently, Walcott (2021) argues it is Black death particularly through police brutality, prisons, immigration detention camps, and other forms of state violence where the colonial logics positioning Black life as less than reveal themselves. These moments reflect the ways institutional structures are embedded with anti-Black practices leading to the unnecessary deaths of Black people. These moments are also emblematic of how the punishment, regulation, and surveillance of the Black body originating in slavery are made and remade in the present (Sharpe, 2016). Due to this knowledge system orienting our world this way of knowing Blackness and the Black body is present in major cultural institutions such as wrestling.
Anti-blackness and professional wrestling
In sport, anti-Blackness is perpetuated through representation (Carrington, 2010; Dickerson, 2023), the erasure of Black histories within sport (McKenzie and Joseph, 2023), misogynoir (Razack and Joseph, 2021), and institutional practices criminalizing and demonizing Black bodies (Douglas, 2012; Hawkins, 2010; Leonard, 2006; Schultz, 2005). Wrestling is not quite sport, but these issues of anti-Blackness are manifested in similar ways. The central difference with wrestling resides in the fictional elements of character creation, storylines, and in-ring performances that engage and perpetuate these larger political issues (Chow et al., 2017). Thus, both entities perpetuate anti-Blackness, but the fictional world of wrestling directly confronts these narratives to purposely create tension.
The advent of professional wrestling in the late 1800s helps to illustrate this difference.
The beginning of professional wrestling overlaps with the popularity of Blackface minstrelsy, which provided a blueprint for the constitution of the persona of Black male wrestlers (Hughes, 2017). Minstrel shows constructed dehumanizing discourses of Blackness to demonstrate Blacks were unfit for a life outside of the plantation. Narratives of innate physicality, primitiveness, and buffoonery from these shows became foundations for storylines of Black wrestlers within the American South (Hughes, 2017). Fiction becomes the tool to play out the political issues of the day. Southern organizations throughout the twentieth century developed storylines feminizing Black men, demonizing Black women to reinforce Black male patriarchy, and used white women to manage Black men to draw on tensions of interracial sexual relations (Hughes, 2017). The WWE has consistently drawn on similar discourses throughout their history particularly through stereotypical characters.
The easily recognizable images and tropes personified through stereotypes allow fans to easily identify the place of individual wrestlers in this fictional universe, while also positioning wrestling and the bodies of wrestlers as a space where the anxieties of daily life are played out (Jenkins, 2005). For example, the Ugandan Giant Kamala, came to the ring in “tribal” war-paint, a spear, animal print loin cloth, and a white male handler to contain his aggressiveness. These signifiers alongside his performance of unrefined wrestling moves personified the perceived primitiveness of African people and the continent (Dozal, 2020). More broadly, Kamala is situated within broader colonial fears and desires of the Black male body. A tension played out further during the Attitude Era (1997–2002) of the WWE.
During this time, WWE storylines and characters were constructed to reject middle-class respectability, while amplifying excessive performances of masculinity (Sammond, 2005). The characters and storylines of Mark Henry (nicknamed Sexual Chocolate) and the Godfather during this period drew on both fears and desires of Black, male, heterosexuality. Mark Henry was involved in a storyline where he was a sex addict whose addiction caused him to have sex with his 8-year-old sister, a 76-year-old, and a trans-woman (Oppliger, 2003). The flip side of this narrative of the dangers of Black male sexuality is the Godfather. A Black male pimp who brought a line of women to the ring named the ho-train and asked audience members to chant ‘pimpin ain’t easy”. Allowing white fans to celebrate misogyny, while also distancing themselves from this hypermasculine performance because of the connection to Blackness (Battema and Sewell, 2005). The WWE also confronted race in a more direct manner.
This era included a storyline where a white male champion, Triple-H (now chief content operator), told his Black opponent, Booker T that people like him didn’t deserve to win, called his hair nappy, and told Booker he was in the WWE to make people laugh not win a title (Beary, 2014). Race also became a central part of the storyline of the Nation of Domination, which was a mostly Black faction of wrestlers during the Attitude era. The group drew on tropes of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther party, and in the early Attitude days were part of a gang war storyline featuring an all-white biker gang, and a Puerto-Rican gang. The Nation of Domination taps into white anxiety about militant and pro-Black organizations, while the gang war storyline is indicative of the WWE's emphasis on making race the gimmick for its Black and other wrestlers of color (Taylor, 2014). It is these constraints that make the story of the New Day more remarkable, as they were eventually able to break free from these limitations. The next section outlines storytelling in both the labor of wrestling and within the Black tradition to set the foundation for this disruption.
The art of storytelling: Blackness and the practice of wrestling
Chow and Laine (2014: 45) argue wrestlers are paid to provide “representational labor, that is, the presentation of a storyline”. In other words, wrestlers through their physical performances, monologues, and bodies propel the narratives within wrestling. McKittrick (2021: 8) states stories might be “one way to express and fall in love with black life”. An argument highlighting the power of storytelling and the radical act of loving Black life in an anti-Black world. The New Day as wrestlers are required to craft fiction on a nightly basis. The stories they write offer us a way to love Black life, as they recreate ways of living and being rupturing Western conceptions of the human as part of their labor as creative storytellers (McKittrick, 2015). The practice of kayfabe serves as a bridge to this larger political project.
Kayfabe references practices used to sustain the illusion that the events, characters, and outcomes in wrestling are real (Litherland, 2022). Wrestling involves real physical events, but conflicts, results, and storylines are scripted. Historically, kayfabe might reference wrestlers staying in character even when in public to protect the secrets of the trade, but overall, it is a practice that is adaptive and dependent on the labor needs of the historical context (Litherland, 2022). Determining what is real, fake, or a combination of both is not of importance here. Rather, it is the potential of kayfabe's performative elements to critique and rewrite our understanding of our world (Laine, 2020). The transformative possibilities of kayfabe are enhanced when read through Black analytical frameworks.
Storying is both a Black tradition and innovation where “fiction” becomes a tool to confront reality and in doing so “remaking it in our image” (Young, 2012: 61). These constructions of fiction take on various forms, but the end goal of getting “elsewhere” is always present. The elsewhere of the New Day entails getting outside of representations of the Black male body used to sustain racial fantasies of the US through representations connected to hypersexuality, criminality, violence, and innate physicality (Neal, 2013). Specifically, these stories read through tradition of storying help to imagine multiple forms of Black manhood not bound by patriarchy or heteronormativity (Walcott, 2009). These stories of Black life are put together through textual accumulation.
McKittrick (2022) names textual accumulation as an important Black methodology, which brings together various sources to dismantle racial logics. A restructuring is enabled by bringing together forms of knowledge that don’t appear directly connected. By assembling and disassembling various texts and sources and piecing them back together as something new we are left with new forms of knowledge (McKittrick, 2022). In my stories of the New Day, I bring together various elements of the group's monologues, bodily aesthetics, in-ring performances, narratives from their comic books, my own thoughts, and the television show MLPFM. These stories are broken into chapters called: The Formation of the New Day, Stories of Black Preachers, and Unicorns in the world of Booty. Each chapter is connected to a different form of the storying tradition.
Chapter one focuses on remapping, Chapter two on the counterfeit, and Chapter three on the mixtape. The emphasis in each chapter is on the possibilities the story might enable instead of direct meaning. To aid in this curiosity of thought I add my own reactions and musings. These thoughts are conveyed through either italics or bolded text. I use italics for rhetorical questions I would ask readers to pause and consider. I use bolded text to draw attention to specific words and ideas. I believe these words and ideas help us disrupt dominant understandings of Black masculinity, and by drawing attention to them through a interruption of standard ways of writing we can begin to dream Black men and their gendered performances anew. These stories and my own musings don’t have answers, but they do enact struggle by providing prompts of how we might live and know our world differently which might compel us to feel, think, and act in different ways (McKittrick, 2021). A way to get to somewhere else.
Chapter one: The formation of the new day
The practice of storying always involves some sort of lie. The lie could be a literal lie, an embellishment, a code constituted through metaphor, a folktale, or a series of hip-hop metaphors (Young, 2012). No matter what form this lie takes its creation is intended as a step towards freedom by imagining something new. Not unlike kayfabe, where the lines between fact and fiction become blurred through the interplay of the work and shoot (Fontaine et al., 2022). Work is a reference to scripted actions and the shoot is something that is unplanned. The fiction element of kayfabe covers the real, scripted, or the improvisation needed for unplanned occurrences (Fontaine et al., 2022). The New Day's origin story through WWE television is linear and predictable. The lie made visible through their comic books takes this origin story and remaps it into a story of creation laying the foundation for new ways of being.
The comics are released in 2021 as part of a larger series which thematically recontextualizes WWE iconography to heighten fans' emotional investment in its stories and characters (Jeffries, 2022). This happens by retelling narratives fans will be familiar with, and adding in backstories, motivations, and emotional perspectives to the choices of wrestlers. The WWE maintains the final say on content, but the series does allow for the input of featured wrestlers (Jeffries, 2022). These comics are published 5 years from the group's surge of popularity, four years after their “co-authored” WWE authorized The book of booty: Shake it, love it, never be it, and six years after the start of Xavier Wood's YouTube channel Up, Up, Down, Down. The latter which has over two million subscribers but is still owned by the WWE.
All of this supplemental material added to the popularity of the group, and probably aided the group's agency in making contributions to the comic given their own framing of gaining more control once they got over (New Day, 2019b). Yet, just as kayfabe can give fans something to believe in (Laine, 2020), it is what the stories of the New Day might enable us to do, think, and feel that is most relevant. In the televised world of the WWE in 2014, Big E and Kofi Kingston were paired together as a tag team, but consistently losing matches. After a series of losses, Xavier Woods confronts the duo at ringside stating “You can’t move ahead by shaking hands and kissing babies like a puppet. You can’t move ahead by always doing what you are told. Together it is our time to find purpose. Now we take” (Monday Night Raw, July 2014). A shift to a more militant persona, and with Woods acting as their manager he coaches the duo to victory the next night.
This moment corresponded with the rise of BLM. Koh (2022) argues the continued development of the group from this angle could easily be conflated with the WWE supporting BLM. Thus, to avoid being divisive the WWE took the group off of TV to rework their characters resulting in the New Day cast as singing and dancing preachers. A possible example of the interplay of the work and shoot. The first edition of the New Day comic books retells this story. A reimaging providing insight into the dance between the work and shoot, but when read through the practice of storying situates the New Day as storytellers and innovators in reconstituting their place in the WWE.
In the comic, Woods does not confront his future teammates at ringside, and is instead depicted in a lab coat sketching out complicated mathematical equations to figure out the formula for a perfect tag-team. Arriving at this formula, Woods sends Big E and Kingston invitations to a meeting. A personification of Woods and the creation of the group situating them as agents in the crafting of this work of fiction.
In the next panel, Big E is dressed as a cleric and Kingston appears as a Paladin. Characters associated with traditional notions of masculinity rooted in strength. Yet also importantly job classes are often associated with role playing video games (RPG) and fantasy fiction. The road to somewhere else starts in the fantasy realm. The imagination. We must break with what we know to travel this road. The fantasy genre in literature and video games is overwhelmingly white, male centric, and heteronormative. Entwining the birth of the group with fantasy elements can be read as them reimagining the work of fantasy fiction to include Black male characters (Thomas, 2019). A remaking of the world to envision Black life. Thus, chapter one of the New Day emphasizes that to get away from the tropes of Black masculinity within the WWE, something new will have to be imagined and created.
Chapter two: Stories of black preachers
The counterfeit is another critical part of storying. Young (2012: 24) defines the counterfeit as “the way in which black folks both ‘create’ and ‘fake’-Black authority in a world not necessarily of their making”. A lie requiring the formation of a new identity while faking one as well. Slaves crafting their own freedom papers is a pertinent example (Young, 2012). To obtain authorship over your own story becomes a form of liberation. For Black men, it has the potential to rupture the racial fantasies imposed on them by a white supremacist and patriarchal culture (Marriott, 2000). The counterfeit requires creativity, secrecy, and the lie to function lending itself well to the labor wrestlers must sustain.
For the New Day, their time as preachers requires them to play into stereotypical notions of Blackness and masculinity. Nonetheless, their commitment to this lie allows them to begin to forge a new identity by generating heat and the inclusion of Black vernacular practices. Their adherence to kayfabe or the lie protects them, while at the same time their over commitment to this trope allows them to generate heat the catalyst that will allow them to create alternative identities. The group's second comic book provides the grounds for reading the New Day through the counterfeit. The comic opens with Triple H (former wrestler/now executive) hiring a writer and stylist to find an angle for the New Day for marketing and economic purposes. The commodification of a
Kofi and Woods also both affirm that WWE management has no idea where any of them are from or where they are trying to go. They know how to market tropes of Black masculinity. They
The new day's counterfeit identity
On the December 5th, 2014, episode of Smackdown, Xavier Woods begins an in-ring promo with “You dirty face paint wearing…” Woods continues What you don’t seem to understand. I said. What you don’t seem to comprehend. I said. What you are not getting through your thick skull is darkness will not prevail. Darkness will not hold us down, because when we are together there is no force in the cosmos that can hold us back (Smackdown, December 5th, 2014).
Woods pauses before each “I said” and changes the pitch of his voice to enunciate and melodically pronounce “I said” before continuing in his everyday voice. These are markers of the Black vernacular. I’ve heard this story before.
The special in this case are cultural elements of the Black church. The pauses in the speech of Woods open his consciousness for the Holy Spirit to breathe into (Crawley, 2016). A form of vulnerability necessary for the divine spirit of God to enter the body. To be vulnerable. Open ourselves to others.
The hidden new day identity within the counterfeit
Wrestlers learn to listen to audience reactions, so they may lean into these responses and improvise to best manipulate heat (Ezell, 2017). A negative reaction. The New Day was situated as babyfaces (good guys) preaching the power of positivity. An angle the group believed destined for failure unless they turned heel (Jericho, 2015). How does one get outside the bounds of current racial logics?
A heel turn requires a shift in character. What will they become? What are they creating? Audiences initially responded favorably to the group, but eventually, the crowd turns on them by yelling New Day sucks at the end of the clap. The commitment to the lie will lead to authority of identity via a remapping of the world. On the April 6th, 2015, episode of Monday Night Raw the group responds to this shift in a backstage interview. Xavier Woods replies “It hurts Renee. It hurts”.
The interplay of the work and shoot. Anger. “Black men hate being typecast” (Marriott, 2000: viii). That anger has to be
Big E continues, We are out here trying to bring positivity to you, and you want to ruin our new day. You see something has got to change. You have got to like us. You have got to love us because we are here for you. We are here for a New Day.
Things have to change. Things are changing.
Halfway through the second comic book, the group is “struggling” to get fans to respond positively to the preacher angle. Exemplified through a series of panels showing negative social media posts about the group, and a panel depicting the trio mid-clap with the text “it's been rough” (Narcisse and Walker, 2021b: 10). Told to
The New Day's dance with unicorns contains many signifiers working to disrupt conventions of Black male masculinity and sexuality, and there is a great need to rupture the link conflating sport with heterosexual masculinity (Abdel-Shehid, 2005). For instance, the cover of their first comic book depicts the group standing on a stack of pancakes floating in the sky. Set against an inverted rainbow and a sky filled with their trademark cereal, Booty O's.
The rainbow is an iconic symbol in the LGBTIQA + community. The rainbow can function to connote solidarity, mark safe spaces, and act as a starting point for negotiations of identity. (Wolowic et al., 2017). Rainbow flags, pins, stickers, the rainbow calls people in. Rainbows are also an important form of symbolism in MLPFM. MLPFM is constructed to disrupt stereotypical depictions of adolescent girls by focusing on the importance of friendship, honesty, loyalty, and kindness (Jones, 2015). Black men, are we honest about our feelings? What type of friendships would allow for us to be honest with ourselves, with each other, and with Black women? Honesty, kindness, friendship, loyalty all necessities for creating and holding space for our Black LGBTIQA + community members. Rainbows are markers of magic in MLPFM. The opening episode tells the story of two sisters who rule the kingdom of Equestria.
The eldest, Princess Celestia, uses her unicorn magic to raise the sun, while the youngest, Princess Luna, uses her magic to bring the night and moon. Luna eventually turns into a dark princess (Nightmare Moon), and Princess Celestia draws on the powerful magic, the elements of harmony, to defeat her sister. A form of magic projecting a rainbow stream from the unicorn horn of Celestia. In the second episode, Twilight Sparkle, a unicorn, and the main character is on a quest to study the power of friendship. Through her journey she learns about the unique qualities of all her friends, and that their collective powers are needed to again utilize the elements of harmony. Friendship, collectivism, rainbow magic, expanding notions of femininity.
To sample something is to construct “not just the outside of the thing, the sound, but also a bit of its inner form, its meaning and its history” (Young, 2012: 362). Three Black men entwined with symbolism connected to
The power of magic. What will magic create? We want to thank the WWE universe for all of their support. We appreciate all your tweets, all your grams, all your messages. If Xavier Woods was here right now, he would play a song of gratitude for all of you. So let us raise our unicorn horns and put them on our unicorn heads for Xavier Woods (Hell in a Cell, October 25th, 2015).
You see we are putting things in their proper place. The Dudley's in the past and our good unicorn brother Xavier Woods in our hearts. That's where he belongs. In fact, let's all take a moment and throw a unicorn horn up for Xavier Woods (Monday Night Raw, October 26th, 2015).
Showing compassion for a fallen teammate is not outside the masculine norms of sport, as the space of athletics is often one of the only spaces men can have this emotional connection (Messner, 2002). Wrestling is not quite sport though.
Side two: The world of booty
Unicorns, unicorn magic, and rainbows are side one of the mixtape. “The tape, like the record-like the story itself-has at least two sides” (Young, 2012: 313). Side two is the world of booty and is not possible without side one. Side one shifts us into a new world allowing our imagination of Black manhood to be taken further on side two. A queer Black male subject? Booty is often used as slang for sex or the pursuit of sex (Collins, 2004), but the New Day frequently use it as an insult. Calling someone or something “booty” takes on negative connotations. A jocular and perhaps juvenile use of the word, but the story takes an interesting turn as to avoid this label one must consume the booty.
In an act which could be read as the embodiment of storying, the New Day began cutting promos referring to a fictional cereal called Booty O's. Proclaiming the consumption of Booty O's everyday guarantees “you ain’t booty”. To not be booty we have to eat the booty. But whose booty are we eating? The creation of this fictional cereal draws on broader discourses such as eating your vegetables or Popeye eating his spinach. The popularity of these promos helped perpetuate a collaboration between the WWE and PLB Sports and Entertainment (a food product company aligned w/athletes) to produce Booty O's cereal for fans to buy and eat.
The artwork on this box brings together all the components of the New Day mixtape compelling us to re/see Black masculinities and Black life (Sharpe, 2016). Big E sits in the center of the box eating a giant bowl of Booty’Os. Xavier Woods and Kofi Kingston with spoons in hand stand behind Big E looking down in envy. Woods also has a long unicorn horn protruding from his head cutting across the box to penetrate the O of Booty O's. The box is adorned in their trademark colors of blue, pink, yellow, and white, while the back of the box features a cut out unicorn mask. The box also includes the phrase “they make sure you ain’t booty”. The cereal contains marshmallows in the shape of booty crowns, magic, unicorn horns, rainbow hearts, smiles, and the “O” shaped cereal (the actual Booty O's).
The New Day benefits from the Fabulous Freebird rule. A rule allowing any two members from the trio to compete in a match. The rule comes from former WWE trio the Fabulous Freebirds. In April of 2016, the New Day inducted the Fabulous Freebirds into the WWE Hall of Fame. A divisive act, as the Freebirds gimmick consisted of wearing Confederate flag face paint and apparel. More so, Freebirds member, Michael Hayes, called Black wrestler, Mark Henry, the N-word backstage in 2008 (Johnson, 2019). The hypocrisy of asking the New Day to do this is emblematic of the treatment of Black wrestlers within the organization.
Especially for Black women who have to navigate the marginalization of Blackness and of being a woman within the dominant male space of wrestling. An inequity is also demonstrated within academic scholarship as there is a substantial lack of literature on Black women wrestlers (see Boyer, 2022). Despite important historical contributions to the industry (e.g., Babs Wingo, Ethel Johnson, Marva Scott) and more recent achievements such as Sasha Banks and Bianca Belair headlining WrestleMania. Additionally, no matter how creative and disruptive the New Day performances may be, the structure of wrestling necessitates they use strength and power to progress through the fictional ranks of professional wrestling (Jenkins, 2005). A standard form of patriarchal masculinity.
There is also the additional challenge of the WWE having a vested interest in pushing the group and their ideas, as it helps position the company to its audiences that it cares about racial diversity (Koh, 2022). Yet, this paper has not set out to determine if the WWE is actually committed to racial equity or to chart anti-Black practices within the industry. I have instead worked with New Day performances, the New Day comic books, and the show MLPFM to highlight Black knowledge construction. A move away from “capturing” meaning and instead question the logics of how we know (McKittrick, 2021). Reading these performances as examples of Black knowledge construction compels us to confront different ways of knowing Black masculinities, sexualities, and Black life.
The New Day as professional wrestlers has to craft narratives as part of their daily labor to sustain narrative fiction (Chow and Laine, 2014). The New Day embracement of unicorns, magic, and emotional intimacy allows them to tell a different story about forms of Black masculinities. These performances and the comic books that retell these stories offer varying levels of agency for the group. Nonetheless, the physical performance of kayfabe opens up possibilities of “seeing relations behind many other matters” (Laine, 2020: 202). Kayfabe offers the opportunity to imagine and dream. A bit like the New Day's own response to having to induct the Fabulous Freebirds into the Hall of Fame.
To open the speech, the New Day explained that both groups liked to have fun, dance, and sing. Then Big E states “The Freebirds really liked to have fun. Y’all remember that face paint? Yeah, we said, it. We are going to talk about it. The red, white, and the blue. Those guys were patriotic. They loved America” (Johnson, 2019). A fabrication to get somewhere else. David Marriott (2000) argues Black men must commit to dreaming ourselves differently to escape the rigid confines of white supremacist, patriarchal, and heteronormative discourses mapped onto the Black male body. Similarly, hooks (2004a) argues Black men need a blueprint to open up to vulnerability to start taking accountability in developing forms of Black masculinity that disavow patriarchy. The stories of the New Day provide an opportunity for reflection and curiosity about these possibilities. This results in Black men having a wider and more humane set of images to fashion a Black masculine persona. A series of identification points that value emotional intimacy between men, embraces feminine qualities, and creates space for Black male queer identities. These series of prompts have implications for Black men in general, but especially those within the confines of sport and wrestling where Black men are seen as the embodiment of hypermasculinity and heterosexuality. Narrow logics of Blackness and gender which also situate Black bodies outside of the genre of human. Black liberation will only come when we acknowledge this exclusion and shift our definitions of what the human is (Walcott, 2021).
It's a New Day, yes, it is.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
