On 27 November 2005 World Wrestling Entertainment held its 19th annual Survivor Series pay-per-view event. Fifteen thousand pro-wrestling fans were in attendance at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, MI. Another 400,000 paid to watch the show remotely.
Relatively early in the broadcast, WWE aired a scripted backstage segment in which longtime chairman Vince McMahon happily greets and offers support to reigning champion John Cena, who would be defending his title against Kurt Angle later that night. “What’s good in the hood?” McMahon asks, to which Cena replies “Holdin’ it down.”
Norman Mailer’s long-lost, counterrevolutionary son
At the time John Cena was adopting the persona of an earnest but generic “wigga”. While striving to be a role model for kids, he preached a message of HLR (“Hustle, Loyalty, Respect”). He also wore cartoonishly oversized chains around his neck, baggy T-shirts and shorts, and routinely rapped in a rudimentary fashion, usually to insult his opponents in the ring. When he became champion he had the belt modified so the shiny WWE logo became a spinner. Cena is of course Caucasian. His in-ring hip-hop stylings were a suggestion from Stephanie McMahon, the boss’s daughter, after she witnessed Cena spitting rhymes in the back of a tour bus in 2002.1
Much has been said about John Cena. Many seasoned fans rejected him for years and booed him loudly en masse; they considered him corny and resented how hard WWE seemed to be pushing him. The youngest viewers, however, responded very positively early on, buying tons of Cena toys and T-shirts. Eventually Cena’s wrestling skills and dedication allowed him to achieve high popularity amongst older demographics as well. In 2017 Cena tied Ric Flair’s record for the most world championship reigns, and Flair praised him as “representing WWE at the highest level”2. By that time Cena had long dropped most elements of his “wigga” character. But whatever else he has accomplished, our research shows that early in his career John Cena also amounted to the 21st-century descendant of Norman Mailer’s “White Negro”.
In 1957 Mailer wrote a 9,000-word essay arguing that “philosophical psychopath” hipsters—persons much like himself—could sublimate the “psychic havoc” of the postwar period if they simply adopted “the Hip[ness of] the Negro”.3 This appropriation would render the [W]hite leftists capable of waging “psychically armed rebellion” against “the mean empty hypocrisies of mass conformity”.
A provocative foreshadowing of various ’60s radicalisms, Mailer’s screed nonetheless earned him disapproval from other activists and fellow travelers.4 James Baldwin, amongst others, called out Mailer’s embarrassing enthusiasm for racial stereotypes. “The White Negro” profusely praises [B]lack people for being better at sex, music, and drugs—i.e., “that myth of the sexuality of Negroes,” in Baldwin’s words, “which Norman, like so many others, refuses to give up.”5 Further, critics chastised the essay for its explicit and irresponsible encouragement of virtually any and all “acts of violence”. Mailer abstractly and naïvely construes chaos “as the catharsis which prepares growth”, but he shows little regard for human life or for the harm done to any community that would host this “catharsis”.
Worth reading as a historical marker, “The White Negro” ultimately stands as a collection of clichés. We asked ChatGPT to reduce the work down to a few representative sentences, and it gave the following paraphrase: “I am an educated [W]hite college graduate, and I am very smart, but I think, like, [B]lack people are really cool? Oh, uh, by the way, have you read Marx?” (Mailer employs the phrase “the epic grandeur of Marx’s Das Kapital” not once but twice in the essay’s final paragraph.)
Leftist vocabulary terms and Beatnik/hippy reading lists are vestigial traits. Eventually they fall away. The reality is different from the theory, and Mailer’s antisocial “White Negro” fantasy turns out to be a smiling, happy John Cena. So much for the revolution.
By adopting aspects of [B]lack culture prominent in media at the time, Cena attempted to connect his image to a “street” lifestyle with which he had little if any experience. Cena grew up in a small town in Massachusetts, attended a prep school, and then moved to California to work as a limo driver. He then became a bodybuilder and eventually a pro wrestler, giving himself the nickname “Dr. of Thuganomics” despite never being a thug or doctor.
To his credit, however, Cena’s fondness for hip-hop predates his showbiz career. A genuine photo even exists of a teenaged Cena clumsily shaking hands with Tupac Shakur. But appreciating a culture doesn’t mean one can adequately become part of it. Was that what Cena was trying to do in the early-to-mid-’00s? Or did his persona function not so much as an appropriation of others’ fashion and music but rather as a representation—proud and loud, but sometimes self-deprecating—of his own unoriginal taste?
The heavy-handed nature of Cena’s wrestling character calls into question the extent to which, on any level, he was actually attempting to pass himself off as “hood”. Even in the context of WWE presentations at the time, Cena does not seem to be “from the streets” exactly. The announcers bill him, accurately, as being “from West Newbury, Massachusetts”. Cena stood as an obvious example of one of those [W]hite guys who think they’re [B]lack or something. We all knew them, then, in the mid-’00s. They were a prominent fixture of almost every social scene, and Cena appeared as just one more very wiggerish wigga, a wigga who made it into the WWE. The curious thing is that even though this was dubious . . . it was also fine, at least as far as American popular culture and mass society were concerned, back then.
But what happened next, in that 2005 Survivor Series scene, might not have been fine.
Wince McMahon chillin / swag at a hundred thousand trillion
“Keep it up, my [no-no word]!” barks Vince McMahon at John Cena, before nodding exaggeratedly and practically floating away with a supremely awkward—deliberately awkward—smile on his face. It’s the face of someone who thinks he’s slick but who couldn’t be more out of touch with the people around him. The camera pans away from a confused, taken-aback Cena, and we see McMahon immediately bop past wrestlers Booker T and Sharmell, both of whom are African American, and both of whom are in disbelief at what they’ve just overheard. “Tell me . . . he didn’t just say that,” growls Booker to Sharmell as the segment closes.
Only in 2005 would this have happened. The strangeness of the situation can be surpassed only by its typicality at the time. It was unique only because it was shown—boldly, laughingly—on television. It goes without saying that Cena, relatively clean-cut and presentable as “thugs” went, never said that word, at least not on camera. In the reality of 2005, however, many real-life wiggas and wigga-adjacents used the no-no word exactly as McMahon used it just then: not with a hard R but with a short -a, and as a term of brotherhood and affection, just as they had heard it said so often by their favorite rappers.
This strange appropriation of a term of endearment—itself a reworking of a term of deprecation—was becoming popular with certain segments of [W]hite youth. Everyone else thought it was bizarre. Many of us thought it was cringe (before cringe itself was popular). And some people, even in 2005, would have said they knew it was wrong.
A year or two earlier, a half-[B]lack college friend told me that some [W]hite boys she knew in Yonkers were using the no-no word amongst themselves. If I’m remembering right, they were a peer circle around the younger brother of her roommate. I’m certain that two decades ago my friend relayed this information with bemusement, grinning a bit, rolling her eyes: “Yeah, most of them are [W]hite, but they act [B]lack, and they call each other [the no-no word].” But of course she also thought it was strange. Today who knows what she would think about this if she looked back on it. Would she suspect she must have had internalized self-hatred because she wasn’t completely outraged? Probably not. Who knows, though. I’m not going to ask her. It’s interesting but it’s too weird now to ask. It was weird at the time too, but it was also in some sense funny.
And what McMahon said above still seems funny to a lot of people. YouTube comments, many of them from accounts with [B]lack avatars, attest to this:
This is even more hilarious when you realize he is 100% in control of the script for these skits and wrote that in there himself
I don’t care what anybody says. This shit is hilarious.
Coming from a black male, this was funny asf. Also the audience not knowing how to react made it funnier.
I love that Vince feels so liberated to say it that he adds a little bounce of joy
I’m black and this has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen PEROID.
I’m a black teen and I couldn’t stop laughing at this.6
I’m black but I cant help but find this funny instead of offensive 🤣 😂7
And on and on.
(By the way, if you caught yourself wondering for even half a second whether the commenters who said they were [B]lack really are [B]lack, that means you’re a paranoid conspiracy theorist. You need to report to your nearest licensed mental health professional for deradicalization. That’s how we deal with narrative questioners around here. . . . Seriously, the commenters probably are [B]lack, though.)
Context (barely) survives a Hulk Hogan leg drop
Vince McMahon saying the no-no word: How much does context matter in cases like this? It matters a lot. Context almost always obviously matters a lot. Some people (usually they’re called “folx”) want to exclude the context around controversial statements. That’s understandable, because context often proves to be so much to take in and deal with, and it’s easier to just condemn (or excuse) someone based on gut reaction. But we need to take the time and effort necessary to learn about the circumstances and setting of an incident, in order to truly know what happened and why. Otherwise, under the pretense of high-minded discernment, we’re simply reacting like Pavlovian dogs to a stimulus we’ve been trained to feel strongly about. This should be basic stuff—due diligence—but it’s not.
So how, then, to explain McMahon out-wigga-ing Cena at Survivor Series 19? That was how certain types of embarrassing [W]hite guys really were circa 2005. WWE was referencing this strange cross-cultural behavior, but they were mocking it, not normalizing it. A year and a half later McMahon would sport a durag and spout “What up, Holmes?” and “What up, G?” to similar comedic effect, deliberately portraying an out-of-touch cornball yet again.8 But whereas Durag Vince was laughable on first sight, in the Survivor Series skit McMahon deliberately kept the audience waiting till his very last word: only then was the peerless cringe of his on-screen character revealed. The utterance was not a candid moment exposing McMahon’s true personality. Rather, it was a bit of planned commentary on the era; it was prewritten, and thus McMahon was no different than an actor playing a provocative role.
This latter point was emphasized by WWE in 2015, when defending itself from charges of hypocrisy. The company had (temporarily) dissociated itself from Hulk Hogan, who was going through his own no-no word scandal. An old (2007) recording had leaked, and the audio documented Hogan using several hard Rs when describing and maligning his daughter’s then-boyfriend. Temporarily canceled (before being canceled was popular), Hogan alleged a double standard on the part of McMahon & co. Not so:
WWE […] released a statement saying that there was a big difference between the two incidents. A WWE spokesperson told TMZ that everyone recognizes what Vince McMahon did “was an outlandish and satirical skit involving fictional characters, similar to that of many scripted television shows and movies.” WWE also claimed that Vince McMahon consulted both Booker T and Sharmell before they shot the segment.9
At that juncture, nearly eight years ago, context still mattered. And back then, major media such as Fox Sports concurred:
We completely agree. As uncomfortable as it is for the N-word to be used, it was clear that McMahon was playing a character and role when using it. Hogan used it in a way to disparagingly describe [B]lack people in the context of being admittedly racist.10
Even in this, however, we notice that details and aspects of context were already being lost. In 2015 the cultural authorities excused McMahon’s 2005 behavior simply because he “was playing a character”. They said that was good enough for them. But major articles did not remark that McMahon had used the no-no word with a soft -a. Nor did they note that he had offered the term in a fraternal way to a fellow [W]hite. By the logic of Fox Sports at the time, McMahon would be just as blameless had his character sneeringly called Booker T a hard R to his face. In reality, however, we can be all but certain that they would not have appraised WWE quite the same way under those circumstances. It’s unlikely that as late as 2015 mainstream voices would fully approve of a segment that depicted full-on nasty racism directed at a [B]lack man, unleashed without warning on a large audience. After all, Vince McMahon’s “character” (“Mr. McMahon”) happened to be an almost exact copy of his actual identity, and children think pro wrestling is real. Children tune in to see John Cena, and some children are [B]lack. Would Fox Sports really have been fine with the skit had it been overtly malicious? I doubt it. But they—the media—always seem to overestimate their capacity for following their own self-set criteria for what is or isn’t acceptable.
For the sake of argument, let’s say that in 2015 McMahon would still have been excused had he played a more insulting character—much as Leonardo DiCaprio was readily excused for portraying a racist in 2012’s Django Unchained. In that case, the point would still remain that mainstream outlets don’t seem to perceive relevant differences. Eventually their inability to consider intent, context, and details will matter a great deal. We will see examples of this in later chapters. The prevailing culture treats real but fallible people, who inadvertently cause offense and make honest mistakes, as if they were all true-life villains seeking to do harm. As if a small-time TV weather lady innocently quoting Snoop Dogg (“fo shizzle, my nizzle”) were the same as a billionaire racist NBA owner. As if they deserved the same shaming and punishment. As if a verbal slip does to our social fabric what a stray nuclear missile could do to our infrastructure.
STEAM analysis, inconclusive
Before their work was halted in late 2022, the W.R.A.N.C.I.D. group (Wrestling-Raciale-Atomique Nexus Consortium InterDisciplinarité) subjected the above material to intense examination. In 2018 a directing body issued them a €450 million grant on the condition that they would employ a tactic of STEAM analysis (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) to better understand a specific set of cultural data connected to Survivor Series 19. As part of this effort, hundreds of news articles, magazines, and blog posts were scrutinized and fed into various machine-learning computer programs. Further, in the words of one investigator: “All the videos were slowed and looked at under figurative and literal microscopes, as if somewhere a rationale for racism were hiding between the pixels.”
Vis-à-vis an outreach program for gifted schoolchildren, copies of the WWE pay-per-view were supplied to several hundred teenagers from ten EU member states. The students’ opinions of the program were elicited, and the results were then collated by mathematics and engineering postgrads in Germany and the Netherlands. Across the board, in every avenue of research, special emphasis was placed on quantifying all responses to the McMahon/Cena exchange. Though W.R.A.N.C.I.D. failed to discover a hidden truth or “secret”, the explorative venture nonetheless proved insightful and delivered much unintentional entertainment value.
To satisfy the “A” in the STEAM mandate, a single frame from the footage became the basis for a series of gigantic art portraits. The selected snapshot captured Vince McMahon sporting a Cheshire Cat grin, just after he had said the N-word in front of half a million people.
The W.R.A.N.C.I.D. group spent upwards of €150 million hiring two world-renowned artists to produce a dozen large-scale (30m x 60m) variations of this image. Titled “The Man Who Got Away With It”, the series showed smiling Vince in altered forms: as if he were painted by Picasso, as if he were half-cyborg, as reptilian, as a mime, mutated with Michael Jackson and David Bowie, dressed and made-up as a 1950s housewife, and drawn in anime style, amongst other themes. One peculiar variant showed Vince with dark purple skin, and internal W.R.A.N.C.I.D. documents note the researchers’ concern that this might be construed as “Vince in Blackface”. Without any prior fanfare, warning, or explanation, on 25 May 2020 these works were unfurled for display on the outside walls of museums, train stations, and other public buildings throughout European capitals. As it happened, George Floyd died the same day. Soon enough, all “Man Who Got Away With It” portraits were taken down, destroyed, and never referred to again by any of the bodies involved in their creation or funding. Scant evidence of them exists online, and the copyright holders still pursue ownership of the images, demanding that any copies of them posted on social media be removed.
In the end, after much toil, embarrassment, and expenditure, the W.R.A.N.C.I.D. group arrived at judgments similar to my own regarding Survivor Series 19 and the related matters described above.
Vince McMahon’s utterance on 25 November 2005 was a highly unique and significant event, tantamount to a “secular miracle”.
It is good that few people capable of getting things done have taken writers like Norman Mailer seriously.
Fear of media persecution is more persuasive than intellectual argument.
The coerced consciousness set by communications technology, as tracked over the last hundred years, may uniformly approve of certain discourses (and discursive terminologies) only to uniformly condemn them shortly thereafter. At any step of the process, the uniformity of opinion holds more cultural power than the opinion itself.
Expressions of dissent always function primarily as “exceptions that prove the rule”, thereby bolstering the hegemonic orthodoxy until the orthodoxy changes of its own accord.
A few weeks ago, an EU commissar referenced the aforementioned €450 million grant as an example of how “monies that could have gone to Kyiv” had been wasted on “fool errors”. The present writer strongly disagrees with this assessment. Yes, the W.R.A.N.C.I.D. committee’s own report on Survivor Series 19 admits their “failure to practice sufficient standards or gain worthwhile perspective.” But they laid the groundwork. The present writer believes that by bringing contextual knowledge (i.e. “lived experience” from the time and place) to bear upon the incident, he has added meaningful dimension to a rare and baffling bit of American television.
2005, that magic moment, tried and acquitted by 2015
To summarize and conclude:
The mass media mindset almost always simplifies; it proves less and less capable of considering nuance. As of 2015 the gatekeepers still approved of some slurs, when spoken in a work of fiction, but they were already streamlining their understanding of vasty different situations. They interpreted goofy Mr. McMahon saying a soft -a no-no word to wigga John Cena as if it were exactly the same as DiCaprio snarling hard Rs as a slave-driving villain. Wildly different character motivations and authorial designs don’t matter—and they may not even register in the new public (semi-)consciousness. All that might matter is the veneer of fakeness (acting) as well as the okay given by the adjacent [B]lack actors (Booker and Sharmell in McMahon’s case, Jaime Foxx in DiCaprio’s11). The excusals given in 2015 do not take chronal context into account either: It doesn’t matter to Fox Sports that McMahon’s big no-no came at the height of wiggadom and constituted a plucky jab at it, whereas DiCaprio portrayed a straight-forward 1800s racist caricature. Because both men were just acting, both instances are considered fine. Okay, fine—but they’re not the same. Yet by and large the 2015 media, evaluating McMahon’s utterance in light of the Hogan scandal, found none of these internal differences worth noting.
But contextual details should matter to anyone interested in understanding cultural change. It is not as though the no-no word was a-okay on pro-wrestling television through 2005. Rather, until 2005 the utterance would have been simply and irredeemably low-class. Only in 2005, due to the broad ascendance of wiggadom (exemplified by John Cena) would the word have been speakable to any desirable effect. Pro wrestling had always trafficked in shock value. But prior to 2005 the shock of saying the no-no word on live TV would not have surpassed the one-note simplicity and stupidity of doing such an ugly thing. That’s why WWE didn’t do it until then, because beforehand the word had been too simple—and it was simply low-class. The rising wave of 2005 “White Negro” subculture, however, through its stupendously awkward slang pilferage, allowed for a specific iteration of the word (soft -a version) to attain—temporarily—a playfulness. It may have still been low-class, and of course it was shocking, but right there and then it was also weird, nuanced, and even—to a mass, mixed audience—funny.
Afterward, the window closed. We entered a new age in which it would become difficult even for an actor like DiCaprio, playing a very different character from himself, to say the word even in the context of the Old West, even with the blessing of his [B]lack costar.12 But for Vince McMahon to say it, as some sort of “joke”? After 2005? Or, good God, later than 2015? The question would become: Why would he even want to say it? What does it say about him that he’d want to say it? Why would anyone [W]hite want to be associated with the no-no word? White actors don’t want to say that word anymore. It becomes almost unthinkable—not a good idea. Let’s stop talking about it, please—it’s making me uncomfortable.
But 2005 was a sort of Twilight Zone for the no-no word. At least in this particular context—for one time only in mass media—the word was very edgy but still stupid, offensive but humorous, transgressive but typical. It seems unimaginable now, that this happened. It did happen. They planned it, and it happened that one time.
In 2021 the WWE Network became the purview of NBC’s Peacock streaming service. The archive of Survivor Series 2005 was then edited to remove the segment.13 We were well out of the Twilight Zone by then; we had entered a starker reality.
______
This ends the second installment of the Two N-Words (Two N-Bombs) essay collection. On Sunday another chapter will be published. Currently the multimedia and licensing rights to the series are being negotiated with a name-brand conglomerate. Merchandising is being lined up and a weekday animated serial adapting the work is being scheduled. Fans can expect “2NW(2NB)” lunchboxes, action figures, and a McDonald’s Happy Meal promo for the back-to-school season.
Full text of Mailer’s essay available here: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-white-negro-fall-1957
I was surprised to find so many negative appraisals of the essay cataloged on Wikipedia. The main entry refers to Mailer having received “criticism from James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Allen Ginsberg.” Further: “Jean Malaquais and Ned Polsky accused Mailer of romanticizing violence, and Laura Adams highlighted the consequences of Mailer’s testing his ‘violence as catharsis’ theory in real life when he nearly killed his second wife Adele by stabbing her twice with a penknife.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Negro.
Baldwin, James. Collected Essays, New York: Library of America, 1998, p. 272.
Comments taken from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APrPDwUosrQ>.
This comment taken from <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Y6DWZ8yg0>.
See the above link again, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WigcMVtG14>, “Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t want to say N word”.