Are we really out here saying Tajiri didn’t have a good WWE career?
Asuka? She’s had a great run in WWE.
Shinsuke is always on TV.
Not everyone can be booked to the top. Asuka has for her division, but I don’t think a lot of them have been booked poorly.
No, what's actually happening is a bunch of folks are saying that these systems are inherently stacked against minorities and have been all along, and a lot of folks are replying saying 'one black guy won the belt last week and is super over so this argument is BULLSHIT'. This is the 'I have one black friend' equivalent for this argument.
There is a fundamental lack of understanding about what is being discussed here from a lot of people. Nobody is saying that absolutely no people of colour are ever successful or ever have been successful.
Asuka has had a great run in WWE! She's also the only Japanese woman to hold the Raw women's title, or the Smackdown women's title. Sasha, Bianca and Nia are the only other women of colour to hold either of those belts, the rest being a killer's row of white women. Asuka succeeding does not mean that Japanese talent, or even east Asian talent in general, get a fair shot at this.
Nakamura is always on TV, sure, including when he was in an angle where Jinder Mahal - another man of colour, who was given the belt pretty much specifically so that WWE could say 'look how racist we
aren't' - basically shouted 'ching chong ching' at him. And you know Jinder didn't write that f***ing promo. And then Jinder won the match! Sorry, matches. There were multiple matches.
How many wrestlers who are not from the US, or at the very least, would not be able to pass as white Americans if they didn't speak and their hometown was kayfabed, manage to get through a WWE career without at some point being a foreign heel?
How many Japanese wrestlers
alone have been given some variation on the 'they can't speak English' or 'they yell Japanese and we pretend we understand or laugh because of the funny foreign noises'? Tajiri did it, Asuka's promos have been basically that on numerous occasions, Kai En Tai did it in multiple ways throughout their runs...
The WWE title, which most of the time is considered the most valuable championship in the company and the company's history, has been held by 11 people of colour out of the 53 men who have held it, unless you count Inoki beating Backlund, which would make it 12 out of 54. Of those, a few are Latinx/Hispanic, several are Pacific Islanders (one of whom was
pretending to be Japanese, which is just racism double-dipping), two are African American and one is Ghanian. Those last three all only happened in the last couple of years.
The world is racist, institutionally. Wrestling, even more so. WWE? Even more so. Pro-wrestling is so multicultural as it is that WWE should get zero respect whatsoever for pushing talent from Japan or Mexico because of how influential those countries are, and yet they still manage to grossly under-represent both wrestling groups. WWE isn't just institutionally racist, it is
especially racist, even in 2022, even in pro wrestling.