You know who else is really racist? Wrestling.

Over at the Reparations Atlantic Monthly there’s a piece up about how racist the WWE is because they’ve never had a black WWE world champion. Which is slightly problematic because of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. But the point here isn’t just another example for the “media ignorance” tackboard. It’s that the actual history of race and wrestling is pretty interesting.

For example, in David Shoemaker’s excellent history of pro wrestling, The Squared Circle, he talks about how, for decades, promoters would only cast black wrestlers as babyfaces. That’s because they knew audiences would accept them as faces. But they worried that if a black heel made too much heat–that is to say, was too good as a villain–then audiences might riot.

As a consequence, a sign of real racial progress in wrestling was when promoters felt comfortable enough with audiences to cast black wrestlers as heels.