First, I’d like to caveat this with the fact that I dont know who ACH is, never seen him wrestle, so i have no bias towards or against him. I also think WWE are a very morally corrupt company, what with their refusal to release unused talent, and their Saudi dealings.
However, I think ACH has been out of order in this situation. I am white, so I dont necessarily face that kind of racism, but I am Muslim and I have faced a lot of racism and racist remarks (or islamophobic or whatever the right term is) and they’ve hurt, but I’ve developed an understanding of when something is intentionally offensive, or just an oversight.
The shirt design did have racial connotations, and it shouldn’t have made it that far. However, I do think that it’s easily possible that that is just an oversight by the design team, especially when you consider every single shirt is a plain black one with a small logo. The only difference is, because ACH smiles a lot, they made it a smile. That simple. Could someone in the pipeline have been more aware and pointed out the issue? Yes. Is it completely racist to not have someone in this clearly small pipeline of probably a few people from the main merchandising department who work on NXT merch, who is aware of the connotations? Of course it isn’t racist.
His remarks that WWE doesn’t care about black wrestlers is silly, because until a few weeks ago their top champion was black. There have been situations before where they have been racist (Booker t, Vince saying n word) but he knew that before he joined, and still signed for the money.
At the end of the day, it’s a shirt that he approved, which is at face value not offensive, and only when you look into it does it begin to have racial connotations, and he’s spoken out against the company in a way more aggressive and immature way than he should have, because he wasnt getting booked on NXT TV. At least that’s how I’ve read it. I’m not saying that WWE are blameless, but I’m just saying what hes done is bang out of order for any employee at any company, short of them internally racially abusing him. Not to mention that stupid comment about Lethal.