The Nation of Domination, originally a kind of catch-all destination for mismatched wrestlers such as heavyset high-flyer D-Lo Brown and champion weightlifter Mark Henry, also launched the career of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. The Rock, who had faltered as a second-generation good guy, emerged as a mega-celebrity simply by being an outsized version of himself. Instead of merely portraying the part of a craven separatist second-in-command, The Rock subverted that paradigm and launched a long and successful career as a massively charismatic catchphrase-deliverer with crossover appeal.

But even though he was the son of Rocky Johnson, a black bodybuilder who was one of the top WWE superstars of the early 1980s, The Rock presented himself as a post-racial figure. He had reinvented himself, to be sure, but he wasn’t a mash-up or a signification of anything else; he was sui generis, and it was fitting that he abandoned the Nation of Domination to create his own distinct legend.

Which brings us back to The New Day, a group that, new or not, are very much indebted to the old, namely the WWE’s history of mismanaging black talent. The success of The Rock didn’t stop poor stablemate Mark Henry, perhaps the greatest athlete to ever set foot in a WWE ring, from being labeled “Sexual Chocolate” and forced to pantomime vomiting after “accidentally” receiving oral sex from a transsexual (this really happened). It didn’t stop the fans from having to endure hours of the Godfather, whose gimmick consisted of “pimping hos,” or R-Truth rapping his way to glory while occasionally forgetting where he was or what he was doing.



The New Day initially weren’t expected to do much, either. Kingston and Langston had held lower-level singles titles, and Woods had worked as a second for R-Truth, but none of the trio had done anything to suggest they were mega-stars in the making. In today’s WWE, tag teams are usually where moderately successful singles wrestlers go to either revive their careers or disappear quietly, and the initial packaging of this trio amounted to more of the same. The group, who together delivered a message of obnoxious positivity in a gospel style, initially received the same overwhelmingly negative crowd response that The Rock had; in both cases, chants of “you suck” rained down on the performers.