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On the Death of Hulk Hogan, Some Thoughts of Mine [1]

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Date: 2025-07-25

So, I was scrolling through reddit earlier today (don’t judge; swamps can be quite scenic if you have waders and know where to put your feet so you don’t sink into the mire, and can get past the smell), and something struck me: seeing the ways everyone reacted to Hulk Hogan (real name Terry Bollea) dying today.

There were some posts mourning his death, but it won’t surprise you to know my feed is curated so it tilts to the left. As a result, I saw a couple other trends. Over the course of the day, I could group the answers into three broad types:

1. Genuine “so sad about the Hulkster’s death” posts.

2. People pointing out the fact he was a bigot and rolling their eyes at the idea of mourning him.

3. People gleefully celebrating that this hateful man is dead and likely in hell now.

What was interesting wasn’t that most reactions could be grouped into these three, what was interesting was how tightly people’s choice of which of those three to feel correlated with race and/or political leaning.

Consider this something of a preview for future “Whiteness Wednesday” posts, because you can probably guess where this is going.

Normally, this is where I’d shamelessly plug my Ko-Fi link and ask for donations. And I will, in future diaries, so don’t think you’ve heard the last of me rattling my digital tin cup for alms. However, I’m currently reworking my Ko-Fi page. Due to a lot of personal life stress and difficulties (not just with me, but seemingly my entire immediate family at the same time), I’ve barely managed to do anything outside of my paying job for a month. So, I’m planning an August relaunch of sorts: the Ko-Fi page will have new monthly tiers available in addition to one-time donations, so you can have the option to subscribe to me.

I’m still working on subscriber benefits, and tweaking them now, but the current shortlist of benefits for regular subscribers currently includes:

- getting my graphic novel updates a day earlier than everyone else

- access to member’s only content, including monthly (possibly weekly, depending on time/production involved) cooking and recipe videos, additional member’s only area articles, serialized fiction stories posted for members only, and a monthly newsletter. Still figuring things out, and as I work on adding new content to what I am producing the perks and tiers will likely be subject to change.

Feel free to leave comments on your thoughts about being a subscriber: how much you’d be willing to spend each month for content like I produce, how many updates/what kind of updates to be “worth it”, rewards or ideas that would interest you, feedback on what I’ve said so far, etc.

So, back to this story’s focus: the overwhelming majority of each category’s responses correlated neatly with their other cohorts. People in group 1 were most likely politically uninterested: not conservative, not necessarily liberal (or lightly so), by and large White and male, and skewing under 40: people generally too White and distant from politics to care or maybe even know about Hogan’s racist past and either some fond memories of Hulk Hogan or just a vague sense of “that’s a shame someone famous died”. I’m assuming more conservative or older cohorts (like Gen X, who formed the bulk of the Hulkamaniacs) would have been even sadder about this news, but I tend not to frequent their haunts so their posts don’t really show up in my feed as a general rule. So, as it was, this was a sort of tepid “aww, dang” mourning: sad, but not TOO sad. Unsurprisingly, this also seemed to be comprised primarily of people who don’t know much, don’t care to find out, and are probably White.

Group 2 was markedly the response in White liberal spaces: some of the usual comedic left-leaning spots I was in were particularly cutting, but overall the tone of “good riddance to racist rubbish” was quite pronounced in these places. It wasn’t THAT spiteful or angry, more “don’t bother crying over this asshole, dude was a racist jerk” energy. This cohort was clearly more liberal, more educated about Hogan’s past (or just more outraged about his behavior than the apathetics in group 1 who knew and didn’t really care), and more clearly White.

And Group 3 was practically synonymous with, for want of a better term, “Black Reddit” (maybe it IS called that, but I haven’t seen anyone use the term yet). Now, Black Reddit is a great place, as you can probably guess if you’ve ever spent time on Black Twitter, and it’s not EXCLUSIVELY Black people either (though most of us who aren’t Black have the good sense to keep quiet for the most part because we know when to contribute and when to listen, so we do a LOT more listening), but it’s got a certain vibe for sure. Black Reddit does not suffer fools, though, and Hogan’s bigotry was met with the kind of scathing, burning reaction only Black America can deliver to an old dead bigot. My point is, of course, that while this cohort wasn’t exclusively Black People (as I was there, natch), the people who weren’t Black were the sort that are typically welcome at the cookout, so to speak, and thus very much singing from the same choir book. This cohort had the least amount of sympathy, in that the kindest words I saw were “Well, he’s looking up at us now *prayer hands emoji*”.

I found this interesting, because it reminded me of when Hogan’s horrifically racist tirade about his daughter came out years ago. I remembered some time after being at work when the topic of being Hulkamaniacs when we were kids came up. I don’t recall the exact words of the conversation, but my coworker said something to the effect of “Well, I mean he said some awful things, but do you think he’s really racist, or-’

At the time, I cut him off to say, “Yeah, he’s racist. That was beyond just a flub or a misunderstood comment, there’s really no defending what he said,” My coworker agreed, but I could tell it disappointed and pained him to admit that about the Hulkster. Hell, I get it: it sucks whenever a celebrity we like turns out to be a garbage person. It’s distressing to look back at your fond memories and see them tainted by the off-screen antics of one terrible person (earlier this month I saw a lot of similar reactions, incidentally, about The Cosby Show on Black Reddit: a lot of bittersweet feelings about enjoying Theo, but also feeling uncomfortable seeing Bill Cosby smiling on set over and over).

But, the thing is, this is a big problem with Whiteness in this country: too often, we let our squeamishness about calling out racism cow us into silence. “Racist” is treated like a dirty word, a terrible smear that we should be loathe to put on one another (I’ll note, as a lifelong white person, there’s nowhere near this much caution about labeling other people racist against whites as there is about calling out our own as racist against non-whites), to be avoided unless and until overwhelming evidence to the contrary should arise.

“Woke until proven bigoted beyond a reasonable doubt in the court of public opinion”, if you will.

Now, reluctance to call out misbehavior in celebrities is not something unique to the White community, or men either for that matter, but something most, if not all Whites have experienced (if they’re being honest) is this exact same reluctance to call out their own family for this behavior.

The Black community may be wrestling with some tough conversations about the ways some celebrities manage to use their wealth, power, and status in the community to get away with horrible crimes as we’ve seen with R Kelly and P Diddy, but I somehow doubt there’s the same sort of reluctance to keep quiet if someone’s elderly uncle at the Thanksgiving table starts talking about trafficking girls and drugging them, for instance.

However, the racist White uncle or aunt or grandparent spouting off bigoted nonsense and hate at the dinner table while everyone timidly tries to keep the peace by ignoring it and talking around it is so commonplace, it’s a freaking trope at this point. Just do a search for “racist uncle at thanksgiving” and go nuts. Unlike the Black Community, where presumably most families do not have a multi platinum sex pest asking someone to pass the mac and cheese, it’s common (or at least was, up until Trumpism and MAGA started driving a very real wedge into some White families) for us to have such a relative and try to keep the peace.

Here, with Hulk Hogan, I saw it playing out writ large: people who were most fine with ignoring racism were ignoring that Hulk Hogan was racist. White people who knew racism is bad were happy to point it out and then move along, mainly just wanting to make sure the record was clear. It was only people who understood the vile and destructive nature of racism by being its victims who truly got just how evil this behavior was.

The thing about bigotry is that it’s more than hate: it’s condemning millions of people with a single stroke to be subhumans and worthy of suffering. If I call a single person a bad name, I’ve insulted them. If I call them a racial slur, I’ve insulted EVERYONE ON THE PLANET who shares that trait. I’ve spoken aloud my belief that they deserve to be dehumanized, degraded, and treated as less than me.

Being a bigot is saying, in no uncertain terms, “I’m better than you, and even the lowest of my kind is better than the best of yours, and you should know your place.”

I’m not surprised the people who were dehumanized like that were the only ones who really got how awful a heart you have to have to believe such things. But, I’m also not surprised that so many White people have tepid or even genuinely kind words at these times. White privilege includes being able to prioritize your happy feelings over other peoples’ suffering. Like my coworker back then, who really wanted an out to keep loving the Hulkster after everything he did, White people too often want desperately to end these difficult conversations or avoid them altogether. It’s almost a desperate, silent pleading: “Can’t you PLEASE just at least pretend not to be so awful so I can have my cake and eat it too? Can’t you throw me a bone by at least doing and saying these things out of sight and mind so I can plausibly deny it?”

Right now, if you’re one of Mr. Bollea’s family or friends, you have my sympathies: I know how painful it is to lose a loved one. But for the rest of us, at least mostly White folks, now is a good chance to speak honestly about him as a flawed person, to not simply whitewash his legacy in the name of not speaking ill of the dead. It’s definitely a good time to think about the sort of legacy a man like that deserves after revealing so much hate in his heart and how painful that experience was for millions of people all over the world (some of whom, one assumes, might even have been devoted Hulkamaniacs themselves at one point, since wrestling and patriotism and pageantry are not solely for White conservative males after all). Hulk Hogan was one of the biggest celebrities in this country for a long time, and remained a household name long after. The impact of his words and deeds is outsized (to say nothing of the millions of Black Americans who were subjected to his dehumanizing words whether they liked it or not as the story played out on TV and on the internet, over and over again). Their pain is as valid as anyone else’s joy; they deserve to be acknowledged and legitimized as much as those he touched in happier ways. That is something we in the White community often fail to think about when selfishly prioritizing our happy feelings and memories: what it was like to be literally anyone else but a White person who heard those words, saw those actions, and had to live with it. It wasn’t US the Hulkster was talking about, we have to consciously think about it and put ourselves in their shoes. And we simply don’t.

I’ve never been a fan of what my father referred to as “sainthood by death”: the posthumous glowing reviews everyone gets within seconds of their heart stopping. In that spirit, I’m not going to say if Hulk Hogan was a good man, or a bad man, but he was a man who said some truly awful things that hurt a lot of people, kept some very questionable company, and he never fully made amends for it. That’s the legacy he earned, a lot more fairly than the glowing one some people have been pushing since his death. I would advise anyone who wants to praise this man to re-read what he said about Black men and ask yourself how you would feel if it was you, or your son or nephew or cousin he was talking about like that? How would you feel when people started mourning him, talking about how great he was, and you can still remember the pain of how he spoke about you and your family, your loved ones (for indeed, he was talking about ALL Black men at once)?

I daresay if you think about that for even a few minutes, you’ll find yourself coming up with some choice words for it.

[END]
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