WWE star Xavier Woods was a recent guest on Twitch Rivals to where the New Day member spoke about racial inequality, and learning from his parents at a young age the challenges he would have to face in life. Highlights can be found below.
Learning from his father that people would judge him because of how he looked:
My dad told me when I was much younger — when I was a tiny child — he told me there was going to be people that don’t like me purely because of the way that I look. Purely because of the color of my skin. And, unfortunately, there’s not always a lot that you can do to change someone’s mind about you. So he explained that to me, I didn’t really understand, I didn’t get it as a kid. Then, throughout my life he always made sure that I understood I had to work twice as hard as some people in order to get treated the same. In some situations, not even the same.
Working twice as hard and presenting himself as nonthreatening:
When you do everything you possibly can, you educate yourself, you learn to be an athlete, you learn to play an instrument, you’re in AP classes. You’re doing everything you can and you’re doing it because you want to because you want to learn these things. You want to understand these things, but then at its core — I realized through conversation the other day — because of the way things are, my entire life I’ve had to spend trying to figure out how to present myself as nonthreatening.
Realizing it was for survival:
If you haven’t been in that situation or understood something like that — it’s a lot. It’s a lot because even though someone might hate me, the onus is on me to deal with it. Not on them. There’s no pressure on them to deal with their hate and their pain. While in my house, as a child, I had to have this talk, I had to get this talk, my parents had to give me this information. Not so I could be smarter, not so that I could do better, it’s so I could stay alive. That was the first goal in our house. Survive amongst people who might not want you to survive.
Check out the full interview below. (H/T and transcribed by Wrestling Inc.
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