WWE may have thought it was just cashing in on Trick Williams’ “Lemon Pepper Steppers” catchphrase, but fans took one look at the new shirt and saw something a whole lot uglier. The design puts Trick’s signature white boot in the middle of a circle of fried chicken wings, and Twitter immediately started questioning how nobody inside WWE stopped to think about the racial stereotype that image could invoke.
The shirt hit WWE Shop with “Lemon Pepper Steppers” plastered across the back and the boot-and-wings graphic on the front. On paper, the joke is obvious — lemon pepper wings plus “steppers” — but once people actually saw the finished product, the merch became a punching bag. Public Enemies Podcast tagged WWE Shop and basically asked what everyone else was thinking.
“.@WWEShop what we doing man??”
That post included a reaction clip, and the replies only got worse from there. Meelz couldn’t believe the shirt survived the approval process.
“That Trick Williams shirt is crazy. How did it make it past literally anyone.”
JDfromNY didn’t bother dressing it up.
“This is hideous.”
Then the backlash crossed over from “this shirt is ugly” to “how did WWE not see the racial problem here?” One fan reacted to the fried chicken imagery by saying the merch might as well contain a racial slur.
“The merch might as well say ‘n***’ atp.”*
That’s where this stopped being just another bad wrestling shirt getting roasted online. Fried chicken has long been used as a racist stereotype against Black people in the United States, so seeing a Black WWE star’s merchandise built around a giant pile of wings was enough for some fans to accuse WWE of being completely tone-deaf.
There’s also an obvious explanation for how WWE got there. “Lemon Pepper Steppers” is Trick Williams’ own phrase, and the design literally turns the words into a picture — lemon pepper wings for the “lemon pepper” and the white boot for the “steppers.” Nobody needs a decoder ring to understand what the graphic was supposed to be.
The problem is that fans aren’t looking at what WWE meant to do. They’re looking at what actually ended up on the shirt. That distinction is why the backlash blew up so quickly. WWE could have slapped the phrase on a shirt a hundred different ways, but somebody chose fried chicken as the centerpiece for merchandise attached to one of the company’s biggest Black stars, and now fans are asking how that decision made it through multiple levels of approval.
Do you think fans are right to call Trick Williams’ “Lemon Pepper Steppers” shirt racially tone-deaf, or is this just a literal visual gag that got taken the wrong way? Let us know your thoughts and feedback in the comments.
