Billy Gunn 'So Tired Of Hearing About' D-Generation X Impersonating The Nation Of Domination During WWE Attitude Era

Billy Gunn has claimed he is "so tired of hearing about" the controversial segment from the July 6, 1998 episode of Monday Night Raw when D-Generation X impersonated the Nation of Domination.

The segment, which took place during the on-screen feud between the two factions, saw many of the DX members wear blackface, including Triple H (now WWE Chief Content Officer Paul Levesque) as The Rock, Road Dogg as D'Lo Brown, X-Pac as Mark Henry, and Billy Gunn as The Godfather.

The segment is one of the most controversial in WWE history and has been criticised over the years to the point it was removed from the WWE Network version of that episode of Raw in 2021. The episode containing the segment has yet to be uploaded to the WWE Raw vault on Netflix.

Billy Gunn, however, told Denise Salcedo that the segment "wasn't outlandish" in 1998 and none of the Nation of Domination members had an issue with how the segment played out.

"I guess the one we've been talking about here lately because for some reason it seems to be a thing is when we dressed up as the Nation. So that seems to be the big controversial thing that nobody understands that I'm so tired of hearing about. But it wasn't outlandish. Now you couldn't do it. Now, not a chance in hell could you ever get away with it. Back then it was a different time," Gunn stated.

"We were asked to do it. Nobody that we imitated had a problem with it because everybody that we imitated had a hand in helping us dress up like them. People have to understand that. It was a different time. If at any time, if any one of them would have had a problem with it, we wouldn’t have done it, but nobody did because it was just all done in fun and like a sense of humour. But nowadays, no, I wouldn't touch that."

Mark Henry, though, previously noted on Inside The Ropes that The Rock did have an issue with the segment, although it appears he didn't express those concerns with members of D-Generation X.

Henry stated:

"We knew and Dwayne didn’t like it from the beginning. He was like, ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like people dressing up like us. I don’t like people putting blackface on.’ He didn’t like it. At that time, I was like, ‘We’re in entertainment, man. It ain’t bothering me.’ He was like, ‘If ya’ll wanna do it, then we’ll do it, but I just don’t like it. I’m just letting you know.’ Dwayne never liked it. I didn’t care because I just looked at it as part of the work because I knew the people and I knew they weren’t racist.

"Like X-Pac, he didn’t know until probably like a month or two after, they started taking heat. Like, ‘Man, ya’ll dressed up like Black people. You put makeup on to look like that.’ He was like, ‘What is the big deal? We’re playing. We were acting like our guys.’ They were like, ‘You ever heard of a minstrel show?’ He was like, “I don’t even know what that is.’ I explained to him what people used to do after the slavery times, dress up and put black on and make big red lips and act like the characterisation of what they thought a Black person is. He cried. He had no idea about that history because America don’t teach the nasty history. They just sweep it under the rug.

"Then this guy finds out that what he did was like some of the worst sh*t you can do to people. It hurt him. I told him, I said, ‘Man, look. I know who you were…I didn’t say you were racist. I said that that situation was deemed racist.’ They gonna fight that for the rest of their careers, for their lives, because it was a little bit distasteful.

"It took for people that I know outside of wrestling to say, ‘Man, you shouldn’t have done that. You shouldn’t have let them do that.’ I was like, ‘What was I supposed to do? Just say I’m not gonna go to work?’ So it was complicated and we all learned a valuable lesson from it on both sides.'"

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