When Ableism and Racism Collide
By: Howland Crowe
Tags: Covid 19, Ableism, Letitia Wright, Vaccines, Racism

Content Warning: For posterity, the following article contains uncensored mention of an ableist slur and graphic description of the effects of syphilis.

Before I could submit this article for publication, it appears Black Panther star Letitia Wright has deleted her Twitter and Instagram accounts following online backlash for a video she shared. I suppose that’s a frustratingly apt metaphor for what I’m about to discuss.

Letitia Wright’s original December 4 tweets, now deleted along with her account.

On December 4th, Letitia Wright shared an episode of Rig Nation’s YouTube series “On The Table” titled “COVID-19 VACCINE, SHOULD WE TAKE IT?” on her Twitter page. YouTube has since removed the episode for violating its terms and conditions, but because the Internet is written in ink, it really isn’t hard to find. Rig Nation’s creator, Tomi Arayomi, has a Facebook page and has even offered to let people watch the video — provided they download his app, of course.

Who is Tomi Arayomi and what is Rig Nation?

The About page on his website is completely blank apart from pages titled “Invite” (which contains a form to fill to invite Arayomi’s “ministry” to speak at events), “The Founder” (also blank), and “National Prophecies” (which only contains four YouTube videos). The home page reads:

“What is SOAP? The School of Apostles and Prophets (SOAP) started in 2007 as a mission to ‘train people to be prophets and prophets to be people’. Today, more than a decade later, the SOAP curriculum has advanced and developed. The focus is on establishing the ministry of the prophetic in the earth, developing the individual in their prophetic gifting and raising up leaders to pioneer new wineskin churches. We believe the apostolic and prophetic mandates to build, transform and establish God’s Kingdom agenda in the Nations.”

On his YouTube channel, the video Arayomi chose to welcome viewers to the channel is titled “2021 Prophecy | An angel visited me on rosh hashanah,” where he is referred to in writing as “Prophet Tomi Arayomi.” He talks about how he had prophetic visions of things like Ruth Bader Ginsberg dying. He has been making videos for at least ten years, with the oldest video being from 2010. It shows him singing at a church service while the words “Apostle Tomi Arayomi” and “Kingdom Soil Ministries” grace the bottom of the screen. He didn’t post videos very frequently until about three years ago.

These videos didn’t become overtly sensationalistic until within the last year. I looked out for the videos with signs of “clickbait” qualities that conspiracy theorists commonly use: all capital letters in video titles, thumbnail graphics with sensationalist claims and bold colors like red.

The screenshots below are the result.

To sum up, the man is anti-abortion, anti-“P.C. culture,” a decidedly fundamentalist Christian who believes evolution is a hoax, a Boris Johnson supporter, probably a Donald Trump supporter, a conspiracy theorist, and definitely not a fucking “prophet,” no matter how insistent he is on the title.

I have no interest in downloading this man’s shitty app just so I can watch what I presume will be an hour-long video about the vaccines being tested to treat coronavirus, but I can glean from news sources what Arayomi said in the video.

He presented no medical evidence and admitted he was not a doctor. “I don’t understand vaccines medically.” He claimed to be a “big skeptic of needles and vaccinations in general” and hadn’t decided on whether he would be taking any vaccine that became available because he took issue with the fact that one of the alleged ingredients was luciferase because of the notion it was named after Lucifer. I’m not even kidding. He complained about being “peer-pressured” into getting flu shots as a kid, wondered whether vaccines containing animal DNA would turn people into “chimeras” from the Bible, and wondered whether vaccines could put metal in your body that can be picked up by 5G signals. He’s also a transphobe, to boot.

Tweet containing a clip of Tomi Arayomi saying transphobic shit.

So, that’s a lot of bullshit to unpack and Letitia Wright following this guy for medical information is… concerning.

Tweet addressing misinformation about luciferase.

Needless to say, reactions on Twitter were swift and critical. Some people arguing with Wright were doctors or medically knowledgeable people trying to educate her on why the video was full of shit.

When Wright claimed she was being “cancelled” for “thinking for [herself],” author Roxane Gay wrote, “Thinking for yourself doesn’t mean you’re right. And you aren’t cancelled. But damn. Promoting anti-vaccine propaganda and shrouding it in intellectual curiosity is asinine. And dangerous.” Even Don Cheadle, Wright’s co-star from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, chimed in, saying Arayomi “sounded crazy.” He also said he would take his concerns to Wright “off twitter.”

Wright isn’t without her defenders, however. Laranzo Dacres of the YouTube channel The Black Experience Japan implied Wright was being attacked for her Christian faith, an argument I won’t even entertain in light of her co-star Chris Pratt’s defenders saying the same thing about him a month ago.

The more worrying but unfortunately understandable criticisms and defenses, however, are in direct conflict with each other. Some have accused Wright’s anti-vaxxer stance of ableism. Wright’s defenders have accused her critics of racism. The problem is both stances are valid because both are rooted in trauma.