Letitia Wright deletes controversial tweet: “My intention was not to hurt anyone”

Black Panther star Letitia Wright goes through a round of cancelling after tweeting an anti-vax video. We’re now in the walk-it-back stage, after the backlash.

If you’re just joining us, Black Panther star Letitia Wright (Shuri) is in the midst of a cancellation scandal. Here’s what happened:

Yesterday, Wright tweeted out an hour-long video from the Invazion Media network, featuring minister Tomi Arayomi discussing, among other things, how he’s “always been skeptical” of vaccines, with Wright seemingly endorsing his statements with a “prayer” emoji.

This, of course, comes at a time when coronavirus hospitalizations and deaths are setting records in the United States, with a vaccine thankfully around the corner. Anti-vaccination thought, labeled by the World Health Organization as one of the top ten global health threats last year, has been growing in popularity over the past couple of decades, and it doesn’t take a genius to see how it could be particularly harmful at this moment in time.

The rest of the video seems pretty off the wall, with Arayomi reminding viewers that he is not a doctor and doesn’t “understand vaccines medically” before going on to talk about the “the jelly bit of the cell” and “some kind of nanotech.” He rails against fact-checkers, calls Dr. Anthony Fauci “the pope of COVID,” and throws in some anti-trans stuff for good measure.

This stuff was pretty much destined not to play well on Twitter, and indeed, many people called Wright out for spreading misinformation. She engaged with a lot of them, too, even liking tweets calling for Disney to cancel Black Panther 2, where she’s expected to take on a lead role following the death of star Chadwick Boseman.

Eventually Wright deleted her tweet supporting the video and issued an…well, take a look and you can decide what it is:

I dunno if anyone thought she intended to hurt people with her tweet? I kind of doubt that will appease anyone looking for an apology for spreading misinformation, but the internet is a strange and mysterious place, so who knows.

We’re pretty deep into the standard cancellation cycle here. We’ve got the initial controversy, the blowback, the defiance and now the half-hearted walk-back. Anger, bargaining, despair and acceptance may or may not follow.

I’m sure the PR people at Disney are just loving this.

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h/t The A.V. Club