The feel-good viral hero behind #ItsAboveMe has been canceled
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The feel-good viral hero behind #ItsAboveMe has been canceled

Brooke Sjoberg—

craignofridayy/Twitter (Fair Use) Kris Seavers

Hotel employee Craig Brooks’ viral fame stumbles when users find a history of transphobia.

The Black hotel employee who went viral Sunday in a video for denying a woman service after she used a racial slur has come under fire for previous transphobic tweets.

After gaining a moment of internet fame from his recorded interaction with the woman, Craig Brooks’ (@craignofridayy) original tweet containing the video was replied to with screenshots of his old tweets. One of these replies is from @allanbrocka, creator of the animated Logo series Rick and Steve.

“Holy shit! This guy really really despises trans people,” @allanbrocka said.

Brooks has at least 13 explicitly anti-trans tweets that users dug up. His response to the rapid resurfacing of his tweets, which range from two years to one month in age, was, “You dug all that up did I lie though?” That tweet was deleted on Tuesday morning, however. We reached out to him for comment.

“I apologized for the way I acted in the past and yesterday about the Trans community,” Brooks tweeted Tuesday afternoon. “I’ve talked to figures of the Trans community and they’ve shown light and are helping me understand.”

Some users who had previously rallied around Brooks’ actions as a new way to deal with disagreeable people in the workplace tweeted about their opinions of him changing. Others, however, prefer to isolate the two incidents and celebrate the #ItsAboveMe meme and catchphrase that he coined while also condemning the transphobic tweets.

“damn, why you have to diminish a group of people like that?” @soriano_xtina said. “you expect people to respect your sexuality and race, but you can’t respect others the same way. maybe you need to check in best western.”

 

@B_Paul06 falls into the latter camp, acknowledging that Brooks went through something which was objectively bad, but said he does not approve of the viewpoint he expressed of trans people.

“This is why, among many reasons, this notion of “insta-fame” is problematic,” @B_Paul06 said. “What happened to him was wrong. Full stop. With that, his pursuit of popularity is awash with aggressive anti-trans bias and gets NO love from me. All my skinfolk ain’t my kinfolk…”

A popular response to the @allanbrocka’s tweet, which was shared by @darrylstephens, is a GIF of Tyra Banks from America’s Next Top Model expressing disappointment with the quote, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”

“He’s a trans-antagonist bigot and we don’t support people like him,” @darrylstephens said. “Sorry. It’s below me.”

Brooks was previously covered this week by the Daily Dot when his video initially went viral.

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Brooke Sjoberg

Brooke Sjoberg

Brooke Sjoberg is an editorial intern for the Daily Dot studying journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the Daily Texan's Life and Arts Editor and an editorial intern for Texas Connect magazine.

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