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@Tsunami_Cisse/Twitter

YouTube star tweets and deletes video of his Black cousin ‘Peanut’ acting as a stool

He deleted the video after receiving backlash.

 

Eilish O'Sullivan

IRL

Posted on May 18, 2019   Updated on May 20, 2021, 12:21 pm CDT

YouTuber Cole LaBrant is facing backlash for posting (and then deleting) a video of his Black cousin acting as a stool for a little white girl to stand on.

LaBrant tweeted the video on Thursday and deleted it on Friday. It can still be seen on Twitter after others saved it.

https://twitter.com/Tsunami_Cisse/status/1129386956968718337

In the video, his adopted cousin, whose real name is Truman LaBrant but who is called “Peanut,” can be seen getting on his hands and knees underneath a swing. A girl then uses him as a stool by stepping on his back to get on the swing. Someone can be heard saying, “Oh my goodness, sweet boy” in the video.

“This is my adopted cousin, Peanut, helping girls get off and back on swings. We all need to be more like Peanut,” LaBrant wrote in the tweet.

People were quick to call the YouTuber out for racism, including the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr.

“When many of us see your video, we are reminded of the dehumanization of our ancestors depicted in this photo. This dehumanization of Black people still exists in many forms today,” Bernice King, an activist and the daughter of MLK., wrote on Twitter. “The video you shared isn’t cute to us. It’s not cute for a Black boy to be a stool.”

Others agreed with King.

https://twitter.com/JoeyGee876/status/1129274195010105344

https://twitter.com/MrsMilling1021/status/1129655474155118593

https://twitter.com/c3yric/status/1129388851276001282

https://twitter.com/hesedgal/status/1129338937611313152

LaBrant and his family have a YouTube channel with more than 9 million subscribers. This is not their first brush with controversy.

On April 1, LaBrant, along with his wife Savannah told their 6-year-old daughter that they were giving her puppy away as an April Fools Day joke. They were also accused of fake evacuating the California wildfires in 2018.

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H/T BuzzFeed 

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*First Published: May 18, 2019, 1:04 pm CDT