In a country full of get-rich-quick schemes, the case of Shiloh Hendrix has got to be the most astounding.
In the past week, a viral video emerged of Hendrix’s verbal altercation about an African-American child at a Minnesota playground. Hendrix, holding her own infant, is in an argument with a man recording her — asking her why she referred to the black child using the N-word. She defends using the slur to the man and repeats it, arguing that she’s justified because the black child tried to take her child’s things.
The exact timeline of events is not clear. What’s beyond doubt is that she is enraged — and unapologetic about her use of the epithet. The episode thus marks a turning point in America’s video-and-race wars. Not just Hendrix, but her legions of online supporters have dug into their tribal trenches. It’s a reaction to the excesses of racial progressivism in recent years, though no less discomfiting for what it reveals: the evaporation of American liberal universalism.
We’ve all witnessed at least one iteration of this cycle over the past decade: someone, usually a white person, gets caught being racially offensive. Online outrage erupts, followed by some kind of real-world consequence for the offender: losing a job or even facing personal threats.
Hendrix has flipped the script. “My name is Shiloh, and I have been put into a very dire situation”, she begins her fundraising appeal. “I recently had a kid steal from my 18-month-old son’s diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was.” She then complains of online abuse and solicits financial support: “Anything will help! We cannot, and will not live in fear!”
The appeal became as viral as the initial video. As of this writing, she has raised more than $683,000. Provided she doesn’t have any extraordinary debt, this makes Hendrix many times richer than the median American. Thus we have the first case, maybe in American history, of a woman quickly getting rich as a result of publicly using the N-word.
To Hendrix’s defenders, that’s a blinkered explanation. They aren’t celebrating a racist tirade or trying to turn an ugly moment into a stranger’s good fortune. Rather, they believe they’re turning the tables on years of Left-wing social repression that destroyed people for even minor social transgressions. They have a point.
During the “racial reckoning”, proportionality was discarded. If someone committed the sin of racism, their life was forfeited. They didn’t deserve a job, friendships, or a moment of peace. They had to be un-personed. This included even those who were merely misperceived as racists, such as the University of Southern California professor suspended for using a Mandarin filler word which sounds like the N-word (but which has nothing to do with it).
I remember how, in 2020, The New York Times turned a brief verbal altercation in Central Park between a black birdwatcher named Christian Cooper and a white dog walker named Amy Cooper (no relation) into a national referendum about racial tensions in the United States.
Christian wanted Amy to make sure her dog was leashed — unleashed canines being a pet peeve of his. Amy refused to do so, and this resulted in a war of words between the two. Eventually, Christian tried to get Amy’s dog to come to him with some treats, resulting in Amy calling the police on him. Speaking to the emergency dispatcher, a clearly distressed Amy made sure to mention that Christian is black.
All of this was recorded by Christian, who uploaded the video and made it go viral. The nation’s news networks and newspapers all jumped on it, tsk-tsking that this was what America had come to: Central Park Karen calling down a police assassination on an African-American man who had inconvenienced her.
Amy ended up going into hiding after losing her job and receiving a mountain of online hate. As far as I can tell, she still lives in hiding today. Christian, by contrast, became a national celebrity. A couple of years ago, he even wrote a bestselling memoir, published by Random House. For much of the progressive Left, this was a perfectly reasonable set of outcomes. A “racist” white lady was shunned into oblivion; her “victim” was rewarded by a karmic load of riches and fame.
“When you have such a simple story guiding your morality — you can expect a simple response. Maybe a brutally simple one.”
But over time, the nuances of the story became more apparent (not least thanks to a podcast feature produced by the African-American journal Kmele Foster). Amy had suffered sexual assault in the past and was clearly triggered by the interaction with Christian, who, it turns out, had a bit of a reputation for accosting people. Was Amy right to cite Christian’s race in the phone call with the police? Maybe not.
But it was also the kind of thing she thought she could say in that moment that would get him to back off. Remember, in 2020, much of liberal America believed that police were systematically murdering black men. If two liberal New Yorkers ran into each other in Central Park, chances were that they shared some variation of that belief. If her assault trauma was triggered, then, she would say anything to get away from the man drawing her dog away from her.
Yet the era of Left-wing racialism didn’t allow for these nuances. It told a simple story of racist white people persecuting minorities. And when you have such a simple story guiding your morality — you can expect a simple response. Maybe a brutally simple one.
All of this cut strongly against how I thought about these issues growing up in a diverse corner of Georgia in the Nineties. My social circle was white and black, Indian and Latino, and it was common to see arguments over race and culture spill over from private to public. People got into heated disputes, then made up the following day; sometimes, they just agreed to disagree. We were making our own way towards a more tolerant world without having every moment judged in a digital Thunderdome.
The viral video ended all that. And what is happening with Hendrix is a sort of middle finger to what came before. It’s a dialectical boomerang, slamming back to the hand that cast it — or the face that forgot it.
Hendrix is telling the world that she won’t be broken. In that sense, you can understand why so many conservatives and white people have been rushing to her side. I agree with her defenders that she shouldn’t be subjected to social death. People screw up, and calling a child a racial slur is a big screw-up, even if he did take something that wasn’t his. But people should also be mature and figure out ways to work through screw-ups without inciting a mob to bludgeon the offender into social oblivion.
That said, Hendrix’s boosters have also learned the wrong lesson from the years of progressive racialism. Many of her backers have compared her case to that of Karmelo Anthony, a black teen who allegedly stabbed a white teen to death in Texas. Anthony’s family has raised more than half a million dollars not just for legal fees, but to support themselves. If Anthony’s family can raise money, why can’t Hendrix’s?
The problem is that both Hendrix and Anthony have been turned into avatars of racial grievance. We have to support “our side” — meaning, white people or black people — even if they happened to be in the wrong in the given case. The co-founder of GiveSendGo, which hosts both fundraisers, had to disable comments on both of them owing to the deluge of racist remarks.
While these currents in American society are marginal for now, we shouldn’t underestimate the anti-American ideology pulsing through them. Contrary to the narratives told by the critical-theory Left and the race-fixated weird Right, America isn’t a country founded for the purpose of defending one race, religion, or creed. It’s not a country based on blood or soil.
Encouraging people to bestow loyalty based on skin or ancestry never ends well in this country, or any other. Both Shiloh Hendrix and Karmelo Anthony are Americans first and foremost, and they should be judged based on their adherence to the law and norms that we all have to abide by.
We should demand the best behaviour from anyone, black or white. We should extend grace and mercy, regardless of race, when people fail to meet the standard. What we shouldn’t do is start celebrating and rewarding bad behaviour out of some sense of racial revenge. That way lies national perdition.
