Shiloh Hendricks. GiveSendGo.
A Minnesota woman named Shiloh Hendricks went viral over the weekend after video showing her using the N-word was released. The Independent. Hendricks was accused of using the N-word after a child stole something from her bag. She also used it against the man who was filming her, who had threatened her to expose her language to the internet. The video had the opposite effect as it went viral as she was able to set up a GiveSendGo drive that has raised almost $650,000 as of this writing. Hendricks defended her use of the N-word and said that her family and children had been threatened and that her personal details have been leaked.
The GiveSendGo campaign can be found here.
My Comment:
I'm several days late on this story but it keeps getting bigger, to the point where it's on "normie" social media, like Facebook. It had been trending on X all weekend and was also on the usual websites, like 4chan and Kiwi Farms. Normally I don't write about random confrontations like this unless it signals something bigger, which this case certainly does.
Do I defend Hendricks actions? No. She did a very stupid thing, using the N-word against a child. I have less sympathy for the Somali guy that was filming her, he was trying to cancel someone and there are quite a few rumors that he might be a sexual deviant himself. He's got the same name as someone that was charged with the sexual assault of a 16 year old, though charges were dropped. It's unclear if he is the same guy but either way, he picked a fight.
Still, though there are questions about the age and status of the child, some outlets are calling him Autistic, though I don't know how they came up with that, it's an absolute overreaction to call a child the N-word if he stole something. Even more so if she just suspected him of stealing. Doing so is both needlessly cruel and also could have had way worse results than just going viral. Hendricks is lucky that the man who confronted her only filmed and harassed her, instead of doing worse. Not that it would be justified mind you, it's just the state of the world today.
In the past what would happen in one of these cases is that Hendricks would be completely canceled. She would have gotten zero support at all and she would get zero sympathy in this case. She would lose her job, her home and probably her children. People are still trying to destroy her life but it's not working this time. She's got enough money now that she should be set for a long time, assuming that GiveSendGo doesn't pull her campaign (which seems very unlikely at this time). She could still get into trouble with the police or perhaps her banking, but I am guessing that won't happen now given the firestorm of controversy that would cause. Though, this happened in Minnesota and Democrats both control the state and also can't help but to shoot themselves in the foot.
So why the turnaround? Part of this is a reaction to the murder, and subsequent fundraising campaign for the killer of Austin Metcalf. Karmelo Anthony, the accused murderer, got half a million dollars and wide praise among the black community after he was charged with killing Metcalf at a track meet. If that wasn't enough, the comments on the GiveSendGo campaign (now removed) were hugely racist and many of them celebrated the murder. That incident, which went mostly ignored by the media, was hugely viral on the internet and it angered a whole lot of people. Indeed, I was furious about it and it does not surprise me that this fundraiser went viral in response.
I think a lot of it also is just the fact that people are sick and tired of folks being canceled. Did Hendricks screw up here? Absolutely. But does she deserve to have her life ruined because of it? No, and the vast majority of folks caught up in these viral stupidity campaigns don't either. That and there is now a couple of mainstream websites where you can actually discuss these kins of issue without being insta-banned. GiveSendGo won't delete fundraisers and X won't ban you if you discuss it, pro or con. That could mean the pushback would have been there before, but folks are actually able to do so now.
Of course much of this is racism, but it's racism that's going both ways. There are a lot of folks out there that hate black people and don't see any problem with this. There are also a lot of folks out there that hate white people (many of them white themselves). In this case it seems like the anti-black racists are trying to defend one of their own from the anti-white ones. In short, this seems like both of those groups clashing with each other, along with the fewer more reasonable people like the ones upset with cancel culture.
I do think that the powers that be are very upset with this case, despite there not being a huge amount of media coverage. That seems clear from some of the folks on the "far-right" attacking Hendricks for just about everything other than what she did. They hate on her tattoos, they hate that she's a single mother, they say she's on meth, they even say she dated a black man. It seems like a transparent effort to try and tamp down on the viral nature of this campaign.
A few weeks ago I mentioned on X that it feels like the old days of 90's style race blindness is dead and gone and this might be the final nail in the coffin. Back then it really felt like folks were going to judge each other based on their actions, not their skin color. But it sure feels like that's no longer viable in today's post-Black Lives Matter world. If we are going to be living in a racial spoils system it sure feels like whites are sick of being left out and this is probably a reaction to that.
Finally, I have to mention that this whole thing feels like enemy action. If I was one of America's enemies and I wanted race relations to collapse this is how I would do it, with the twin viral GiveSendGo campaigns that show how bad race relations actually are. I have no idea if that is the case or not, but it is something to keep in mind...
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