A Woman, Not a Symbol

Against the objectification of Shiloh Hendrix

Last century, when Donald Trump was nearly assassinated, a middle-aged woman got on Facebook and said some ugly things. Because she didn’t hide her identity, a man managed to track down the Home Depot where she worked and record her on his phone. As she tried to ignore him, he berated her and demanded to know what she had “contributed to this country.” “This is ridiculous. You are ridiculous. And I’m making you famous.” The video went viral, and the store fired her.

My mind went back to that sad little episode when I watched the social media firestorm around Shiloh Hendrix, a woman whose name nobody knew until five seconds ago when someone decided to “make her famous.” I will summarize briefly for the not-very-online: Shiloh was in a park in St. Louis with her baby, when—by her account—a black child ran up and stole something from her diaper bag. She reacted by calling the child a familiar racial slur. An unrelated Somali man observed the interaction, then took out his phone and hit record as Shiloh was walking away. Words were exchanged. The man dared her to repeat the slur to his face, and she obliged him multiple times. When he accused her of hate speech, she declared that she didn’t give a sh*t. “Okay,” he said, “We’ll see what the Internet has to say about you.”

Exactly what happened after that moment is unclear. According to the description in the GiveSendGo campaign Shiloh started, all of her sensitive information had been leaked, including her phone number, home address, and (somehow) Social Security Number. She claimed her family had received violent threats, and she needed to raise funds quickly so they could relocate. That was when the money began pouring in.

However much money Shiloh actually needed to find a new home, it immediately became obvious that this wasn’t the point. For many if not most of the donors leaving comments, their contributions were symbolic. In particular, they saw themselves standing in symbolic opposition to the donors contributing to a fund for Karmelo Anthony, the black teen who recently made headlines after stabbing a white teen to death at a track meet. On social media, people began to compare the progress of the two campaigns like sports bettors. Karmelo’s campaign had cracked $500,000, but Shiloh’s campaign blitzed past it, and there was much rejoicing. She raised the goal to $1,000,000.

Meanwhile, comments on both campaigns became so rancid that GiveSendGo closed comments (though someone noted that people had freely been calling for “death to the white man” and what-not for a while on Karmelo’s campaign, and company head Jacob Wells initially defended this as “free speech”). Other calls for violence went out, including one especially vile short video of a black man cheerfully suggesting Shiloh’s baby be “slapped” into brain damage so he wouldn’t grow up to be a racist.

To add another surreal twist to the whole saga, it was discovered that the man who made Shiloh famous had a rap sheet, including a rape charge that was dropped “in the interests of justice.” This triggered more posting on the right about what he was doing in the park and what sort of “shady Somali pirate pedo/smuggling/Medicaid fraud ring” the child might have been entangled with.

I initially wasn’t going to write anything about the case, because the whole thing was just so strange and sad, in that distinctively Digital Age way. But as other people rolled out their hot takes, I got the itch one gets as a writer when everyone else’s take feels wrong, and you begin to suspect you might just have to write the take you want to see. Though I did find Ben Shapiro’s assessment basically spot on. So these reflections will be part me and my thoughts, part “What Ben said.”

The wrong takes came in different political flavors, but I think I can put my finger on what united them all: All of them, one way or another, turned Shiloh Hendrix into a symbol. This was crystallized for me when I saw two different “Ghiblifying” memes floating around—a new trend where people run a photo through an AI filter to make it look like a Studio Ghibli movie. One turned Shiloh into “Joan of Park,” putting her in armor with a cheering white crowd on one side and the black man gleefully filming her on the other (with the child she insulted, in tears). The other turned her into a “meth mama,” looking like a dissipated hag. Neither meme looked like the real Shiloh.

There’s no evidence that she’s an addict, though it’s fair to say she typifies the white underclass, with her rough speech, hard eyes and tattoo sleeve. Her crowdfund campaign refers to “the baby’s dad,” suggesting she’s unmarried. People familiar with white underclass women weren’t terribly fazed by this story, especially people who’ve watched them fight with black women. Shiloh isn’t some exotic bird. She just happened to be caught on camera, having a very bad moment. A moment which, to be clear, she’s since doubled and tripled down on. It’s unclear whether the child is really as young as five and autistic, as has been claimed, but there’s no lingering doubt around whether she actually hurled a racial slur at him. We know she did, because she’s proudly told everyone that she “called the kid out for what he was.” (By this she seems to mean the combination of his race and his attempt to steal from her bag. One wonders if she would berate a white child thief for “acting like a n***er.”) It was further claimed that she began ranting at the man behind the phone and his family as a “drain on the welfare system,” though we only have his word for that.

However, I think we’re allowed to think it strange that when that other black man made his car video casually wishing someone would beat Shiloh’s baby senseless, no mobs came for him. His little rant didn’t become a Discourse. The entire Internet wasn’t forced to take sides and write takes about him, because not enough people cared. I think we have a word for this, and that word is “privilege.”

All to say, Shiloh Hendrix is neither a cartoon hero nor a cartoon villain. She’s just a woman—clearly an embittered, troubled woman, a woman who has no doubt had a difficult life but has allowed hardship to harden her heart. In the age before the Internet, her sins would have remained lost to obscurity, between herself and her community and God. People would have figured out that she might not be the most pleasant lady to hang around at the playground, and that would have been all. The rest of the world would have gone on turning in blissful oblivion. This is one of many good points in Ben Shapiro’s video commentary: We have had people like Shiloh with us always, just like we’ve always had people like the schmuck who was recently caught holding a “F*** the Jews” sign in Dave Portnoy’s bar. The difference is that where the pre-digital society used to just quietly reshuffle itself around them, our digital society now gawks at them. Instead of obsessing over what should happen to them, perhaps we should pause to consider what has happened to us.

When I wrote about the cancellation of Home Depot lady, I reflected in general on what it was like when we all knew a lot less about each other, when social media didn’t accelerate the fraying of friendships and community bonds:

Once upon a time, when I was still an anonymous writer, I had the idea that I would tuck myself away in some apolitical academic job by day, then vent my spleen under a pseudonym by night. This dual life would be necessary because I was a conservative, and as Nate Hochman and all the rest have been pointing out, we don’t live in a world where you can have conservative thoughts in public and assume your job is secure. As it happened, I decided I didn’t want to live that sort of dual life. But I sometimes think about what it would be like if I did. I think about the advantages of not having my every waking political thought instantly googleable. Even on a smaller scale, even on my private social media, I think about what it would be like if I never posted political or cultural takes at all. I think about what it would be like if I’d only ever known my friends in incarnated contexts, instead of learning all the various topics and subtopics on which we disagreed.

That is not the world I live in, I know. It’s not the world any of us live in. The genie is out, and we can’t put him back. But we can, in small ways, at least begin to try to apply some common sense. We can at least begin to try to see people as people, and not just posters. As somebody’s crazy aunt or grandma, and not just a “foot-soldier” in a culture war to the death.

Home Depot lady probably deserved some sort of social consequence or other, but she didn’t deserve to go TikTok viral and have her life ruined. Shapiro correctly identifies the false dichotomy of the Digital Age: Either speech sins deserve the social death penalty (or even threats of a literal death penalty), or no one deserves any consequences for their speech, ever. As of five minutes ago, we had an understanding that there was space for something in between.

I don’t think it’s quite fair to say that Matt Walsh’s take falls on the other horn of the dichotomy, but I still couldn’t co-sign his conclusion that the best possible outcome of all this is for Shiloh Hendrix to become a millionaire. I do think he was right to point out the double standard whereby Shiloh is virtually mobbed while her violent detractors literally get away with threatening murder. To whatever degree she actually does need money now to ensure her family’s safety, I share his conclusion that it’s a good thing for her to have it—though whether she needs a million dollars is another question. And I share his desire to cripple the incentive structure that keeps these vicious cancellation cycles going. But it seems far less clear to me that turning Shiloh into a heroic icon will actually cripple that incentive structure. The way people rushed to inflate her and Karmelo Anthony’s campaigns in parallel evoked something more like a nuclear arms race, suggesting a bleak future where each side enables progressively worse people with no end in sight. And finally, aside from the dubious pragmatic value of this take, it participates in the same instrumentalizing game as the people villainizing Shiloh.

I’ve been reflecting that I feel this kind of uneasiness even in cases of people much more sympathetic than Shiloh, like Kyle Rittenhouse or Daniel Penny. These are both examples of people who did nothing wrong, even behaved admirably in the circumstances they were thrust into. But as they were alternately lionized and villainized, I began hoping that when it was all over, they could walk away from it all, back to their little lives, back to the people who actually knew the real Kyle, the real Daniel.

All the more, I hope there’s someone who knows the real Shiloh, who understands the needs that won’t be satisfied by winning the lottery. The Internet made her famous, and the Internet made her rich, but only grace can make her whole.