Shiloh Hendrix and the Battle For The Soul of The Right

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

(Audio version here)

I have, against my better judgement as well as my promise to myself, been looking in on the hellsite that is X. I found a flood of some of the worst politically-motivated fallacious reasoning and absolute abandonment of any consistent principle at all around the issue of Shiloh Hendrix. Hendrix is the young white woman who responded to a little black boy rummaging through her diaper bag at the park by calling him the N-word and then justifying this on camera on the grounds that he was behaving like one and repeating it to the black man recording her. This went viral and much anger and many threats resulted, causing Ms. Hendrix to set up a funding plea to allegedly protect herself and her family with the funds needed for this reportedly increasing until it is now at $1 million with nearly three quarters of it raised.

Many MAGA commentators have repeatedly justified this on the grounds that the fund-raiser for Karmelo Anthony, a black 17-year-old who fatally stabbed a fellow student who was white in an argument about seating on a sports pitch, had raised large sums of money with some of the donors espousing anti-white racist views in the comments. When it has been pointed out that this is, surely, an unhealthy racial tribalism, many have responded that tribalism is natural and asked why only white people are prohibited from engaging in it. Others have challenged claims that the child was autistic, calling this an excuse, and/or evinced skepticism that he was five years old saying that his height suggests he was older and/or said the man filming is due in court for having sex with an underage girl and is thus of dubious integrity. Many of the largest and furthest right accounts on X have claimed that the support for Hendrix is an indication that ‘white people’ will no longer tolerate cancel culture on the grounds of racism accusations.

Principled conservatives have been responding to this terrible ethical reasoning and I think the best response was from Frank McCormick.

Frank is absolutely right. There have been (and still are to some extent) cases of people being accused spuriously of racism and facing severe career and reputational damage as a consequence that principled opponents of cancel culture could have championed and supported financially and on strong principled grounds. In 2020 and 2021, I was involved with my organisation, Counterweight, trying to help people in precisely this situation and seeking funding to support the cancelled suffering financial loss. Only a handful of them went public but we put out anonymised information about ongoing cases regularly. This did include many teachers (of all races) who had challenged ‘anti-racist’ policies that seemed to them to be quite clearly racist and held white children complicit in white supremacy while informing black children that their attempts to work hard and succeed were futile. One of them had simply included a respected black conservative thinker in Black History Month.

Also overrepresented were people in the psychological, therapeutic and social work professions who believed that identity-based changes to the policy that governed their practice was doing their clients of color a disservice in not treating them as complex individuals while unjustly alienating white clients who were vulnerable and in need of support. Humanitarian aid workers and people within the charitable sector who had objected to funds going to dubious anti-racist training rather than the people they were set up to serve or compelling people to receive such training to receive support were also common among those who contacted us. Academics and students were also highly overrepresented, of course, for undertaking research in ‘problematic’ areas or declining to use Critical Social Justice theories in their analysis or objecting to mandatory DEI statements or being insufficiently affirming of the theories underlying them.

In addition to these ‘high risk’ areas of work, we also supported hundreds of other people. Our only criteria for supporting people against accusations of racism was that they had not, in fact, been racist and agreed that evaluating people’s worth by their skin colour was wrong. They included engineers, technicians, emergency services personnel, healthcare professionals, administrative workers, people working in retail and hospitality, parents and students. It was incredibly hard to get people to offer funding to support them as they went through this. In the end, we were funded by hundreds of small monthly donations from people we’d already helped and their friends and colleagues.

Possibly, the people now set to make Shiloh Hendrix a millionaire have only recently realised the extent of the cancel culture problem or have finally reached the end of their tether and are willing to put funds into addressing it. I am dubious about this, however, as I do not remember the illiberal right being quiet on the issue at the time. There have been so many principled people falsely accused of racism that conservatives (or anybody) opposed to Cancel Culture or imposing harsh penalties on people for words could have used as a rallying point that the fact that a subset of them have chosen an unambiguously racist woman who verbally abused a child does seem somewhat morally suspect. It seems much more likely from the memes and jubilant language about white resistance and the constant references to the support of Karmelo Anthony, that it is Hendrix’s unapologetic and vulgar racism and the shocking nature of her targeting a child with it that has inspired many. This celebratory response to appalling behaviour has been deemed ‘vice signalling’ by some and refers to a kind of grotesque revelry in being the worst manifestation of what your political enemies have accused you of being to signal a childish ‘edgy’, “We don’t care what you think anymore. We have no shame. Do your worst. You can’t touch us.”

It is indeed, racial retribution and anybody trying to make an ethical argument that it is resistance to cancel culture should be very aware that they are speaking into this context. To make the best possible case for supporting Shiloh Hendrix on the grounds of freedom of speech, one could consider her an edge case and say “Even people who engage in morally abhorrent speech like this should not be legally penalised or harmed. We must protect freedom of speech for the vilest of ideas expressed to anybody, even though we utterly condemn them” while demonstrating ethical consistency by defending the freedom of speech of those whose views are disgusting in the opposite direction. (In this case, that would be the people who supported Anthony with claims that killing white people is justified). An attitude of “Yes, unfortunately, even her, but let’s reserve our moral support and sympathy for principled people” could be ethically justified on this ground. Making Hendrix a poster girl to rally around, iconise and celebrate could not.

One could also make an ethical case that, even though racially abusing a small child is horrible, Hendrix and her family should not be physically harmed because of it, as some people have threatened to do, with some targeting her toddler. Principled people could demand the police be proactive on investigating threats and contribute to funding for security measures or relocation while expecting to see receipts to ensure that this was all that was covered and did not reward the abusive behaviour. Saying things like, “I’m glad she raised half a million dollars. I hope she raises half a million more” does not convey this serious, sober and principled attitude and is best reserved for the support of people who are wrongly accused of racism and whose successful resistance to that could be honourably celebrated and rewarded. There are enough of them.

These are the only two good arguments I can see for funding Shiloh Hendrix, and, if anybody can see any others, I’d be delighted if they’d put them in the comments. The bad arguments for doing so abound.

Arguments that the ‘n-word’ should not be taboo in the first place, especially when some black people use it regularly with an ‘-a’ ending, and that desensitising it is a noble aim are bad because this is not how you desensitise words. In fact, you could hardly think of a worse way to lower anyone’s threat response to a term than to throw it at a small child aggressively and unambiguously as an insult. The connotations of language evolve naturally according to the context in which they are used. If you wanted the ‘n-word’ not to have racist connotations, there would need to come about a scenario in which it was consistently used non-racistly for a protracted period. The value of trying to socially engineer this is far from clear and is also unlikely to work. Other people have argued that nobody should use the word at all with any ending and that if one group can use it, everybody should be able to, but this is still not how language works. It still works by cultural context and connotation. I’m not arguing that language should work this way rather than by objective, unemotional and consistent rules of reasoning, but that it does work this way and that this is unlikely to change unless we find a way to radically rewire our social brains. If you want to change language that has negative connotations in certain contexts, you need to change culture so that whatever it refers to no longer has negative connotations in those contexts. Trying to effect change from the top down by changing language usage doesn’t work, using a term understood as disparaging disparagingly couldn’t achieve that anyway and using it as a form of political statement in the service of ‘language equity’ is unlikely to be comprehensible to an autistic five-year-old. I’m not convinced this is a good faith argument.

Suggestions that it was acceptable to call a small child a racial slur because he was rummaging through a bag are not at all convincing. Most well-adjusted adults recognise that this is a reason to say “Stop that, please! That is not yours.” in a firm voice and, if a child continues to be troublesome, to complain to the parents whose responsibility he is. On rare occasions, in which a parent does not take responsibility for a persistently troublesome child, it could be acceptable to call the police to remind them of their parental responsibilities. Verbally abusing the child, not even on the grounds of his actions, but the colour of his skin should be recognised as a particularly appalling thing to do and generally is.

Given this moral consensus (which I would argue is ethically right) it therefore makes no difference at all if the child was not autistic in a way that made him unaware of social expectations or if he was 8 or 10 rather than 5. One could reasonably speak more sharply to an older child without a neurological disorder about his unacceptable behaviour, (although I would still suggest that firmness and seeking out the parents would be preferable with a child one does not know) but one cannot reasonably abuse him for the skin colour he would still have if he were beautifully behaved and politely drawing your attention to your purse falling out of the bag. Skin colour is simply not an acceptable reason to abuse anyone and it is particularly reprehensible when that person is a child. This principle is not affected at all by other adults who share that skin colour having been racially abusive to your own racial demographic because individual humans are not interchangeable tokens of racial demographics who can be held responsible for the worst behaviour committed by any other member of that demographic. They are individual humans who are responsible for their own behaviour. Individual responsibility has typically been a value most strongly held by conservatives and they will be most effective at addressing failures of it on the right. The Shiloh Hendrix Adulation Society is a monumental example of a failure of this.

The moral character of the man who filmed the incident is also irrelevant to whether the incident was morally acceptable or not. This would absolutely be a reason not to celebrate him personally, but as Hendrix has not claimed that the footage was doctored or the context misrepresented but instead justified doing what she appears to be doing, this is a red herring and a deflection.

“It’s OK to celebrate Hendrix’s actions because some morally abhorrent black people were celebrating Karmelo Anthony’s” is not a good argument because you have already identified those people as morally abhorrent and, ideally, you should, yourself, wish not to be morally abhorrent. The dilemma is not resolved by pointing out that the consequences of Anthony’s actions are that a teenage boy is dead while the consequences of Hendrix’s are that a child is distressed. This could work for an argument that it is worse to celebrate Anthony than Hendrix but not that it is good to celebrate Hendrix. We can always engage in this kind of comparative whataboutism. “The scale of the brutality and death involved in the enslavement of black people and lynchings was worse than the stabbing of one white boy, so it’s acceptable to celebrate the latter” is an argument I have seen made in defence of Anthony’s disgusting fans (not by Anthony). If you do not find this convincing, you should see why “Stabbing someone is worse than racially abusing a child” does not work either. The logical conclusion of comparative whataboutism is that nobody can ever condemn any behaviour unless it is the worst thing that has ever happened and anything lesser can be justified.

The same reasoning applies to “It’s OK for white people to be racial tribalists because people of other races are too.” If you are objecting to that (and you should), you should know better than to engage in it even if your mother failed to impress upon you that two wrongs do not make a right as a child. It is also a terrible argument to argue that tribalism is natural. This is the naturalistic fallacy and often called upon to justify rape, murder and violence more broadly as well as behaviours which are not crimes but are widely considered unethical like infidelity to one’s partner and which are found all over the animal kingdom. Again, this rationale should be particularly unconvincing to conservatives and especially to Christians who have argued particularly strongly against giving into temptation to engage in destructive, instinctive urges and instead to remain self-controlled and exercise restraint and live according to principle. If you think you have a principled argument in favour of racial tribalism, you should try to make it rather than excuse it on the grounds of tribalism being natural. That you do not suggests that some part of you is ashamed of it. Good. Delve deeper into that.

Attempts to claim that the surge of support for Hendrix’s racist verbal abuse of a child is evidence of a praiseworthy and heartwarming unity of white people coming together to “take back their culture” is appallingly racist. Against white people. Those of us who object to people being evaluated by the colour of their skin consistently have never accepted the claims of the ‘woke’ that the overwhelming desire of white people is to be able to throw the ‘n-word’ at black people without being thought despicable and that this explained all criticisms of illiberal anti-racist activism. They’re unlikely to accept the same denigration of their character and motivations from the illiberal far-right now, even if they are willing to degrade themselves in this way.

It is sometimes tempting to fantasise about placing the woke left and woke right on an island somewhere where they can vice-signal each others worst perceptions of themselves to each other and work themselves up into the kind of frenzy of outrage they seem to enjoy so much without bothering any normal people, but unfortunately, this is neither ethical nor practicable. The rest of us have to deal with them. The beliefs of the woke left that all white people are responsible for white racial tribalists and the woke right that all black people are responsible for black racial tribalists are not born out in practice. White people who oppose white identity politics are simply dismissed as race traitors and also often ‘accused’ of not being white (I’m brown or Jewish, apparently). Black people who oppose black identity politics and are difficult to “accuse” of not being black may be designated racially but not politically black or, in the UK, “coconuts” by black and brown members of the movement while white ones typically try to ignore their existence because it is inconvenient.

We may do better to appeal to people going off the rails into racial identity politics within our political and philosophical tribes. Principled conservatives will likely do better at reaching anybody on the right who can be reached by reminding them what a principled conservatism looks like and presenting a solid and consistent model of that in unity and defiance of racial divides so many wish to entrench. Christians may well do best at reaching Christians. Those of us on the left can try to recall those who have embraced racial identity politics and remind them of our foundations in prioritising issues of economic class and organising across it again in unity and defiance of racial divides and that this approach has been most effective at addressing the aftermath of racist policies which manifest most significantly in problems that are, at root, issues of class. Liberals, who can be found on either the left or right or who currently find themselves politically homeless can appeal to all of the liberally-minded and remind them of the importance of evaluating people as individuals, valuing our common humanity and rejecting collectivism.

Idealistic? Probably. I certainly don’t envision a quick fix. Nevertheless, I do think it is important that, in these increasingly polarised times, we don’t just point out how appallingly unethical the extremists are, but also try to create positive models of what ethical conservatism, ethical economic leftism and consistent liberalism look like. We need to argue for positive things and not just against negative ones. With the illiberal right in the ascendent in the US right now, we are particularly depending on ethical conservatives to move conservatism in a more positive and principled direction. Embracing the likes of Andrew Tate and his self-proclaimed misogyny and highly credible accusations of sex trafficking does not do that. Making Shiloh Hendrix and her racial abuse of a small child a rallying point for the right certainly does not do that. I think most genuine conservatives know this and we need them to win this battle for the soul of the right.