We Are all "Superhuman With Accusation:" On Shiloh Hendrix and Cancel Culture

Nothing a mob does is clean.

- Les Murray, from Demo.

For those who need outrage the way that alcoholics need a drink, this weekend’s tasty libation involves a Minnesota mother named Shiloh Hendrix, a racial slur, and competing fundraisers. Earlier this week, Hendrix was captured on camera calling a young Black boy the N-word. The child, according to Hendrix, had been rifling through her own son’s diaper bag, and she had cursed him. In the video, Hendrix is unapologetic for deploying the vulgarity, and walks away, head held high.

Sharmake Omar, the Black man who filmed the video, shared it with the press – hoping, as one does in the modern age, to have the perpetrator of this unpleasantness named and shamed. This has become a familiar strategy in recent years. Five years ago this month, in what Wikipedia archives dispassionately as the Central Park Birdwatching Incident, a Black man named Christian Cooper filmed a white woman, Amy Cooper (no relation) as she threatened to report him to the police. Christian Cooper, an avid birder, had complained that Amy Cooper had brought her dog into a section of Central Park where dogs were not permitted. The situation escalated. Amy Cooper did not call Christian Cooper the N-word, but she did call the police. To those who see racism as the foundational stain on our culture, for a white woman to call the cops on a Black man is to seek his lynching. As a result, in the minds of an indignant public, Amy Cooper deserved everything that followed and then some.

The Central Park video came out the week that George Floyd died. It went viral, and in that strange COVID spring of 2020, the Internet quickly dispensed justice. Within hours, Amy Cooper had lost her job. Her friends denounced her. She had to leave her apartment. Her dog was taken away. Eventually, she had to leave the United States entirely. Christian Cooper, on the other hand, got a book deal and a television show. There was much rejoicing. Thanks to the wonders of a pre-Elon Twitter (and to a collective awakening to the ubiquity and banality of virulent racism) the American public decided that sweet justice had surely been done in this case.

Amy Cooper did not do an online fundraiser. She presumably didn’t consider one. Like most people caught in a public shaming, she just wanted the nightmare to be over. She was ashamed and terrified (“Good,” says the mob, “It’s what she should feel!”) In many ways, the nightmare continues for her five years later. We can agree that Amy Cooper should not have brought her dog into a section of the park in which dogs were not permitted, and we can even agree she should not have been so quick to telephone the police. We should also be able to agree that the punishment she endured vastly exceeded the crime.

It is 2025, not 2020. Shiloh Hendrix knows the script. We have learned how to respond to attempted cancellations. (Think of how Brett Kavanaugh and Pete Hegseth were each accused of sexual misconduct – and each was confirmed by the Senate after following a strategy of refusing to cede a single inch of moral real estate to the mob.) Hendrix turned to GiveSendGo, a fundraising platform. As of this morning, the New York Post reports she is more than halfway to her goal of $1,000,000. (As I type this, at 5:00PM PDT, she’s at $572, 462.).

Hendrix writes:

My name is Shiloh and I have been put into a very dire situation. I recently had a kid steal from my 18month old sons diaper bag at a park. I called the kid out for what he was. Another man, who we recently found out has had a history with law enforcement, proceeded to record me and follow me to my car. He then posted these videos online which has caused my family, and myself, great turmoil. My SSN has been leaked. My address, and phone number have been given out freely. My family members are being attacked. My eldest child may not be going back to school. Even where I exercise has been exposed.

I am asking for your help to assist in protecting my family. I fear that we must relocate. I have two small children who do not deserve this. We have been threatened to the extreme by people online. Anything will help! We cannot, and will not live in fear!

You do not need to condone using racial slurs to understand that Hendrix has a reasonable fear of being unable to find gainful employment -- or housing -- in the near future. Like almost everyone in this country, Shiloh Hendrix knows what happened to Amy Cooper and others like her whose livelihoods and social networks were cancelled after they were caught on camera being intemperate or bigoted. Shiloh is, um, not apologetic. Declaring that I called the kid out for what he was suggests that Hendrix has no intention of following the (invariably ineffective) script of pleading that the woman we see on film is not the woman she truly is. Hendrix knows that Internet outrage is never sated by even the most abject and tearful apology. Perhaps taking a page from President Trump, Hendrix understands that when accused, it is better to rally your own base than try to win forgiveness from those who have already written you off as deplorable and irredeemable.

Most of the donations to the Hendrix fundraiser have been very small. For the frustrated cancelers, the relative success of her appeal and the number of donors is a scandal. Surely, Shiloh Hendrix is a virulent racist, and those who donate to her cause share her unfortunate worldview! How infuriating that a villain has remade herself as the victim, and that she has turned her own hatefulness into lucre! I can’t believe that even now, in the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty-five, them dumb crackers still respond to Pavlov’s bell of fragile white womanhood!

I do not doubt that a few of those who gave to the Hendrix GiveSendGo are straight-up bigots. Yet surely, it is possible to see that for all Hendrix’s manifest imperfections, in this kerfuffle, she is a sinner more sinned against than sinning. Perhaps Shiloh Hendrix is the very (very, very) flawed reminder that our toxic modern habit of “naming and shaming” those who fall afoul of ever-evolving social conventions is not a healthy one. Perhaps some of those who sent Hendrix and her kids a few bucks did so not to encourage her bigotry but to push back against a culture that in recent years has repeatedly delivered monstrously disproportionate consequences for fleeting instances of less-than-ideal behavior.

Let us stipulate: people should not use racial slurs, even when angry. People should not call the cops on birders who ask that an unleashed dog be curbed. People should not make tasteless, hurtful jokes. They should not flip each other the bird on the highway. Yet people do all these things, and will continue to do them, despite our best efforts to discourage them from doing so. The great crime of cancel culture – an admittedly broad category – is that it took ordinary human foibles and elevated them to cardinal sins from which no restoration was possible. If you think that’s hyperbole, consider Amy Cooper, who still lives in hiding years after that Central Park incident.

To send money to the likes of Shiloh Hendrix, no matter how unsympathetic she may be, is to put a boulder in the road to slow the march of a pitchfork-wielding mob. To send money to Shiloh Hendrix is to declare oneself sick and tired of crude vigilantism masquerading as citizen journalism. To send money to Shiloh Hendrix is to say one is fed up with the noxious lie that everlasting shame is invariably a richly deserved consequence for an intemperate moment.

The late Aldous Huxley famously observed that “the surest way to work up a crusade in favour of some good cause is to promise people that they will have the chance of maltreating someone.” He did not know the platforms the cancellers would use, but he understood the cancelling impulse, as it is very old and very human. Huxley knew that sadism is much more fun when it pretends it’s simply the delivery of a long-overdue reckoning. Perhaps giving to Shiloh Hendrix is a calculated way to spoil the self-deluding sadist’s fun.

The pitchfork-wielders on every side need periodic reminding that those they hunt can (and will) learn to wield pitchforks as well. The pitchfork is a metaphor, of course; in 2025, the real weapon is the Outrage Fundraiser. Credit card processing companies are raking in the fees as each side tries to outdo the other. The NAACP of Rochester, Minnesota, has its own online campaign in response to Shiloh Hendrix, and has pulled in more than $340,000 as of this evening. Look, if you can’t jail or kill or ostracize those you despise, perhaps you can outraise them. Good news for companies like GiveSendGo and GoFundMe, at any rate – and maybe good news for the rest of us as well.

In his poem “Demo,” Les Murray writes that whatever the stated cause, demonstrators always want the same thing:

Superhuman with accusation,
you would conscript me to a world
of people spat on.

Does it make you feel superhuman – or maybe just a bit less impotent – when you get to get to play a small part in dealing consequences to someone whom you’re sure deserves them? Look at Shiloh Hendrix, with her tattoos and her haircut and a mien that reeks of the trailer park! That wretched-rhymes-with-witch has raised $572,000! Doesn’t that make you so mad you want to spit? Are your fingers curling round the pitchfork now? Do you feel superhuman with accusation?

Take a walk. Touch grass. Give to the charity of your choice. And rethink the pleasure you take in being part of a world where you get to do so much spitting.