Whatever Happened to Shame?

The lost art of making bad people feel bad.

New York Post

Perhaps you’ve already seen the video: Shiloh Hendrix, a white woman, launches into a furious tirade against a five-year-old Black child she accused of stealing from her diaper bag at a playground in Rochester, Minnesota. If you’ve seen it, you already know what happens; if you haven’t seen it…you probably also already know what happens: Hendrix not only confirms that she called the kid in question a hard-r n-word but repeats it for good measure after she’s confronted by an outraged bystander.

While awful, the breezy racism on display in the footage is hardly uncommon. What is new is what Hendrix did after the cameras stopped rolling on her ignominious 15 minutes of fame: She hopped on a Christian-focused crowdfunding site to A) triple down on her racism (“I called the kid out for what he was”) and make a little cash to “protect” her family after from this “very dire situation.” As of this writing, Hendrix has raised more than $700,000 for calling a child the n-word.

Here’s a quick look at the sort of folks forking over their hard-earned cash to this unrepentant bigot:

screenshot / GiveSendGo

This whole revolting episode — the incident, the whiny self-pity, the groundswell of support from fellow racists — got me thinking a bit about shame. Because if there’s one thing you won’t see in the initial video, nor in the posts Hendrix has shared to her crowdfunding page, is any sense that she feels bad about anything; not for using the n-word, not for yelling at a child, and not for taking cash from people with charming usernames like “somalistodawoodchipperNOW” and “KissMyWhiteAss.”

Shame, one of a healthy society’s most effective ways at ensuring some degree of functional coherence, is nowhere to be found. And I fear it’s only going to get worse from here.

Let’s zoom out for a sec. Out, and a thousand miles to the East.