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Notes -
Grift Upon Grift
A white woman named Shiloh Hendrix took her child to the park.
What happened next is not totally clear. This is the only direct video evidence I could find, since so-called journalists are apparently allergic to providing direct links to original sources for direct evaluation (God forbid they should create a hyperlink to a source containing uncensored slurs I guess). In this video a man accuses Shiloh (who is holding her young child) of calling a black child a racial slur. She tells him that the black child was stealing from her son, and, uh, firmly invites the videographer to go away. Instead, he demands that she say the slur to his face. So she does, several times, and he tells her that the word is "hate speech." In some other places I have seen the video continue as he follows her to her car while continuing to berate her. (If there is actual video of her saying anything at all to the black child, I have not been able to find it.)
According to Shiloh's GiveSendGo,
As I write this, she has received $735,837 in donations, prompting some commentary. She hasn't been charged with any crime yet, but someone is considering it.
The "other side" of the story has been told... inconsistently, I guess. Also from the Yahoo writeup:
Several stories (but not all) mention the supposed autism; some add that the black child had three siblings keeping his parents busy at the time and was therefore unsupervised, explaining his reported misconduct as mere childish curiosity.
Well, hopefully Omar knows the boy's parents; after all, according to another news report Omar is the black child's uncle. Or is this a folksy "every man from Somalia is my uncle" sort of thing? Unclear! Incidentally, Omar was recently charged with felonious sexual misconduct, only to have those charges dropped for unclear reasons. Well, "in the interests of justice," whatever that means in this context:
In fact this doesn't actually state that the charges against Sharmake have been dropped, but everyone seems to think so. Presumably just one more piece of relevant information denied to me by the transformation of facts into culture war ammunition.EDIT: This link shows the documents dropping the charges.In response to Hendrix's GiveSendGo, the Rochester branch of the NAACP opened a GoFundMe and raised about $350,000 before closing it down (apparently at the behest of the black boy's family).
It's difficult to know how much to read between the lines, here, in part because the lines themselves are so blurry. Omar is apparently a single man and possible child sex offender who was filming at least one otherwise-unsupervised child at a public park. His story about how he is connected to the child is inconsistent. Given the current state of American politics with regard to immigration law, a family of Somalians deliberately avoiding the public eye seems well advised, but also raises further questions about broader demographic trends and the impacts of those trends. Meanwhile, Ms. Hendrix's unapologetic utterance of the killing curse has turned into a bit of a financial bonanza for all involved (except, apparently, Omar...).
Of course the culture war angles are attention-grabbing, and the toxoplasma of rage ever present. But at the risk of going full "boo outgroup," can I just say--I really, really hate crowdfunding? It seems like a horrible mistake, a metastasized version of the cancer of social media, virtue signaling with literal dollars that feed nothing but further grift. Regardless of their reasons, I'm thankful to the Somali family for shutting down the NAACP's grifting fundraiser as quickly as they did. I'm gobsmacked that Shiloh has managed to milk three quarters of a million dollars (and counting!) out of being accosted over a minor literal playground scuffle.
I mean, I get it--the money is tempting, and if you aren't getting yours, someone else will be more than happy to scoop it up "on your behalf." Racism is big business, for which the demand vastly outstrips the supply, and overtly slur-slinging white moms are... well, usually they're rapping or something, not dropping the honest-to-God Hard R. And on a child!
...for $750,000, though?
To be completely honest--I was irritated earlier this week because one of my social feeds was inundated with requests for money for some kid who was super sick and then died. Did he not have health insurance? Oh, no, he was insured. Why did he need $50,000 then? Well, his parents had to take some time off work, you know. Didn't they have paid family medical leave? Oh, well, yes, but you know how "incidentals pile up." Burials ain't cheap! And everyone was so heartbroken, because kids are so great! And this kid was great. Just brightened the room and everyone's lives. Obviously $50,000 isn't going to bring him back, or help his parents heal, but at least we can all show our sympathy and support... better than "thoughts and prayers," eh?
So probably I was kind of sensitized to this when I ran across the story of Shiloh and her anonymous (autistic?) antagonist. How many humans live out their lives by, ultimately, convincing lots of other humans to just bankroll them? How much of my frustration with these people boils down to a kind of deep-rooted envy, that I must labor while others take their ease, simply because I do not have a gift for grift?
As a matter of principle, I do not give money via crowdfunding. I don't even use Patreon, much less GoFundMe or GiveSendGo or whatever. I regard it as a moral failing when I see others do so, no matter how apparently worthy the cause. I am prejudiced against the entire enterprise, but I cannot rule out the possibility that it is because I have no expectation of ever benefiting from it--even though this is at least in part because I would feel like a charlatan if I did.
You know, a while ago, I remember Matt Yglesias noticing that elected Republican officials (this was pre-Trump) were MUCH more sensitive to conservatives being called "racists" than they were to conservatives being "racist". He said it in a way that made it clear the thought he was being cute, of course.
But the observation has stuck with me, because it's actually fully general. And I think there actually really serious consequences.
To a first approximation (and I'm aiming here to use the no-no word to good effect), by the end of the 70s, the more radical side of liberals came out of the civil rights movement with a stance that was something like, "It is your own racist standards and worldview that make you think you can put certain people in the category of "nigger", and the word "nigger" exists to keep people down, and to the extent that there are people actually behaving in bad ways that might make you want to label them as "nigger", that's actually a result of pre-existing systemic racist forces that produce the "nigger" in the first place. All of this is a stain on you, not them. That word is your original sin."
And then, at about the same time, the Reagan coalition and Reagan detente settled on something like, "Obviously there are a whole bunch of people that it would be reasonable to call "nigger", clearly they are incompatible with civilization, but it's rude and unhelpful to use that explicit language about the topic, and much more to the point, there are a bunch of American black people who can be trusted to live up to high standards like the rest of us, we don't need to lower our standards, and it would be a grave injustice to treat those Americans as though they were just "niggers" who, by the way, totally exist, but we're just going to throw up our hands and corral those types in inner city ghettos and then massive prisons and turn our heads and avoid acknowledging it because, honestly, there really is nothing to be done, and we're more interested in integrating the more upstanding black citizens anyway, which is a much more happy project that we'd like to have our names attached to". Which is to say, the conservatives of that era might well have said, "You know what's much, much worse that calling someone "nigger"? It's choosing to be a civilization destroying "nigger", obviously, or choosing to coddle and elevate such people like liberals insist on doing. Incentives matter, and you're making sure you get a lot more of that". There's actually some interesting personal anecdote from Glenn Loury, talking about a private conversation he had with William F Buckley during the heyday of the Reagan administration in the mid 80s, and the summary of what Buckley had to say was very much in that ballpark - do what you can for the redeemable half, throw your hands up and move on for the other half.
And then Obama came along, and he and his movement (and the collapse of George W. Bush conservatism) destroyed the Reagan detente, and we've been living with that liberal story about racism every since. But I think this has probably been a great example of arson being applied to Chesterton's fence - the older Reagan-era norm, with its insistence that "of course you can expect plenty of black people to live up to high standards" played a really important social role in encouraging everyone else to go along with integration. Despite all the word policing, the Emperors New Clothes is real, and I have to believe that anyone who has ever lived around a large enough variety of black people has some contact with some uniquely frustrating (or likely much, much worse) behavior. It's certainly been the case in every city I've ever lived in, and every good white liberal I know, if you can steer the conversation sensitively, will more or less acknowledge it and have their own stories, often said in sadness not anger. Just going off of basic human psychology, it would be the most natural thing in the world for lots of non-black people, given their actual life experiences, to hold significant grudges about black people in a tribal way. It really is, or I think it is, an act of civic virtue when someone says, "While all of that is obviously true, it is both wrong and unhelpful to tar other members of the larger group for the behavior of these particular people..." But that impulse really only works when you can follow that by saying "...because I know lots of people in this group both CAN and ARE living up to our high standards, and we are collectively capable of validating and affirming those high standards". Ever since the Obama years, this is no longer the narrative frame we exist in, I don't think.
I think this is why, at least for someone people, Chris Rock's old "Black People vs. Niggers" stand up bit feels so cathartic. Because the rules of the game, post-1980 was, you can behave as though you acknowledge those facts, you can vote with your feet and where you buy property, but you absolutely can't actually name those facts with your mouth. That was the trade off, the detente. And so hearing someone touch that nerve by actually naming it was electric at the time.
I've long expected that the Obama-era blowing up of those older norms, especially after a lot of the insane cancel culture language policing, was eventually going to force a deeper re-evaluation of these topics. In important ways, the Reagan-era settlement was a kind of social compromise between a bunch of different groups that had a lot of tension with each other, with different parties each getting half a loaf. The Obama era shift was not like that. I think it's always had a deep instability buried in its heart. A lot of groups didn't actually sign off on it, they just had it shoved down their throats while they were weak. And its norms (which have been unstable and have often been caught up in purity spirals) have proven to be simply way too far from reality to be stable, too.
All of this has been very much in the back of my mind as I watch the current kerfuffle about this crowdsourcing money stuff. I don't enjoy rudeness, but a lot of the progressive McCarthyism of the last 8 years or whatever has more or less guaranteed that we're going to see some new norms renegotiated, and it's bound to be messy and probably often unpleasant and shocking as it happens. But I don't think there's any switch we can hit that will just take us right back to 2008.
Another way to frame this is from the Black perspective, as I understand it:
Blacks agreed to largely stop calling people racist, and whites agreed to end the legacy of racism. That is, Black Culture never understood the deal to be that the underclass was incorrigible and would be written off, but rather than education and social policy would dissolve the underclass and uplift all blacks together. They were willing to tolerate a considerable amount of write-off in the short term, but the public agreement (and it was a very public agreement in the late 90s - early 2000s) was that this uplift was happening and would continue until the problem went away.
From my own perspective, the fact that this agreement was based on a lie does not strike me as the fault of Black Culture; they mostly weren't the ones who built the ideological foundations of the Church of the Blank Slate. It's not their fault either for noticing that decade after decade, the results they were promised never materialize. They aren't the ones who bet the full faith and credit of our entire society on "social science" that turned out to be ideologically-motivated fictions. They are at fault, it seems to me, for many of their own pathologies; even accepting their framing that America as constituted was, is and likely will continue to be innately hostile to their culture, there's much better ways to handle such a reality than the strategies they've collectively defaulted to. But this doesn't change the fundamental nature of the situation: the problem isn't the blacks demanding impossible solutions, it's the whites who spent decades promising those impossible solutions, and are now desperate to skip out on the checks they've written and cannot cash. I remain baffled by the people, some of them commenters here, who seem to believe that if we could just sufficiently marginalize blacks, Red Tribe and Blue Tribe could lay their other differences aside and get down to productive cooperation.
I share your skepticism that any of this can be meaningfully rolled back to some more congenial prior state. We burned unbelievably vast and irreplaceable resources on a scam perpetrated by a specific band of ideologues, leaving us in a strictly-worse position.
On the one hand, after they can agree that rules are rules, and it doesn't matter what "disproportionate" amount of blacks end up in jail, what is there left to argue about? The central plank of blue tribe ideology seems to be rooted in the inherent evil of western white civilization, and exhibit A is blacks as a permanent underclass globally.
On the one hand, yeah, old habits die hard. It is hard to imagine the average blue triber going "Ok, yeah, I admit it, more blacks are in jail because they commit more crime" but then being ok with gun ownership, recklessness towards the climate, or free speech. But I also, simply, have a very difficult time imagining the blue tribe mind without that aforementioned central plank of their ideology.
I guess the difference is that I'm skeptical that black victimhood really is a central plank to Blue ideology. My perception is that the central plank in Blue ideology is the belief that they are capable of an arbitrary level of control over material reality, that they have the power to make the world as they wish it to be. "We know how to solve all our problems; if a problem isn't solved, it's the fault of someone with a name and an address."
It seems to me that the American Blue Tribe has existed since the founding, and they coexisted with explicit, legally-codified racism for a very long time without much of an issue. It likewise seems to me that many of their foreign analogues coexisted with deep cultural racism for even longer, and in some cases continue to do so right down to the present day. Blue Tribe's commitment to the racial justice narrative seems just as contingent to me as their commitment to Christianity or Bodily Autonomy. Blue ideology is explicitly built around facilitating rapid, fundamental social change; appeals to history and tradition seem to me to be rather badly missing the point.
What justifies the violations of freedom that allow that material control?
America has a liberal counter-narrative to totalitarian optimism, in theory. It's supposed to have much stronger protections than even many other liberal nations. One wedge that allows the defeat of defense mechanisms like freedom of association or federalism and hell, just even entry level noticing about transgender athletes is the condition of African Americans, to an actively uncomfortable degree ("black women would suffer more from attempting to police femininity" is a take that would be considered Stormfront-tier by SJWs if it wasn't SJWs saying it).
The Civil Rights movement is still considered an important enough pillar to base all of these arguments on (or the laws extending these protections to more and more people) and any modern attack on freedom is justified on the grounds that those values were already attacked during the CRM, and this is universally considered to be the right thing.
And the more that gets stacked on it, the harder to default.
It's the wedge they have, and it's been very effective.
They've observably gotten a lot of mileage out of material inequality and various flavors of materialist apocalypse.
The question isn't whether race is their biggest, best wedge in the American context. It certainly is. The question is whether the giant hammering that wedge ceases if the wedge were to be taken away. I'm pretty confident it does not. They will find their next-best alternative, and continue swinging.
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