A Racist in the Park

In Rochester, Minnesota, Shiloh Hendrix is filmed admitting she called a five-year old autistic child a nigger (don’t flinch; that’s what she said). She claims the boy took something from her child. “I called the kid out for what he was,” she wrote on her crowdfunding page. In the video, Hendrix is belligerent. Flips off the man who films her. Even calls him a nigger. Now she is crying victim. “I have been put into a very dire situation.” The posted videos have “caused my family, and myself, great turmoil.” She has raised over $600,000 to date.

I am not shocked anymore. Outrage at her use of the racist slur or at the amount of money raised to support her seem to be a waste of energy. People are who they are. And it is clear, at least to me, that some white folks in this country have lost their minds and feel emboldened to impose their madness on the rest of us.

I could give less than a damn about Shiloh Hendrix and the people who have given her money. Nor am I interested in the wet eyes that will come with the sentimental condemnation of what she did. I am more concerned about that young boy who bore the brunt of Hendrix’s cruelty. She refused to see him as a child. Treated him like a monster. Labeled him her greatest fear. Even as she held her own child on her hip.

I am concerned about her baby, too. What will he hear as he grows up? How will his own sense of decency be malformed by his mother’s hatreds? What kind of adult will he become? Will he be a man who carries forward his mom’s sins and makes them his own?

But the Black child, who by some reports was deeply afraid and understandably so, will have to struggle with what that white woman said about him and the outpouring of support for her abuse of him. To be called a nigger wounds and scars, because all too often the word echoes what the country tries to deposit in our spirits by way of structures and policies. That somehow or in some inscrutable way, the color of one’s skin determines your value, and you end up spending much of life trying to prove to others and to yourself, not because you are obsessed with them, but because you want to live, that you are not a nigger.

These people want us to prove to them again and again that we are worth something. A Sisyphean task, because they will never believe us. They call us and our children out of our names. They declare that we haven’t earned anything: that our success is because of discrimination against them. They need us to be niggers, again, because the world as they know it is crumbling into ruins.

It is against this backdrop that we must raise and care for our babies. This country is what it is. Shiloh Hendrix was monstrous in her dealings with that baby. That much we know. But our task, despite their madness, is to raise him and our own: to make sure that the jungle these white folk have created doesn’t end up strangling our babies’ sense of themselves. We must hand over to them, instead, the beauty and power of our inheritances.

James Baldwin wrote of the challenge in “Uses of the Blues”:

In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.

Place a crown above that baby’s head. Let them know that the problem is not them. It never was about them. The red gums of the country ready for blood are not our own. Tell them that their lives are more than wreckage and ruin left after the plunder: that they must imagine themselves in the most expansive of terms.

To echo the words of Paul D to Sethe in Toni Morrison’s magisterial novel Beloved: tell our babies that they are their best thing. The Shiloh Hendrixes of the world and all those people who finance her hate, the MAGA crowd and all those who claim that we are not worthy, be damned. We are our best thing!

And that scares the shit out of these people.