2025 has been an all-out assault on Blackness. Since Donald Trump took office on January 20th, he tried to erase the contributions of the Tuskegee Airmen from military history, has made attempts to gut the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and is trying his best to eradicate all Diversity, Equity and inclusion initiatives. These are the blatant, in your face results of his Presidency. But there is a more subtle and far more insidious thing that is happening because of the man who occupies the Oval Office.
By now I’m sure you’ve heard of Shiloh Hendrix. She is the white woman who was caught on camera unapologetically calling an autistic 5-year-old child the N-word. According to her, that situation “put [her] into a very dire situation,” and has since raised over $700,000 to help her navigate it. This is deeply concerning because this racist woman is now being rewarded for doing something that she would have been cancelled for just a year ago.
But Hendrix is not the only one. She is but the most recent example of a white person profiting off racism.
Lily Gaddis was a self-proclaimed ‘tradwife’ who went viral last year after she used the N-word during a cooking tutorial video. (Making potato salad with raisins, I suspect.)
She is now a right-wing pundit who proudly proclaims that she is an “unashamed racist.” Gaddis now is invited by the likes of Pies Morgan to share screen time with intellectuals like Dr. Marc Lamont Hill.
One more time for those in the back. Shiloh Hendrix and Lilly Gaddis both engaged in behavior that would have gotten them cancelled in years past, but the opposite has happened. They are now being rewarded for their bad behavior. The former was given nearly a million dollars and the latter now has a burgeoning media career. What are we to make of this?
President Donald Trump has created a culture of anti-Black permissibility. Let me put it another way. Things that racist white folk used to only say privately, they now feel emboldened to say with their chest. No longer are they socially ostracized for uttering these vile things…they are now rewarded.
Others who always wanted to say these things but felt silenced have rallied around these individuals. If you look at who’s donated to Hendrix’s fundraiser or who gives Gaddis a platform, they are, at best, conservative, and, at worst, Neo-Nazis.
This is the Trump effect. He makes racists feel comfortable to say whatever comes to mind, and they have no fear of what might happen. In fact, in the culture he created, there is a possibility that they might be rewarded.
This is America in 2025. It’s not as bad as 1965, but it’s not much better.