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Let's get into it:
Remember Shiloh Hendrix? The Minnesota mom who went viral for calling an 8-year-old the n-word after he stole from her diaper bag while she watched her 18-month-old son at a playground? She's on trial this week, charged with two misdemeanors, and facing up to 90 days in jail along with a $1,000 fine.
Because so-called hate speech is not a crime in these United States, the jury must decide if her comments to the autistic 8-year-old who stole a snack from her bag and stuffed it in his mouth constitute "fighting words," meaning whether she attempted to incite or engage in violence with her commentary as a prelude to that. The judge in the case instructed the jury to consider this, not whether or not they were offended by what she said.
But as the case has gone on this week, with arguments expected to wrap up on Thursday, several things were revealed about the incident and the aftermath: the man who filmed the video was a third-party onlooker who was not at all involved. He posted the video to TikTok, and it was only after that video went viral that the boy's father, Shire Jimale, reached out not to the police, but to the local NAACP, which instructed him to contact the police.
Jimale was interviewed by police twice in May 2025 and it was only during the second of those interviews that he said he feared that Hendrix would strike his child. And it just so happens that this alleged fear is the only thing that would speak to Hendrix's alleged crime of "fighting words."
There is so much in this case that exemplifies what's going on in the US over the past year; it's like a microcosm. The racial aspect: Jimale didn't talk to the police first, but to the NAACP. The NAACP used the case to fundraise. That fundraiser had to be stopped because another Somali family claimed they were the ones involved in the case, not the Jimales, which speaks to all the allegations and convictions of fraud in the Somali community.
The viral video aspect: Is it even a thing if there's no video? And does that video even matter if it got less than a million views? How much is a viral video not about the thing that happened but about the person who shot the footage? In this case, the cameraman, another Somali man, taunted and harassed Hendrix, which can be heard on the video. After the video led to Hendrix's life being turned upside down, she launched a fundraiser—up to nearly $850,000 at the time of writing—which drew responses along racial lines. White people were sick of being called racist and black people were offended by the n-word even though it's used in black culture all the time.
And of course, the whole Somali fraud in Minnesota thing. Autism in the Somali community in Minnesota is out of control, with rates way higher than the national average. However, convictions have been piling up against Somali autism providers in the state who have gotten Somali families to allow their children to be diagnosed as autistic so they can sign up for services they don't need which are not provided, leading the providers to bill the state, collect the money, and give kick-backs to the families.
Libby