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NOTE CONTENTS: This story contains a term that refers to a racial slur.
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A video showing a Minnesota woman at a playground last week openly admitting to using a racist slur against a Black child has garnered millions of views. But what’s been equally appalling for some is that the woman has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in crowdfunds.
In the video, a man in Rochester, a city roughly 90 miles (145 kilometers) south of Minneapolis, confronts the woman for calling a 5-year-old boy the N-word. The woman appears to double-down on the racist term and flips off the man confronting her with both of her middle fingers.
The woman, who could not be reached for comment, has since amassed over $700,000 through Christian fundraising platform GiveSendGo for relocation expenses because of threats she received over the video. The fundraising page said she used the word out of frustration because the boy went through her 18-month-old child’s diaper bag. The Associated Press has not verified this assertion.
“I called the kid out for what he was,” she wrote, adding that the online videos have “caused my family, and myself, great turmoil.”
The flurry of monetary contributions has reignited multiple debates, from whether racist language and attacks are becoming more permissible to the differences between “cancel culture” and “consequence culture.” Many want to see the woman face some sort of comeuppance for using a slur, especially toward a child. Others say despite her words, she does not deserve to be harassed. The confrontation is reminiscent of others from the internet age in which the instigator of assaults or verbal attacks obtained almost folk hero status, while the victim received a tepid show of support by comparison.
The NAACP Rochester chapter started its own fundraising campaign for the child’s family. The GoFundMe page had raised $340,000 when it was closed Saturday per the wishes of the family, who want privacy, said the civil rights organization. It was speaking on behalf of the family of the child, who the organization said was on the autism spectrum.
“This was not simply offensive behavior—it was an intentional racist, threatening, hateful and verbal attack against a child, and it must be treated as such,” the NAACP Rochester chapter said in a statement.
The Rochester Police Department investigated and submitted findings to the Rochester City Attorney’s Office for “consideration of a charging decision,” spokesperson Amanda Grayson said in a statement Monday.
GiveSendGo did not immediately respond Tuesday to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
The donations did and did not surprise Dr. Henry Taylor, director for the Center of Urban Studies at the University at Buffalo.
But shifts in the political and cultural climate have emboldened some people to express racist and bigoted views against people of color or those they consider outsiders. A more recent backlash, from the White House to corporate boardrooms, against diversity, equality and inclusion initiatives have amplified those feelings.
The racism “hovering beneath the surface” comes from blame, Taylor said. “People are given someone to hate and someone to blame for all of the problems and challenges that they are facing themselves,” Taylor said.
The volume of monetary contributions in the Rochester case is reminiscent of the surge of support for individuals like Kyle Rittenhouse, Daniel Penny and George Zimmerman. All three men were legally found to have acted in self-defense or in defense of others after the death of a Black victim — except Rittenhouse, who killed two white protesters at a racial justice demonstration against police.
The support and opposition in these cases has often been split along party lines.
In the woman’s case, a contingent of supporters just want to fight cancel culture, said Franciska Coleman, an assistant professor of law at University of Wisconsin Law School, who has written about cancel culture and social regulation of speech. For some it can include donating “to everyone who they in quotes try to ‘cancel.’”
Some people are fixated on how “it just seems too much that this mother of two young kids is getting death threats and rape threats,” Coleman said.
Conservative commentators have gone online to applaud her for not capitulating to angry internet mobs while acknowledging she used a hateful word. “No one’s excusing it. But she didn’t deserve to be treated like a domestic terrorist,” conservative podcast host Matt Walsh said in a Facebook post.
There’s an important distinction, Coleman said, between “cancel culture” and “consequence culture.” The latter is about holding people accountable for actions and words that cause injury such as with “this poor child.”
That is what many people want to see in this Rochester woman’s case. Because a formal system of punishment may not impose consequences for the woman’s racist behavior, “we have to do it informally,” Colman said.
She and Taylor agree that, in conventional societal thinking, using racist slurs against someone who has frustrated or even provoked you is never acceptable. Those who think otherwise, even now, are seen as being on the fringes.
But donors on the woman’s GiveSendGo page unabashedly used racist language against the boy, prompting the site to turn off the comments section. Others excused her behavior as acting out of aggravation. There are communities where the racial slur is only unacceptable in “racially mixed company,” Coleman said.
Social media websites and crowdfunding platforms have helped people around the world speak with each other and with their wallets. It’s intensified by the anonymity these platforms allow.
“Feeling that no one will know who you are enables you to act on your feelings, on your beliefs in an aggressive and even mean-spirited way that you might not do if you were exposed,” Taylor said.
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Tang reported from Phoenix. Raza reported from Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
