Taboo Words and the Alpha Taboo
Musings on recent internet events re. "The Word of Power," some strange phenomenon occasionally seen in the traumatically brain injured, & what it means for American and western society re. race
Meet Shiloh Hendrix of Rochester, Minnesota-a woman who, until recently, was effectively (and I say this not pejoratively - but descriptively) a nobody. An inconsequential person.
Now, she’s at the center of a viral internet social event that appears to show no signs of letting up.
There’s not much concrete information about her, but speculation has run rampant since her GiveSendGo fundraiser, titled “Help Me Protect My Family,” exploded online. Some claim Shiloh is a single mom (she’s apparently married), others whisper about a past in internet porn (this looks largely unsubstantiated), and there are mentions of a 2012 DWI (this - apparently more credible).
Frankly, all of these details are noise. They’re just fodder for media optics, a distraction.
On April 28, 2025, Shiloh was at Soldiers Field Veterans Memorial Park in Rochester with her child. According to reports, a young black child-allegedly five years old and possibly autistic (neither detail confirmed)- was roaming the park and began rummaging through Shiloh’s diaper bag, taking items.
Caught in the act, Shiloh reportedly snapped and called the child a racial slur, the infamous, the terrible, the Alpha Taboo Word - the great and terrible “n-word.”
Enter Sharmake Omar, a 30-year-old Somalian man who filmed the incident. Omar himself has a reported history of traffic violations and recently dismissed charges in a sexual assault case (also irrelevant here), confronted Shiloh on camera.
“Did you just call that child the n-word?” he asked, excited, accusatory.
Her response? “It’s none of your f------ business,” accompanied by a dismissive wave.
What happened next was fascinating, jarring, socially significant.
Omar pressed her, escalating the encounter: “Why don’t you have the balls to say it again right now?”
Shiloh could have at this moment just walked away. Maybe denied it. Could have ended there, perhaps.
Instead, she did the unthinkable. She repeated the slur, clearly and defiantly, multiple times into the camera.
Omar, clearly stunned, warned, “That’s hate speech; you can be recorded for that.”
Unfazed, Shiloh flipped him off and walked away with her child as Omar called after her, “OK, we’ll see what the internet has to say about that.”
The Unexpected Backlash-or Lack Thereof
Omar uploaded the video, likely expecting the usual outcome: Shiloh would be doxxed, publicly shamed, and “canceled” in the familiar post-2020 ritual.
The playbook is drudgerously familiar and predictable to all of us in the modern era: in “cancellation,” first you get exposed - doxxed, then threatened and harassed. Then you lose your job, future prospects, friends, church ties, volunteer roles, everything. You basically lose your life. As this is all happening, the pressure mounts and mounts until the offender buckles and posts a tearful apology for their grave sins, their “racial harm” or whatever transgression - and then vanishes into obscurity - summarily erased and ostracized from every vestige of civic existence.
But - Shiloh didn’t follow this script. Instead, incredibly, she tripled down, launching a GiveSendGo fundraiser with an initial goal of $20,000.
Almost overnight, donations poured in, surpassing goal after goal. As of now, she’s raised over $770,000, and the donations are steadily rolling in.
What does this all mean?
This mistake is in thinking this is somehow about the event itself - about Shiloh Hendrix, rando Minnesota lady yelling a racial slur at a child in a park, a tawdry act at best. Or “the right to be racist,” or to be a “white supremacist” or some such utter retarded nonsense.1
I see things thusly, similarly to how
has eloquently written below - what has happened potentially signals a major cultural sea change in how we handle one of the most potent taboos in modern Western society, especially in the post-WWII, post-Civil Rights era we find ourselves in:
For a deeper dive into this sociocultural shift, I highly recommend the article “Stripping the Word of Its Power” by
and the accompanying interview with Mr. Carter by .Their key point: instead of being erased from polite society, Shiloh has been showered with financial support.
This challenges the very framework of social control tied to this “Word of Power.”
This is how taboos die.
Taboo Words in the Brain Injured
As someone working in long-term care with older adults-often those with cognitive decline from Alzheimer’s or vascular dementia-I’ve been reflecting on a related phenomenon.
While I rarely encounter traumatic brain injury (TBI) patients (mostly progressive dementia of the “insidious onset and progressive decline” variety), I have, if I recall, once or twice in my career encountered a brain-injured patient displaying what has been called “preserved swearing” or “automatic speech preservation” - where patients lose nearly all expressive language due to concussive or penetrating injuries, yet retain the ability to utter a curse words - also known as taboo language.
This isn’t new.
French physician and anatomist Paul Broca, of “Broca’s Area” fame, noted this in the 19th century. One of his aphasic patients, a 47-year-old named “Chev” who suffered a TBI from a suicide attempt, could only say “sacré nom de Dieu” (“holy name of God”).
Given the religious era of French society at the time, this was deeply blasphemous-a classic taboo. Since Broca’s time, this preservation of taboo words in brain-injured patients has been documented repeatedly. Modern functional neuroradiology suggests these words are processed differently in the brain compared to regular language.
These words often have what is called “low emotional valence” (meaning - they are negative in character) but “high (emotional) arousal,” meaning these words, because of their cultural loading, overactivate limbic circuits by eliciting feelings of threat and harm, and shutting down rational, “left-brained” language processing. This - in very oversimplified way - explains why someone with severe left-hemisphere damage might lose speech but still blurt out “fuck,” “shit,” or even the n-word.
Also worth noting - while there’s no universal list of taboo words across cultures, they often fall into categories like sexual terms (“fuck”), slurs (racial, gendered, or targeting gays), disability insults (“retard”), or death/disease references. Their “power” shifts over time and place. In the contemporary West, religious taboos like “Jesus Christ” have largely faded (except perhaps in Italy). In East Asian, Slavic, or Spanish-speaking cultures, sex-related slurs retain potency, while in the U.S., racial slurs carry the heaviest weight.
This suggests that “taboo words” appear to be uniquely represented in the human brain. They are something special, and seem to be an aspect of our cultural evolution as a species. “Taboo words” and their maintainence seem to be how cultures police themselves - how regimes are imposed on populations.
It is curious though - while there is a decent amount of research on the phenomenon of “taboo words” in brain injured patients, there appears to be little clinical literature on brain-injured patients preferentially using racial slurs.
My hunch?
The taboo around racial slurs are so deeply ingrained, so dangerously radioactive in Western society that even academic study shies away from it - it’s as if it doesn’t exist. Yet, it must!
(An anecdotal example supporting my hypothesis is typified by the firing and cancellation of the above fellow, formerly the NY Times Science Editor, who made the mistake of uttering the “word of power” out loud as part of an intellectual discussion with students. As far as I am aware, he remains unemployed and effectively permanently cancelled).
The Evolution of Taboo Words to Non-Taboo and what it means for Social Heirarchies.
Like all word taboos - the “n-word’s” taboo status is deeply contextual.
For Black individuals, hearing it from a white person is often framed as a uniquely harmful experience - so deeply offensive and harmful it prompts calls for legal - or even violent repercussions.
Yet, when spoken by black people amongst themselves, it’s seen a form of in-group affiliative behavior, of in-group signalling, or what is called “reclaiming the word.”
A sampling of hip-hop music and urban black culture from the 80s through current day finds the word in widespread use. This “reclamation” of the word by the black community is viewed as a positive, if not liberatory phenomenon by many.
But is it truly?
Contrast this with the word “queer.”
From the mid-20th century through the 1980s, “queer” had all the earmarks of a taboo word: it functioned as a classic low valence, high arousal sexual slur, reinforcing taboos against homosexuality, especially among men.
Yet, via subsequent cultural shifts & shifts in sensibilities, particularly amongst the elite and professional managerial class in the U.S. & the West - the taboo around the word “queer” has been transformed.
Being gay is no longer widely viewed as deviant across political spectrums, it is in fact aggressively celebrated. The “reclamation” of the word “queer” is a mainstream phenomenon - prominently monetized through corporate Pride campaigns, and enshrined in academia via “Queer Theory” departments.
Professionals such as dentists, doctors, etc, can say the word “queer” openly at PTA meetings without a second thought. “Queer” has become a marker of class alignment for the predominantly white, professional & upper classes.
But this is interesting - despite the “reclamation” behavior of the black community for the N-word, there has been no shift in the “alpha taboo” status of the N-word.
In fact, I’d say it’s gone in reverse.
Anecdotally - I have a teenaged relative who, amongst other things, listens to hip-hop, which, as we all know, often features frequent use of the n-word. He often sings or raps along with these songs, but makes a point of avoiding saying “the word” which makes for a very strange experience of listening to him in the car, bizarrely but deliberately omitting every instance where he might accidentally say the “n-word” out loud by accident.
Yet, when I was a kid in the 80s, I remember a (very white) friend of mine who discovered “NWA” and thought it was the coolest thing. We sang along to the songs because they sounded, well, badass!
We didn’t think twice about singing along & saying the N-word out loud as we did it (but - we also didn’t think about using the word as an epithet either, since we weren’t, you know, assholes).
So, there’s an interesting and uncomfortable truth to be grappled with, when reflecting on the difference between the evolution of “queer” from slur to reclaimed, and now monetized, mainstreamed and (at times, cringily) celebrated word in modern culture, versus the strangely socially bifurcated, frozen status of the “n-word.”
It’s instructive in my view, and it speaks to some really uncomfortable things about how America has dealt with race.
The fact is, the “N-word” as the “alpha taboo,” the Word of Power - is a prison for both white people and black people.
The “N-word” isn’t merely a slur. It’s a lynchpin in a complex system of social control, fear, and ritualized virtue signaling that has governed interracial relations and public speech for generations. From
’s article:
The enduring strength of the “N-word’s” taboo has sustained a regime in which both blacks and whites have been perpetually locked into endless, futile, repeating cycles of complementary roles of grievance & apology, doing nothing more than fueling an entire industry of race grifting and performative allyship that has done nothing to uplift either group.
The maintenance & policing of the Alpha Taboo hasn’t stopped a single racist from being racist. It hasn’t educated a single poor black person or given them a job or uplifted them. It’s made race grievance grifters rich - and has made everyone else angry and empty inside.
Let’s be clear: Shiloh’s act was never laudable.
In a likely moment of frustration, this woman inexcusably called a child a racial slur. But without the internet’s viral, global reach, the just consequences for her act rightly would have been something along the lines of being a yelled at by her husband, reprimanded by her boss, maybe demoted to the graveyard shift at work, or being sidelined from social gatherings for a while.
Omar, the Somali immigrant who recorded her, likely expected & intended that after he uploaded this video it would completely end her life as she knew it - grotesquely destroying her livelihood and social standing in act of disproportionately unjust, vicious, performative nonsense.
Remember - this isn’t about one incident. Seeing this as a “right-wing endorsement of racism,” is intellectually lazy or dishonest framing - but OK, you do you.
I see this as a collective expression of exhaustion with an endless, furtive, Sisyphean cycle of public shaming, forced, performative apologies, and the bureaucratic apparatus that narcissistically sees itself as the rightful wielders power to police all aspects of language and identity for us peons.
Yet - the “alpha taboo” may be in the process of being punctured not by argument but by a critical mass refusing to play the condemnation game-a refusal backed by tangible, mass donations.
This could represent a critical vibe shift. For the black community, it might end their use as props and leverage in a system that offers little real gain.
For white people, it could lift a “cognitive prison” of performative guilt and an suffocatingly and increasingly bizarre regime of self-censorship (I refer you back to the former NY Times Science Editor’s firing - or my teenaged family member’s strange behavior when singing along to songs that contain the N-word).
If - and I emphasize if - this Shiloh Hendrix situation actually represents the fear sustaining the “alpha taboo” (and the entire apparatus of race-based moral theater that surrounds it) dissolving, this likely represents a time of great anxiety for people across the political spectrum.
It’s unsettling to those invested in the status quo, emotionally and/or financially. But it could represent a more honest, less ritualized engagement with race, language, and power in American life.
We shall see.
I expect such retarded reductionism from mind-controlled, progressive leftists. But have seen, depressingly, this attitude verbalized by people online nominally aligned with the “new right” or “dissident right” as well. Mostly these are what I would classify as “counter-elites,” (a la Peter Turchin) like the James Lindsays, Colin Wrights, and Jordan Peterson types. They are uncomfortable. They don’t want a destruction of the current regime. They just want to assume control of it and continue it. But this requires a separate article and discussion.
Disagree about “inexcusable” which is buying into the whole taboo nonsense. Some out of control kid, with no parents around to control or discipline him, was rummaging through this woman’s stuff, while she’s a single mother out with her child in a public place. She may be under all kinds of stress. She doesn’t look like she’s enjoying an upper middle class, comfortable life. She’s not a “Karen.” Her irritated outburst was indeed excusable, and the type of consequences you say should be applied to her, such as having her work impacted by it, are far too excessive.
Thank you for this.
In my current LTC world, the reality is most of the care staff is now black and most of the long-term residents are white, especially in the Assisted Living setting, which is private pay and financed by the sale of the resident’s private home.
So I run into the situation you describe frequently.
The taboos still exist (but I don’t see it from the African immigrant care staff, only the Americans).
So, when certain caregivers report the behavior, I explain the reason for the uttering-but I must express a certain shocked outrage or risk being labeled a racist and turned into management.
Society may be changing but the hostages are still out there.