The Digital Fight To Stop Woman Who Called Child N-Word Receiving $750K In Donations

Atlanta-based entrepreneur and activist Kiandria Demone is leading a campaign to prevent a white Minnesota woman from receiving over $750,000 in donations after she was filmed hurling a racial slur at a young Black child.

The incident

Shiloh Hendrix was caught on camera calling a five-year-old Black boy the n-word while at a playground in Rochester, Minnesota. 

She later launched a campaign on GiveSendGo, a Christian crowdfunding platform known for hosting fundraisers for Daniel Penny, Luigi Mangione, and Kyle Rittenhouse. She claimed she needed the money for her safety and potential relocation. The campaign’s target has since been raised to $1 million and, as of this writing, has surpassed $750,000.

The local NAACP chapter in Rochester has also started its own crowdfunding campaign for the family of the five-year-old and has raised more than $300,000 at the time of writing. The organization has also called for criminal charges against Hendrix, according to CBS News, and the city of Rochester called the footage “deeply disturbing” and said local law enforcement is looking into the matter.

Stopping Hendrix from receiving donations

After seeing the online donations for Hendrix, Demone got to work. Using her experience in web development and payment compliance, she began examining the backend of the GiveSendGo platform to determine how the funds were being processed. “I cracked HTML web code to expose the payment processor funding the racist campaign that is rewarding a yt woman for calling a Black child the N-word,” she wrote on Threads.

She initially identified Square, the payment service owned by Block Inc., as the processor facilitating the campaign’s transactions. In response, she mobilized a group of tech volunteers who worked in shifts to analyze the site’s infrastructure, track real-time changes, and coordinate a pressure campaign. Their efforts even temporarily crashed Square’s customer service ChatBot.

Square, owned by Block, has denied involvement, stating: “We do not and have not processed payments for them.”

Holding payment processors accountable

Demone is now focusing her actions on Stripe. “After initiating actions against Block Inc. for processing payments related to the fundraiser supporting Shiloh Hendrix, we discovered that Stripe has taken over as the payment processor,” she told supporters in an update.

Demone is asking the public to keep applying pressure by filing complaints directly with Stripe, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and local legislators. Stripe has not yet confirmed or denied its role as the payment processor.

“I have to see this through, because I have a Black child. 
I’m a Black mom. I’m not gonna sit back and watch people do things like that with no consequences when I have the skill to help do something about it,” she told Blckpress.

Image: Kiandria Demone