Thankfully, a vicious, now-viral TikTok video about the victims of the Texas floods has received a sane response.
Mass fundraiser campaigns for individuals infamous for a range of despicable acts have blown up in the past couple of years. There was the campaign to raise legal-defense funds for Luigi Mangione, the man who assassinated UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson; the campaign to raise money for Karmelo Anthony, the high-school-aged boy accused of stabbing another teenager to death; and the campaign to help Shiloh Hendrix, the woman accused of calling a little boy a racial slur on a playground.
Fundraisers like these usually attract deeply partisan, too-online individuals for whom digital activism is a kind of god. It’s disheartening to read the racist, sexist, murderous comments that tend to litter these platforms — which is why the shockingly sane online response to a recent racist tirade on TikTok is worth highlighting.
Sade Perkins is a Texas resident who posted a now-viral TikTok video about the floods that have ravaged Texas. In it, she falsely claimed that an all-girls summer camp hit by the floods was “whites only.” Dozens of the girls and camp staff have perished.
“Especially in today’s political climate, if this were a group of Hispanic girls….this would not be getting this type of coverage that they’re getting. No one would give a f***,” Perkins said. “They want you to have sympathy for [the girls]. They want to get out of your bed and to come out of your home and to go find these people and to donate your money to go to find these people.”
“Meanwhile, they are deporting your family members,” she continued. “Meanwhile, they’re setting up concentration camps and prisons for your family members. And I need you all to keep that in mind before you all get out there and put on your rain boots and go find these little girls.”
When one commenter online warned Perkins there would be consequences for her comments, she replied, “Consequences for what?? Maybe it was gods will to wash them lil cu#t$ away.” She later said that she chose “those words in particular because I knew that it would get under their skin” and accused people of using her words to “shift the narrative . . . instead of focusing on the failure of the government and the white supremacy.”
Perkins, who acknowledged in the original video that her comments would probably get her canceled, is still making her rounds on TikTok, waiting, one can only assume, to achieve the good kind of fame — to be snatched up as a darling of some fringe political movement. She “feels like an influencer,” she said in subsequent videos, and enjoys being “gassed up.” No one has taken the bait.
A GiveSendGo campaign that asks the public to stand with Perkins and protect her from “systemic retaliation” has been live for almost two days. It’s raised a pathetic $389 so far. Some people donated just to leave comments such as, “I rebuke you in Jesus name,” “for your funeral expenses,” and “paid just to say eat sh*t.”
When Americans crowdsource funding for figures like Mangione, Anthony, or Hendrix, it’s hard to resist the sinking feeling that society is too divided to function properly. Political tempers become incensed and magnified by online debates to a discouraging degree. I regret being cynical enough to have thought that a contingent of Americans would support Perkins’s reprehensible comments.