If a young girl tries to be cool by using an offensive word that pop stars use, it’s a mistake, but is it a crime? This is really a story of adults who’ve lost their bearings.
When did we become so merciless? I’m not talking about the 18-year-old kid, featured in a New York Times article, who elected to torpedo a fellow student over a three-year-old video clip — though what he did was cruel. No, I’m talking about all of the supposed adults who created the world these kids navigate through. The outline of the story is as follows: Mimi Groves, a 15-year-old high school freshman in Leesburg, Virginia, posted a Snapchat video when she got her learner’s permit. Speaking into the camera, she said, “I can drive, n—–.” Whoa. Who uses the N-word like that? We’ll come to that. The video circulated among a few people and was forgotten. Three years later, it surfaced again, this time coming to the attention of a classmate, Jimmy Galligan, who filed it away. Later, after Mimi Groves had been accepted to her dream college, the University of Tennessee, and welcomed onto the cheerleading team (apparently the national champion), Galligan released the three-second video. It was May 2020. The furor following the death of George Floyd was erupting nationwide. Groves, the Times reports, urged her Instagram followers to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something.” Her first hint of the deluge to come was a comment from a stranger, saying “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word.” Galligan’s little time bomb had exploded on Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter. Within hours, the University of Tennessee was fielding calls demanding that they rescind their acceptance of Groves.
