National overview
How a vicious classmate and a cowardly university ruined a girl’s life
‘ARacial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning’. This is how the New York Times bought her hit piece on a first-year student for something she said as a first-year student. Mimi Groves was still a child when she said in a Snapchat survey: “I can drive, followed by the” n-word “- the racial slur. Jimmy Galligan, a half-black student attending Heritage High School in Virginia graduated last spring with Groves, acquired this video during their senior year, Per Galligan himself, he waited until Groves was accepted and chose to enroll at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville to release the video – which went viral The ensuing firestorm led to a shower of abuse and an ultimatum from the University of Tennessee to Groves: withdraw voluntarily or have your offer of admission revoked. Groves, who is white, chose the former and followed now courses at a local community college instead of at her dream school – the settlement.Does the former two have led to the third on the scale that Groves is now dealing with? Any reasonable person would say no.Even if she had the obvious conceded – she should not have used the failure in any context, there is little indication that she used it out of hatred for black people. In fact, the context seems clear: Groves said it casually, as hundreds of hip-hop tracks do every year. It does not excuse the behavior that should be considered unacceptable. But this is an important distinction between the use of the slur with animus, which of course was not her intention. There are many who are to blame for what happened. If Groves can be held responsible for a poor decision made in her mid-teens, Galligan could certainly be the case to deliberately try to ruin a classmate’s life four years later – a worse crime on a more mature age. But despite Galligan’s guilt, institutions like the University of Tennessee and the New York Times are far more ridiculous than any of these teens in Virginia. At university, cowardice won the day. Faced on social media that the acceptance of Groves should be revoked, administrators bowed to the pressure of an outspoken minority, saying it was the right thing to do that was most appropriate. It was easier for university officials to hang out Groves to dry than to withstand the intense but fleeting storm themselves. So that’s what they did. Their decision has nothing to do with race or any other kind of justice. They did not care if Groves would feel ‘comfortable on campus’ – language they used to persuade her to withdraw before handing over the ultimatum – and they did not honestly believe that black students on campus would be in danger. be as she to enter. The only thing that mattered to them was to escape the situation with as little effort and investigation as possible. Forget about taking a stand and explain why they would not punish a young woman for a mistake she made as a child. It’s all about damage control. I wonder how many of us would eventually be eligible for the University of Tennessee if we had kept the same standard as Mimi Groves from our freshman year of high school. And at the Times, shameful (but now well-known) behavior has also won. To indicate the approval of Galligan’s conduct to readers without endorsing it directly, Dan Levin, the author of the article, notes that Galligan ‘made a decision that was about Leesburg, Va. Lee and whose school system had an order to desegregate more than a decade after the Supreme Court ruling. The ridiculous implication is that the name of Groves’ city and the opposition to integration justified her treatment more than 50 years ago. of the richest provinces in the country, where black students said they had long been ridiculed ”before telling the stories of students who were forced by their classmates to endure horrific racist treatment or even ‘Underground Railroad’ games forced on them physical exercise class. As crazy as these stories are, they describe people who are guilty of much worse than Groves’ offense. Levin’s attempt to blur the lines between her case and damning cases is despicable – or worse. Kevin also records an anecdote from Galligan that shows in a useful way how wrong Galligan did:> Mr. Galligan thinks a lot about race, and the implications of racial barriers. He said his father was often the only white person at mother’s family gatherings, where ‘the N-word is a term sometimes thrown around’ by black family members. A few years ago he said that his father had said it out loud, and Mr. Galligan and his sister asked to take him quietly aside and explain that this is unacceptable, even if a joke is made. Just a few paragraphs later:> For his role, Mr. Galligan said he has no regrets. “If I had never posted the video, nothing would have ever happened,” he said. And because the internet never forgets, the clip will always be available to watch. >> “I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said contentedly. “You taught someone a lesson.” For his father, Galligan calmly explained why it was misused – even casually. For Groves, he summoned the national tribulation over her and her family and denied her the opportunity to attend her dream school. Those who are so unforgiving as to seek this revenge, so cowardly as to grant it, and so dishonest as to excuse it, are broken.