The New York Times called the case of Mimi Groves ‘a reckoning,’ leaving no space for forgiveness.
The New York Times called the case of Mimi Groves ‘a reckoning,’ leaving no space for forgiveness.
J immy Galligan — the 18-year-old biracial teen who has “no regrets” about purposefully derailing the life of his white former classmate for once using a slur when she was 15 — is hardly the first teenage bully. Hopefully he’ll grow out of that. But in any case, neither he nor his target deserves the national media coverage they have been getting.
Here’s the catalytic nonsense: In 2016, Mimi Groves, then-high-school freshman at Heritage High School in Loudoun County, Va., sent a video to her friend on Snapchat in which she said the words, “I can drive, n*****s.” This ill-conceived and inappropriate message was then shared around until it made its way to Galligan, who, incensed by such racial insensitivity, decided to keep it in order to post it publicly “when the time was right,” which, Galligan told the New York Times, meant the specific moment that would “get her where she would understand the severity of that word.” [emphasis added]
So, Galligan waited for Groves to be accepted to her dream college, the University of Tennessee, whose cheer team she had also made. Meanwhile, in adult land, civil unrest and racial tension was spreading throughout the nation in response to the killing of George Floyd. Now a bit older and more sensitive to such matters, Groves posted her support of Black Lives Matter on Instagram. It was then that Galligan “got her.” He released her recorded slur to Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter. The reaction was precisely as he had hoped. Groves’s life plans were derailed. She was booted off the cheer team. Her admissions offer was revoked. Complete strangers posted hate-filled messages. All this for a single, flippant, four-word, three-second remark sent to a friend.
The only way that any morally sentient adult could participate in the humiliation of a young person in this way — let alone think themselves righteous — is if they subscribe to an ideology whereby people (however young) are not treated as individuals, with all the context that this demands, but rather as representatives of their racial group. Mimi Groves is a white girl. A baby Karen. An example needing to be made. Indeed, this is the precise logic permeating the staggeringly irresponsible reporting on the incident by the Times’ Dan Levin.
Levin sets the scene by telling the reader that Galligan claimed this sort of racial slur “was regularly hurled in classrooms and hallways throughout his years in the Loudoun Country school district.” (That may well be true, but oddly, Levin does not think to investigate. He does not include any comment from the school, nor does he specify the context.) Instead, Levin informs us that Galligan’s decision to unleash the video when it would cause Groves maximum damage was one that “would ricochet across Leesburg, Va., a town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.” But is he implying that Mimi Groves, born in the 21st century, is complicit in the racism of leaders and lawmakers from before her time? That doesn’t seem fair.
Circumstances and context, truth and justice, mercy and proportionality are the realm of the individual and simply not important when up against the highest collective good. To such a thinker, the ends always justify the means. Since the enemy is racism, any hint of it must be stamped out with full force. Yet people are complex, and not everyone who utters something racially offensive is a card-carrying member of the KKK. One of Groves’s black friends, who came to her defense on social media, put it well: “We’re supposed to educate people. . . not ruin their lives all because you want to feel a sense of empowerment.” Who hasn’t said something dumb as a teenager? “We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior,” as Stephen M. R. Covey once put it. Again, the story here is not Galligan’s cruelty, but rather how an ideology embedded deep into civic life so recklessly escalated it. The New York Times called the case of Mimi Groves “a reckoning,” leaving no space for forgiveness.
You have to feel sorry for teenagers — notoriously image-obsessed, immature, and lacking in empathy — who have never been as vulnerable and exposed as they are now. Before social media, teens had enough to be anxious about: Perhaps they weren’t good looking, popular or fashionable enough. Now, everything they do has the potential to go viral and to be judged by a global audience — it’s no wonder their anxiety levels are off the charts.
Imagine being the poor girl from Utah who wore a traditional Chinese dress to prom, only to have the whole woke world on her doorstep accusing her of racism and cultural appropriation. Or imagine the distress of Matthew Burdette, a 14-year-old in San Diego who was filmed surreptitiously by a classmate in the bathroom, who then posted it online and claimed he had been masturbating. (Burdette killed himself soon after.)
The teenage supposition, “it’s me against the world” is easily transformed into the teenage nightmare of “everyone hates me.” Social media and the Internet have taken that to the next level.