Context, damnit, context!

Yeah, obviously, I’ve been enjoying my holidays and not blogging much (sorry quick hits lovers), but this one I could just not let go by unmentioned. So much damn awfulness in this:

LEESBURG, Va. — Jimmy Galligan was in history class last school year when his phone buzzed with a message. Once he clicked on it, he found a three-second video of a white classmate looking into the camera and uttering an anti-Black racial slur.

The slur, he said, was regularly hurled in classrooms and hallways throughout his years in the Loudoun County school district. He had brought the issue up to teachers and administrators but, much to his anger and frustration, his complaints had gone nowhere.

So he held on to the video, which was sent to him by a friend, and made a decision 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.

“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly when the time was right.

Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur, to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan attended, but did not cause much of a stir.

Mr. Galligan had not seen the video before receiving it last school year, when he and Ms. Groves were seniors. By then, she was a varsity cheer captain who dreamed of attending the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team was the reigning national champion. When she made the team in May, her parents celebrated with a cake and orange balloons, the university’s official color.

The next month, as protests were sweeping the nation after the police killing of George Floyd, Ms. Groves, in a public Instagram post, urged people to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,” responded someone whom Ms. Groves said she did not know.

Her alarm at the stranger’s comment turned to panic as friends began calling, directing her to the source of a brewing social media furor. Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer.

By that June evening, about a week after Mr. Floyd’s killing, teenagers across the country had begun leveraging social media to call out their peers for racist behavior. Some students set up anonymous pages on Instagram devoted to holding classmates accountable, including in Loudoun County.

The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public.

To quote myself from twitter…

The idea that somebody should have their college admission rescinded because of something they said at age 15 (and not even close to an act of actual racial harassment) is insane! Intent matters! Context matters! Age matters! This does not further a more equitable society!

Honestly,  I mean maybe if she had been going Black people when she was 15 and saying, “you N-word” to their face, but, simply for using the word in a non-harassing, non-threatening context in which she surely heard many a Black person use the word.  I mean, what if she had stabbed somebody when she was 15 and truly sorry about it– would we say “no four-year college for you!”?  I suspect not.  But, dumbly using the word in a dumb context (15-year olds do dumb things!!) without any intent to harm others?!  Again, intent matters!  This might be an interesting discussion if she were intentionally insulting and harrassing the Black kids in her school/neighborhood in this manner, but simply using the word in a stupid 15-year old way?  Also, Jimmy Galligan– a kid who literally plots for years on how best to ruin another kid’s life?  Now that‘s a kid I don’t want at my university.  

And, as several comments I saw on twitter made mention… the real shame of this is the adults who need to know better, especially those at Tennessee.  Mob justice is not justice.