On Dec. 26, 2020, The New York Times published a story entitled “A Racial Slur, a Viral Video, and a Reckoning.”
The article by Dan Levin details the saga of Mimi Groves, a 19-year-old graduate from Heritage High School in Loudoun County, Virginia. She would have been an incoming freshman at the University of Tennessee (UT) this year, and had been accepted onto the UT cheer team. That was until a three-second video surfaced wherein Groves, who is white and then aged 15, uses a racial slur. The video, posted by a fellow student from Heritage High, who has one white parent and one African American, was intended to get UT to withdraw their offer of admissions to Groves and it worked like a charm. Athletics barred her from the cheer program and admissions officials at the university pressured Groves to withdraw according to her statement in the Times.
Ironically, the event that precipitated the firestorm surrounding Groves was her decision to post on social media urging others to support the Black Lives Matter movement. At that point, her classmate posted the video he had been holding onto for years, generating a pressure campaign that UT admissions inevitably caved into.
The rest of the article from the Times, which you can read here, goes on to characterize Leesburg, Virginia as a fevered swamp of racism based on the town being named after a relative of Robert E. Lee, the slave trade that existed in the county over 150 years ago and anecdotes about racial insensitivity from a county school board investigation. I’ve never been to Leesburg, but neither has Dan Levin, I’m willing to wager, and cobbling anecdotes together does not make the pressure campaign to get Mimi Groves to withdraw justified.
In fact, the entire Times article is a project in narrative framing intended to excuse the bad behavior of a crowd of online cyberbullies by a columnist at the national newspaper of repute targeting a teenage girl. That is the textbook definition of punching down.
As to the actual content of the video, it seems highly dubious to claim that a three-second Snapchat video wherein Groves exclaims “I can drive!” followed by the aforementioned slur represents anything other than the universally-shared experience of youthful indiscretion. It’s an extreme stretch in logic to suggest that her use of the term was anything other than an outgrowth of the popularity of hip-hop music that features the word in its lyrics among her age cohort, which is Groves’ own explanation. There’s no reason not to take her word on that, and there is certainly no reason to connect a video made by a 15-year-old to a matriculating cesspool of racism in a county Joe Biden won by double-digits.
I’m not attempting to downplay the harm that hurtful language can cause, especially words with a great deal of heavy, racially-charged baggage, but the actions of UT and The Times do not seem proportional to the offense.
I’m just a white male, so feel free to disregard my opinions or recommendations. To me, this smacks of cruelty masquerading as social justice. Perhaps Groves committed the unforgivable sin, but to me it feels like UT missed a teachable moment. Rather than letting woke-scolds dictate who can and can’t attend their school, admissions officers at UT should have taken the high road. They should have stated: “Regardless of what harm you have done in the past, the University of Tennessee will teach you to be a compassionate citizen that cares about all people.”
That, however, is not the world we live in.
Photo Credit / UTK.edu
