This year saw a wave of protests in reaction to the death of George Floyd. The stated purpose of the more peaceful ones went well beyond an effort to demand more accountability for police officers. Protesters hoped to trigger a broader awareness about racial injustice and the need for some sort of reconciliation. But such a reconciliation will be made impossible by the Jacobins who refuse to recognize that people can change.
The latest example, which received national attention thanks to a lengthy piece in the New York Times, involves a Virginia teenager who had her life uprooted because, as a high school freshman, she recorded herself using a racist slur.
For the unacquainted, the teenager, Mimi Groves, sent her friend a private, three-second Snapchat message after getting her driver’s license in which she said, “I can drive,” followed by the N-word. Time passed, and then, last year, somebody sent the video to another student, Jimmy Galligan. Galligan held on to the video and waited for the right time to release it.
That moment came after Groves, a cheerleader, was accepted into the University of Tennessee, her dream school due to its competitive cheer program, and posted on social media in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. In response, Galligan posted the yearsold three-second clip. The clip went viral, and suddenly, the University of Tennessee was flooded with messages demanding Groves not be allowed to attend the school.
Sure enough, the cheerleading squad revoked its offer to her, and school administrators pressured her to withdraw, telling her she would be uncomfortable if she ever made it to campus due to the uproar and that if she did not voluntarily withdraw, her offer would be rescinded anyway.
It should be noted that Groves insists that she regrets her use of the word.
“At the time, I didn’t understand the severity of the word or the history and context behind it because I was so young,” she said, adding that the word was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”
A black classmate also said that Groves had personally apologized for the video before it became an internet sensation.
This is a completely destructive way to handle the issue. If we are ever going to make progress as individuals or as a society on the issue of race, it’s only going to happen if we accept that people are capable of growth. This should especially be true of an academic institution. If instead we assume that people are irredeemable by age 15, then there is no hope. It’s suggestive that the goal isn’t reconciliation but retribution.
