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Black teen gets high-flying White classmate kicked out of college with video of her using racial slur in 2016

At the time, Mimi Groves was a 15-year-old freshman at Heritage High School in Leesburg, Virginia. She had just received her learner's permit and had excitedly used the slur while sitting in traffic

A Virginia student reportedly has no regrets after he shared a video of a classmate inadvertently using a racial slur, thereby causing her to withdraw from her dream university after the backlash that followed. Speaking to The New York Times, Jimmy Galligan said he had obtained a three-second video last year of Mimi Groves, a white classmate, using the racial slur back in 2016. “I can drive, n*****s,” Groves reportedly said in the video.

At the time, Groves was a 15-year-old freshman at Heritage High School in Leesburg, Virginia. She had just received her learner's permit and had excitedly used the slur while sitting in traffic. Groves had shared the video on Snapchat at the time, and it was ultimately somehow received by Galligan years later when the two were seniors.

The 18-year-old Galligan reportedly saved the footage for a year and waited for the perfect moment to strike — when Groves chose to attend the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in June this year. “I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Galligan told NYT. “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened.”

Galligan boasted to the outlet that he will now be able to remind himself that he "taught someone a lesson”. Groves was the varsity cheer captain at her high school and had been drafted to the university's cheer team — the current national champion — in May this year.

However, Groves couldn't believe her eyes when she received backlash weeks later amid the George Floyd protests, despite urging friends on social media to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, and do something" to support Black Lives Matter. According to The Sun, someone reportedly responded to the post saying: “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word.”

Groves later found that Galligan had shared the controversial footage just four hours prior to the backlash and it had gone viral on social media platforms such as TikTok and Twitter. This resulted in a wave of outraged netizens demanding to see the university revoke her admission.

In a recent interview, Groves explained that she "was so young" at the time and "didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it." She argued that the slur was in “all the songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”

Now 19, Groves said her entire family has had to face public shaming for the three-second clip recorded when she was just 15. “It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth,” Groves said of her video, according to the outlet. “How can you convince somebody that has never met you and the only thing they’ve ever seen of you is that three-second clip?”

In a Twitter threat in June, the University of Tennessee announced that her placement on the cheerleading team had been revoked and she would no longer be attending the school as a result.

“The University of Tennessee has received several reports of racist remarks and actions on social media by past, present, and future members of our community,” the school tweeted. “The university takes seriously our commitment to fostering a Volunteer community that values equity, inclusion, and that promotes respect for all people. We have a responsibility to support our black students and create a place where all Vols feel safe.”

“On Wednesday, following a racist video and photo surfacing on social media, Athletics made the decision not to allow a prospective student to join the Spirit Program. She will not be attending university this fall," the statement added.

While Galligan is enrolled in his freshman year at Vanguard University in California, Groves is taking online classes at a nearby community college while surrounded by her trophies and medals. “I’ve learned how quickly social media can take something they know very little about, twist the truth and potentially ruin somebody’s life,” she said.

One of Groves’s friends, who is Black, told NYT that she had personally apologized for the video long before it went viral. “We’re supposed to educate people not ruin their lives all because you want to feel a sense of empowerment,” she wrote in a Snapchat post, according to the newspaper.