A biracial college student says he doesn’t regret sharing a video of a white high school classmate uttering a racial slur because she should have known better.
Mimi Groves was excited after earning her learner’s permit and was sitting in traffic when she dropped the N-bomb in a video.
Groves, who was 15 at the time, said, “I can drive, n*****s,” in the video.
The high school student from Leesburg, Virginia sent her video to a friend on Snapchat, where classmate Jimmy Galligan, 18, spotted it, The Sun reports.
Galligan reportedly saved the video for a year before he posted it on social media right when he knew that Groves, now 19, had chosen to attend the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in June.
She was kicked off the University of Tennessee cheerleading squad and eventually withdrew from the school under pressure from admissions officials, according to The NY Times. They told her they’d received hundreds of emails and phone calls from outraged alumni, students and the public asking them to revoke its admission offer.
Groves, the cheerleading captain on her high school team, was mortified. She had just been accepted to the university’s cheer team when the video dropped — right around the time of the George Floyd protests.
Groves had urged her friends and followers to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, and do something” in support of Black Lives Matter.
One of her social media followers responded: “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word.”
Groves said that, at the time, she “didn’t understand the severity of the word, or the history and context behind it.”
“I was so young,” Groves said. She added that the slur was in “all the [rap] songs we listened to, and I’m not using that as an excuse.”
She said her entire family was struggling with the public shaming.
“It honestly disgusts me that those words would come out of my mouth,” Groves said. “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?”
Galligan was unmoved by Groves’ tearful apologies.
“I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of that word,” Galligan told the New York Times.
He added: “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened” to her.
Feeling proud of himself, Galligan said he will always remember he “taught someone a lesson.”
Galligan is now enrolled in his freshman year at Vanguard University in California while Groves lives at home, taking online classes at a nearby community college.
One of her friends, who is Black, said Groves apologized to her long before the video went viral.
