Take Your Huckleberry Finn and Shove It!
English Lit is making Black kids miserable. Why doesn’t anyone care?
The other day my best friend sent me a New York Times story about a Black teenager who got a White classmate cancelled. Her delayed downfall began four years ago with a three-second Snapchat video.
After the murder of George Floyd last May, Mimi Groves, a recent graduate of Heritage High School in Leesburg, Virginia, posted a message on Instagram urging her followers to support Black Lives Matter. Jimmy Galligan, an 18-year-old former classmate whose mother is Black and whose father is White, responded by posting the aforementioned Snapchat clip, in which Groves uses the N-word.
Galligan sat on the video for an entire year, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. Once he did, it quickly went viral, made Groves a pariah on social media, and ruined her college plans.
The narrative reminds me of something I’ve seen play out in movies and on TV shows, though the damning video usually inspires slut shaming instead of racial reckoning. Galligan says he, like many of his fellow Black classmates, spent his years at Heritage High suffering under the profound weight of racism, and he “wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of the word.”
