XPost: alt.politics.nationalism.white, rec.arts.tv, alt.news-media   
   XPost: talk.politics.guns   
   From: athletics@vanguard.edu   
      
   LEESBURG, Va. — Jimmy Galligan was in history class last school   
   year when his phone buzzed with a message. Once he clicked on   
   it, he found a three-second video of a white classmate looking   
   into the camera and uttering an anti-Black racial slur.   
      
   The slur, he said, was regularly hurled in classrooms and   
   hallways throughout his years in the Loudoun County school   
   district. He had brought the issue up to teachers and   
   administrators but, much to his anger and frustration, his   
   complaints had gone nowhere.   
      
   So he held on to the video, which was sent to him by a friend,   
   and made a decision that would ricochet across Leesburg, Va., a   
   town named for an ancestor of the Confederate general Robert E.   
   Lee and whose school system had fought an order to desegregate   
   for more than a decade after the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling.   
      
   “I wanted to get her where she would understand the severity of   
   that word,” Mr. Galligan, 18, whose mother is Black and father   
   is white, said of the classmate who uttered the slur, Mimi   
   Groves. He tucked the video away, deciding to post it publicly   
   when the time was right.   
      
   Ms. Groves had originally sent the video, in which she looked   
   into the camera and said, “I can drive,” followed by the slur,   
   to a friend on Snapchat in 2016, when she was a freshman and had   
   just gotten her learner’s permit. It later circulated among some   
   students at Heritage High School, which she and Mr. Galligan   
   attended, but did not cause much of a stir.   
      
   Mr. Galligan had not seen the video before receiving it last   
   school year, when he and Ms. Groves were seniors. By then, she   
   was a varsity cheer captain who dreamed of attending the   
   University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team was the   
   reigning national champion. When she made the team in May, her   
   parents celebrated with a cake and orange balloons, the   
   university’s official color.   
      
   The next month, as protests were sweeping the nation after the   
   police killing of George Floyd, Ms. Groves, in a public   
   Instagram post, urged people to “protest, donate, sign a   
   petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives   
   Matter movement.   
      
   Editors’ Picks   
      
   It’s 2020. Indigenous Team Names in Sports Have to Go.   
      
   Uncovering Lost Black History, Stone by Stone   
      
   What if Remote Learning Slows Them Down?   
   “You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,”   
   responded someone whom Ms. Groves said she did not know.   
      
   Her alarm at the stranger’s comment turned to panic as friends   
   began calling, directing her to the source of a brewing social   
   media furor. Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had   
   chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon.   
   Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and   
   Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of   
   Tennessee to revoke its admission offer.   
      
   By that June evening, about a week after Mr. Floyd’s killing,   
   teenagers across the country had begun leveraging social media   
   to call out their peers for racist behavior. Some students set   
   up anonymous pages on Instagram devoted to holding classmates   
   accountable, including in Loudoun County.   
      
   The consequences were swift. Over the next two days, Ms. Groves   
   was removed from the university’s cheer team. She then withdrew   
   from the school under pressure from admissions officials, who   
   told her they had received hundreds of emails and phone calls   
   from outraged alumni, students and the public.   
      
   “They’re angry, and they want to see some action,” an admissions   
   official told Ms. Groves and her family, according to a   
   recording of the emotional call reviewed by The New York Times.   
      
   Ms. Groves was among many incoming freshmen across the country   
   whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen   
   universities after videos emerged on social media of them using   
   racist language.   
      
   In one sense, the public shaming of Ms. Groves underscores the   
   power of social media to hold people of all ages accountable,   
   with consequences at times including harassment and both online   
   and real-world “cancellation.” But the story behind the backlash   
   also reveals a more complex portrait of behavior that for   
   generations had gone unchecked in schools in one of the nation’s   
   wealthiest counties, where Black students said they had long   
   been subjected to ridicule. “Go pick cotton,” some said they   
   were told in class by white students.   
      
   “It was just always very uncomfortable being Black in the   
   classroom,” said Muna Barry, a Black student who graduated with   
   Ms. Groves and Mr. Galligan. Once during Black History Month,   
   she recalled, gym teachers at her elementary school organized an   
   “Underground Railroad” game, where students were told to run   
   through an obstacle course in the dark. They had to begin again   
   if they made noise.   
      
   The use of the slur by a Heritage High School student was not   
   shocking, many said. The surprise, instead, was that Ms. Groves   
   was being punished for behavior that had long been tolerated.   
      
   A ‘hostile learning environment’   
   Leesburg, the county seat of Loudoun County, lies just across   
   the Potomac River from Maryland, about an hour’s drive from   
   Washington. It was the site of an early Civil War battle, and   
   slave auctions were once held on the courthouse grounds, where a   
   statue of a Confederate soldier stood for more than a century   
   until it was removed in July.   
      
   The Loudoun County suburbs are among the wealthiest in the   
   nation, and the schools consistently rank among the top in the   
   state. Last fall, according to the Virginia Department of   
   Education, the student body at Heritage High was about half   
   white, 20 percent Hispanic, 14 percent Asian-American and 8   
   percent Black, with another 6 percent who are mixed race.   
      
   In interviews, current and former students of color described an   
   environment rife with racial insensitivity, including casual   
   uses of slurs.   
      
   A report commissioned last year by the school district   
   documented a pattern of school leaders ignoring the widespread   
   use of racial slurs by both students and teachers, fostering a   
   “growing sense of despair” among students of color, some of whom   
   faced disproportionate disciplinary measures compared with white   
   students.   
      
   “It is shocking the extent to which students report the use of   
   the N-word as the prevailing concern,” the report said. School   
   system employees also had a “low level of racial consciousness   
   and racial literacy,” while a lack of repercussions for hurtful   
   language forced students into a “hostile learning environment,”   
   it said.   
      
   In the wake of the report’s publication, the district in August   
   released a plan to combat systemic racism. The move was followed   
   by a formal apology in September for the district’s history of   
   segregation.   
      
   Heritage High School officials did not respond to interview   
   requests.   
      
   Mr. Galligan recalled being mocked with a racial slur by   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)