This weekend, The New York Times reported on some teenage drama. In 2016, a high school freshman named Mimi (who is white) posted a short video to Snapchat of herself saying “I can drive, n*****” in a rapper-like cadence. In spring 2020, it circulated around the school again, and a classmate of Mimi’s named Jimmy (who is half black) saved a copy. In June, during protests over the police killing of George Floyd, Jimmy posted the video. It went viral, people got mad about it, and denounced Mimi on social media. Some contacted the University of Tennessee, which Mimi was going to attend this fall. She got kicked off the cheer team and, under pressure from administrators, withdrew. Jimmy told the Times he “taught someone a lesson.” Now some are trying to get him in trouble with his college.
This all strikes me as a gross overreaction, unnecessarily making both Jimmy and Mimi’s lives worse. They’re teenagers. When she posted that video, Mimi was fifteen. Kids in the social media era need space to say bad things and do dumb stuff without facing serious, long-lasting consequences, much as kids had pre-internet. Many adults surely did worse than Mimi as teenagers, but few people heard about it, and later most of them grew up. The world is not worse off because those teenage mistakes faded away.
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