Overview of the beginning of the Zimmerman Trial:
Travyon Martin’s Friend Grilled By Defense, Says Calling Zimmerman ‘Creepy-A** Cracker’ Not ‘Racial Comment’
Witness Rachel Jeantel — who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin moments before he was killed — was back on the stand on Thursday, again facing a grilling from George Zimmerman‘s defense attorney Don West. Alluding to yesterday’s testimony, West asked about Martin characterizing Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker” — which Jeantel felt was not a racist remark.
West questioned Jeantel about why she felt the shooting was racial. Jeantel pointed to Martin’s description of “the person that was watching him and following him.” West repeated, “Describing the person is what made you think it was racial?” Jeantel agreed.
To that point, West recalled Jeantel’s previous testimony — during which she said Martin described Zimmerman as a “creepy-ass cracker.”
“So it was racial, but it was because Trayvon Martin put race in this,” West pressed. “You don’t think that’s a racial comment?”
Jeantel replied simply, “No.”
West repeated the question, receiving the same answer. He then went on to press her on why she didn’t include that description in the letter to Martin’s mother. After a few minutes of back-and-forth, West contended she didn’t tell Martin’s because she knew the remark was “offensive.” Jeantel said it was being “respectful.”
“You don’t think calling someone a creepy-ass cracker is offensive?” West asked.
“No,” Jeantel replied.
At that point, West continued to press the point, questioning whether she felt it would bother Martin’s mother to know the remark. Jeantel dismissed the comment as unimportant.
Take a look, via HLN {Notice that the lawyer didn't do his research before asking about the cracker comment. I wonder what else he's not doing his research for? Can you win a court case using the Southern Strategy? I know it was done on To Kill A Mocking Bird... but is the South still executing black people based on false evidence Answer is yes! Related Article Southern Strategy 3 - Overview }
At the merciful close of key prosecution witnessRachel Jeantel‘s testimony in the trial ofGeorge Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, defense attorney Don West asked Ms. Jeantel to describe the “culture” that she said uses the word “cracker” to describe white people. “The area I was raised in?” Jeantel asked, to which West replied “Yes.”
As it turns out, in the area in which Rachel Jeantel was raised, the word “cracker” isn’t a racial slur at all, but rather, a proud nod to the region’s history, and one’s own ancestry.
A whole mess of white people like to get worked up about the word “cracker,” some in the mistaken belief that this will somehow result in permission to use the n-word. Here’s a secret for you: you don’t need permission. This is America, go ahead and say it, and in the process, you’ll find out if “cracker” and the n-word are really the same thing.
Some of that worked-upedness has occurred over Rachel Jeantel’s revelation that Trayvon Martin referred to his eventual killer, George Zimmerman, as a “creepy-ass cracker,” which the Zimmerman defense has tried to capitalize on as a sign of racial animus on Mr. Martin’s part. Jeantel denied that there was anything racial about the comment, which many found strange. The term is, indeed, a somewhat derogatory term for white people. However, in Florida, the word “cracker” is anything but.
Many years ago, during a visit to Orlando’s Gatorland, one of the trainers regaled the group of tourists I was with by explaining the origins of the word “cracker” as a description of Floridians of pre-Civil War ancestry. He explained that Florida cowboys used whips to herd cattle, and to scare away gators, and were called “crackers” because of the sound of their incessant whip-cracking. He also explained that although the term is derogatory in much of the country, in Florida, it’s a source of pride.
In fact, the Wikipedia entry for “Cracker (pejorative)” even notes the distinction:
Cracker, sometimes white cracker or cracka, is a sometimes pejorative expression for white people, especially poor rural whites in the Southern United States. In reference to a native of Florida or Georgia, however, it is sometimes used in a neutral or positive context and is sometimes used self-descriptively with pride.
Now, it is entirely possible that Rachel Jeantel was referring to the common, derogatory use of the word, perhaps even likely, but its also possible that she and/or Trayvon Martin were referring to the non-pejorative use of the word, especially given Jeantel’s insistence that the word isn’t racial, and is region-specific. Don West, who looks like he ought to know the difference, never bothered to ask. It’s possible he just assumed the derogatory meaning, but you’d have to ask him why he would do that, why he would assume that two Florida residents could not have been using a Florida-specific colloquialism.
Articles From Salon On The Earlier Media Smearing of Rachel Jeantel
So why is the star witness in the George Zimmerman case being treated like a defendant?
Rachel Jeantel is a 19-year-old Florida woman. On Facebook and Twitter, she’s been known to post photos of her nails and talk about drinking. She is also the last person to have spoken with Trayvon Martin before George Zimmerman shot him to death last year, the woman who was on the phone with him when his fateful encounter unfolded. She is known in the justice system as Witness #8 in Zimmerman’s trial. She is, in fact, the prosecution’s key witness. But you’d be forgiven if you’d gotten the impression recently that she was sitting up there to defend herself.
Jeantel does not fit the comfortable image of the grieving girl. As Rachel Samara wrote Wednesday in Global Grind, “A predominantly white jury is not going to like Rachel Jeantel,” a girl “who has no media training and who is fully entrenched in a hostile environment.” There is confusion over whether or not she was Martin’s girlfriend, which eradicates her chances of being depicted as a devastated young quasi-widow. On the stand, she has been blunt, hostile and at times seemingly confused. Online, she has a documented history that includes partying. She is not thin or blond or demure. So there goes her credibility.
This week, the Smoking Gun carefully picked through her social media history, uncovering such bombshells as a recent image of what she described as her “court nails.” She has posted photos of liquor bottles and declared that “wowww I need a drink” and tweeted “party time let get high” [sic]. The Smoking Gun also reports that she’s posted “a sexually suggestive series of photos,” “made references to Martin’s death, referred to acquaintances as ‘bitch’ and ‘nigga,’ and wrote about having ‘jackass lawyers on my ass.’” She has in recent days deleted several dozen of her more damning tweets. And so Smoking Gun commenters have, in their turn, declared that she’s not just a “thug” but “proof the gene pool NEEDS more chlorine!” … “and maybe some arsenic too.” Funnily enough, there’s no mention on the site that on Monday she also posted, “I’m a friend god damn it,” or that she loves Jill Scott and Janet Jackson.
Here is what is true about Jeantel. She has publicly admitted to underage drinking and getting high. She is a poor speller (at least on social media). Her way with words is not calculated to win favor – she has testified that Martin told her “a creepy-ass cracker” was following him. She has responded to the defense’s line of questioning with an icy “You got it?” and “That’s retarded, sir.” The Daily News describes her diction as “often difficult-to-understand” and says it’s “cringe-worthy” and “humiliating” that she couldn’t read a letter out loud on the stand because she says, “I don’t read cursive.” Jeantel has also admitted to law enforcement that she lied about her initial claim that she didn’t attend Martin’s funeral because she was hospitalized at the time; she now says that she felt too “guilty” to face his parents and “didn’t want to see the body.” She admits that at the beginning of the investigation, she said she was under 18, because she didn’t want to get involved. She is unpolished and emotional.
So is she a reliable witness? That’s yet to be determined. And watching her struggling to articulate “the sound of wet grass” to the jury, you can see not just her frustration but defense lawyer Don West’s undisguised exasperation. But when outlets like MSN gleefully seize upon the fact that she’s posting photographs of her nails, they invite exactly the kind of troubling and deeply offensive conclusions about what a “bitch,” what “ghetto trash,” what an “ugly ho” “buffalo” she is, that they have been racking up ad nauseam.
Of course it’s the job of the defense to question her and cast doubt on her testimony. And of course it is significant that her version of events has varied. There’s a lot at stake. George Zimmerman decided Trayvon Martin’s fate on Feb. 26, 2012, and now a jury will decide his. A jury that, by the way, is part of a justice system that is not supposed to exclusively serve the best educated and most articulate of our citizenry. So now would be a good time to point out that Jeantel’s weight, her nails, her sex, her color – these things have precisely jack to do with her account of what happened the night Travyon Martin died. Justice is supposed to serve teenagers too, and people who party and who don’t hide it when they’re angry or flustered, and women who can’t read cursive. It’s supposed to serve people whose dialogue wasn’t written for them by David E. Kelley. Remember that. Remember that Rachel Jeantel is not the one on trial.
Dark-skinned and plus-sized: The real Rachel Jeantel story
Painting Rachel Jeantel as "combative" is a classic way to discredit the validity of black women's traumas
Trayvon Martin’s trial might be intriguing, fascinating cultural theater to some. To me, it is more akin to a cultural trauma: a continual reminder of how unsafe all those young black men that I love actually are as they move through the world — and how tenuous and torturous it would be to seek justice on their behalf. Troubled, though, by the negative characterizations of Trayvon Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel, after her first day of testimony, I tuned in yesterday in a show of sofa-based, sister-girl solidarity.
Immediately, I heard newscasters referring to her prior testimony, which I had watched on video, as combative and aggressive. And I felt my pressure start to rise.
These kinds of terms – combat, aggression, anger – stalk black women, especially black women who are dark-skinned and plus-sized like Rachel, at every turn seeking to discredit the validity of our experiences and render invisible our traumas. By painting Rachel Jeantel as the aggressor, as the one prone to telling lies and spreading untruths, it became easy for the white male defense attorney to treat this 19-year-old, working-class black girl, a witness to the murder of her friend, as hostile, as a threat, as the one who needed to be regulated and contained and put in her place.
I know these are just classic legal maneuvers of a good defense. Yet these maneuvers also provide an eerily perfect diagram of the cultural grammar that determines how black folks move through the world, always already cast as the aggressors, always necessarily on the defensive, all too often victimized, all too rarely vindicated.
No one knows this better than Trayvon Martin.
The thing about grammars, though, is that they rely on language, on a way of speaking and communicating, to give them power. And Rachel Jeantel has her own particular, idiosyncratic black girl idiom, a mashup of her Haitian and Dominican working-class background, her U.S. Southern upbringing, and the three languages – Hatian Kreyol (or Creole), Spanish and English — that she speaks.
The unique quality of her black vernacular speaking style became hypervisible against the backdrop of powerful white men fluently deploying corporate, proper English in ways that she could not do. The way they spoke to her was designed not only to discredit her, but to condescend to and humiliate her. She acknowledged this show of white male power by repeatedly punctuating her responses with a curt but loaded, “Yes, Sir.”
Still, legions of black people watched and cringed internally, expressing shame, disgust and embarrassment at her lack of polish. Some referred to her as “Precious,” the beleaguered female movie protagonist played by Oscar-nominee Gabourey Sidibe.
There is a reason that black people in public life learn to be as articulate as Barack Obama or Oprah Winfrey. Stakes is high. When given the opportunity to speak, you wanna make for damn sure you are heard.
But justice should be no respecter of persons, or it isn’t justice.
What we witnessed with Jeantel was a deliberate attempt by the defense to mis-hear and misunderstand her, to suggest, for instance, that statements like “I coulda hear Trayvon, Trayvon,” meant that, in fact, she did not hear Trayvon screaming for George Zimmerman to “get off, get off,” of him.
Still she maintained her composure and clarified, “That means I could hear Trayvon.”
Gayatri Spivak once famously asked, “Can the subaltern speak?” Forever, I have thought the question was wrong. The problem was not in her speaking, but in their hearing.
But those of us who came to listen heard her loud and clear. Zimmerman followed, confronted and eventually murdered her friend, while she listened on the phone hoping simply that her friend made it back to his “daddy’s house.”
Given the hostile and combative space into which she entered, a space in which she had to fight for the integrity of her own words, combativeness seems like the most appropriate posture.
If the justification for the defense attorney’s combativeness is “he was doing his job,” then I submit: So was Rachel.
She was there to defend her friend. And herself. Though she was not on trial, she seemed to know instinctively that black womanhood, black manhood and urban adolescence are always on trial in the American imaginary.
By choosing to take the stand and fight for her friend, she was fighting for so much more than simply him. She was fighting for the right of black people to be seen and heard, for our testimony about our traumas to be believed, no matter how inelegantly stated.
Rachel Jeantel took the stand and told the gut-wrenching, heartbreaking, ugly truth. My only hope is that the jury truly listened.
The Media: Attention Span of the Dog in UP vs. Manufactured News?
NOTE: Fox News jumped in, in defense of Zimmerman when media was trying to get the case heard. They did it for ratings (at the very least). Now once again a Fox News division is saying they can remove race from their conversation! Another marketing tactic? If everyone removes race will they go back to it for ratings using some excuse? It's a fact that Rupert Murdoch controls all the shares needed to make all the decisions...so who are they trying to fool? Related: Once Again, Murdoch Misuses the 26th Law of Power & The Case for Indicting the Murdochs for Treason (*as per The US Constitution) ... also known as, 'he who must not be named'.