“The dehumanization of Rachel Jeantel—the laughter, the disbelief—is rooted in the same attitude that causes people to treat unarmed black kids with suspicion, to follow them around subdivisions for no good reason. I rarely agree with Nancy Grace, but yesterday on HLN she made a decent point. “Oh, everybody can laugh all they want to. She can’t read cursive. Or that she has nicknames she goes by that some people may laugh at; this one is ‘Diamond Eugene.’ You know what? Laugh all you want to. Nobody ever said that a murder trial was a tea party, where everybody had perfect manners and spoke perfectly. That’s not what this is about.” And she’s right. A lot of the people in our jails and prisons come from poor black neighborhoods, and the witnesses in their trials are often made uncomfortable by courtrooms and judges and aggressive defense attorneys. Dismissing them and what they have to say because of their grammar and demeanor says more about us than it does about them. Rachel Jeantel can’t understand cursive. We can’t understand Rachel Jeantel. Which is worse?” — Justin Peters
Posted on: Sat, 29 Jun 2013 04:47:42 +0000
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