"You're Not Listening to Me": Rachel Jeantel and Social Geographies of Dis/ability, Race, and Literacy

• In Event: Disability Critical Race Theory and Conceptualizations of Place and Space: Working Toward Intersectional Understanding

Abstract

Objectives:
On the evening of February 26, 2012, 28-year-old white Hispanic Neighborhood Watch Captain George Zimmerman profiled, shot, and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old Black male high school student walking outside the condominium home of his father’s fiancé. At the time of his death, Trayon Martin was talking on the phone with his friend 18-year-old Rachel Jeantel. On June 10, 2013, The State of Florida v. George Zimmerman, a nationally televised trial that would span 15 days of testimony, commenced. Rachel was a key witness for the prosecution and she testified for five hours and 48 minutes across two days, June 26th and 27th, 2013. The trial was televised, and Jeantel’s interactions with defense attorney Don West immediately became the focus of social and traditional media. Jeantel was repeatedly described as “retarded,” “stupid,” “angry,” “resistant,” and as an example of the failure of the American educational system to teach academic literacy. On July 13, 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of all criminal charges in the slaying of Trayvon Martin.

In this paper I examine Rachel Jeantel’s interactions with defense lawyers during the Zimmerman trial, statements made about Jeantel’s speech by jurors’ after the trial, and depictions of Jeantel on social media. The primary objective of this analysis is to understand the role of situated conceptualizations of dis/ability, race, and literacy in the discursive positionings of Jeantel as illiterate, resistant, and otherwise deficient. An additional objective of this work is to expand conceptualizations of race, space, and literacy within a DisCrit framework.

Theoretical framework
My work draws on DisCrit theory (Annamma et al 2013) and social geography (Jackson, 1987) to make visible how situated notions of race, ability, and literacy were wielded by participants within the trial to mark Jeantel as disabled, illiterate, and out of place (Collins, in press) in the courtroom and to thus discredit her testimony.

Data Sources
Data consist primarily of court transcripts of The State of Florida v. George Zimmerman. I triangulated these data with 183 pages of case discovery documents released by the court, video recordings of the 5-week long trial, and relevant newspaper, television, and social media reports.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry
I applied critical discourse analysis to the trial transcript of Jeantel’s testimony and the lawyers’ examination and cross-examination as well as to transcripts of jurors’ comments on news and social media outlets. I conducted a content analysis on the remaining data, including images from court documents and texts from social media.

Conclusions/Scholarly Significance
This paper sheds light on how deficit identities are built, challenged and (re)constructed at the intersections of race, class and disability and has implications for understanding how students with strengths in multiple, diverse forms of literacy are marked out of place in school.

Author

• Kathleen M. Collins, The Pennsylvania State University