Fault Lines

<p>[para. 1]: "The 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent murder trial of George Zimmerman continued intense debates over race and weapons in US culture. Those controversies were amplified by representations of African American bodies, and by the near-instantaneous reactions through social media by many who forcibly re-inscribed forms of racial legibility for public consumption. The testimony of Rachel Jeantel particularly invited a range of public responses, from scrutiny of her personal appearance, to criticisms of her difficulty with public speaking and literacy. Jelani Cobb, writing for The New Yorker, said, “Crass assessments of her weight, looks, and intelligence from some white observers competed with a cocktail of vicarious shame, embarrassment, and disdain from some black ones.” Despite fluency in three languages (English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole) and a 3.0 high school GPA, Jeantel’s speech impediments provoked  heated and unwarranted criticism of her courtroom appearance and elocutionary performance. Black conservative Larry Elder told Piers Morgan that Jeantel “needs to get her act together.” Rush Limbaugh unsurprisingly claimed that whites could now freely exploit the “N word” because of Jeantel’s description of Trayvon Martin’s use of “nigga” and “cracker” during his final phone call to her moments before Zimmerman killed him. Comedian Steven Crowder mocked Jeantel for seeming “retarded” in her courtroom testimony. While these are extreme reactions, Limbaugh, Crowder and others publicly broadcast attitudes that similarly circulated in the more fragmented communication networks of social media. Comparisons to “Precious,” the plus-size female movie protagonist played by Oscar-nominee Gabourey Sidibe, and other pejorative physical descriptions were blogged and tweeted across the Internet, revealing, not unexpectedly, a social imaginary haunted by race and the legacies of slavery and civil rights. Writing for Salon, Brittney Cooper called the reactions to Jeantel a “cultural trauma.”"</p>