Reaction to Rachel Jeantel on the stand “has been in terms of aesthetics, of disregarding a witness on the basis of how she talks, how good she is at reading and writing,” says George Ciccariello-Maher, a history and politics professor at Drexel University, in Philadelphia. “These are subtle things that echo literacy testing at the polls, echo the question of whether black Americans can testify against white people, of being always suspect in their testimony. It’s the same old dynamics emerging in a very different guise.”
To be sure, in the scathing commentary about what some called her puzzling demeanor and alleged lack of education was lost her singular background and her youth: A black and Creole girl growing up in a segregated Miami community, she represented part of the problem of the case – an America so divided, that many can’t “code-switch,” or move between the gauzy racial, cultural, and socioeconomic divides that have become hardened with the nation’s first black president, and which have helped fuel political polarization.
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