• ELIXHER
• On July 1, 2013

After the close of the first week of the George Zimmerman trial, I wanted to tell you I believe there will be justice for Trayvon Martin. I wanted to allay the fears of every pessimist I know with a reassuring beckoning to come out and watch history being made. I wanted to tell you that black citizens’ right to a livelihood is finally being acknowledged by the U.S. justice system.

But I can’t give that just yet. The truth is, this trial is as ugly as you feared it would be.

Commentators are pathologizing black bodies at an emotionally exhausting pace, while “neutral” media remains oblivious and unmoved. Every tactic the defense team throws out to other and discredit black witnesses seems to have had at least some success with TV personalities, and has enjoyed smashing success with the Deen Family Reunion that is the Internet. Yet despite the media victories, Zimmerman lawyers have failed to demonstrably impress or intimidate the women that matter most to the case itself-the court’s judge, jury, and most dramatically, its key witness: Rachel Jeantel.

“Rude” and “combative”? Absolutely. She knew this trial would be a war zone. While the Interwebz continues to feign horror at the 19-year-old’s courtroom presence, it has yet to acknowledge the Zimmerman defense team’s disconcerting eagerness to marginalize every black victim and witness thrown their way.

Grand Wizard Don West (I’m guessing at his title) could not wait for testimony to even begin before erasing and discrediting the black faces of the trial, leading his opening statement with a clunkily prefaced “knock knock” joke while tears were still drying on Sabrina Fulton’s face. Not one to be deterred by poor returns on terrible ideas, he went on to attack Ms. Fulton’s reliability and trustworthiness, characterizing the black mother as an overly emotional liability, a woman who would desperately “want” the crying voice on that 9-1-1 call to be her son’s—a reasonable enough defense, had he not buttressed it with an assumption that Zimmerman’s white uncle had an ear that was somehow more impartial and reliable. Adding the necessary cherry to his F*ck You pie, he and his colleague attempted to throw the Martin parents out of the courtroom for the duration of the trial, labeling them as “threats” to the trial attendees. That threat in question? A white Zimmerman supporter thinking he heard Tracy Martin mumble “motherfucker” under his breath, two weeks before the trial started.

Don West didn’t limit the ignorance to the prosecution’s witnesses. He spoke of Zimmerman’s neighbor, a black woman who had lived cordially next to George for years, saying how “despite how hard it must have been” for her, she identified the cries on the 9-1-1 call as his. If he’s hitting his own witnesses with condescending, racist assumptions in an opening statement, what should Rachel Jeantel have expected when she sat down for cross examination?

In the 16 months since her friend was killed, she has seen Zimmerman defenders thoroughly investigate and deride Trayvon for everything from his school records, to text messages to friends, to mischaracterized YouTube videos, to outright admissions that he was too tall and black to be sympathetic. She’s seen the passion with which total strangers are convinced beyond a doubt that an unarmed high school junior, who by all accounts was minding his own business that night, Mighty Morphin transformed into a cold-blooded killer. In a disturbing repeat of the events leading to his death, Trayvon Martin is confronted with a defense team who profiles, dehumanizes, ostracizes, and attacks him, never expecting a fight back. He needed someone in that courtroom going to war for him.

So Rachel fought. She sat on the stand for hours, swallowing every attempt by the defense to stigmatize her speech and denigrate her intellect. She ignored exasperated sighs, whines and interruptions from Don West after her every response, even when no one but the defense complained about an inability to understand her. What elicited a polite, “Can you say that again into the microphone” with white witnesses, turned into a “Speak up! We have to hear you!” with Jeantel. When the judge demanded West stop repeating the answers she had just given back to her, he irritatedly responded that he had to ask her questions “one step at a time,” like a child. On day two of her questioning, he opened with an unbelievably condescending chide, asking, “Did someone speak to you about your demeanor yesterday?” After every jab, we saw Rachel. If anyone cared, they might have seen her holding back tears with each blatant attempt to humiliate her and insult her intelligence. If anyone cared, they would have noticed her pain as equally as her frustration. But, no, we want to talk about disrespect. Contempt. Ok, let’s talk.

Where is the respect for Trayvon Martin? Where is the respect for black America? In a case where any thinking person knows that Trayvon Martin would not have been pursued and reported to the police had he been white, the prosecution is barred from even mentioning racial profiling during trial. Very early in the week, the defense played every person of color in the country with this gem of an inquiry:

“When he said it was a black male, could you hear animosity in his voice?”

Could you hear the racism, seriously? Of course, as racial discourse often goes, Rachel Jeantel’s cross examination became littered with subtle accusations of reverse racism and worthless commentary about the word “cracker.” Rachel, a person the defense had previously decided was not articulate enough to understand her own answers to yes and no questions, was now apparently competent enough to be answer a loaded, “What did you hear on the news that made you think this case was racial?”—as if any black person has enough time in the day to explain America’s history of racism to a combative, old white guy and the five white women sitting on the jury. Rachel may not have been equipped to fully articulate the absurdity of what was transpiring in that Sanford courtroom, but she put a full stop to the nonsense while the trial was in her hands.

“You ain’t get that from me!”

As he had done many times throughout the week, Don West tried slipping in a suggestion that Trayvon doubled back on his way home to confront George Zimmerman. Not this time. Colloquial, yes…but West didn’t try that hand again.

“Are you listening?!”

Losing track of his own convoluted, pointlessly quibbling line of questioning and zoned out during an answer, an insulting display when you’ve spent more than five hours grilling a witness. She was not impressed. Brusque, perhaps…but he stayed alert for the rest of her testimony.

“Ya got it?”

He asked the same questions over and over, replaying taped depositions, asking her to reinterpret garbled speech she had cleared up several times, dissatisfied with her explanations. This would be the last time. Antagonistic, surely…but he moved on to the next question.

While the genteel public awaited proper courtroom etiquette, Rachel Jeantel was getting what she wanted on the stand.

Yet they said she was an embarrassment. Well, she heard the criticisms. She begrudgingly yielded to the Politics of Respectability Brigade on day two, practically spitting an insincere “Sir” out after every sentence, in transactions that sounded uncomfortably akin to Jim Crow-era niceties. The good people got what they asked for, but with that disingenuousness, came a dose of reality. In their world, the courtroom demands black respect even when it does not offer it; in their world, witnesses put on appearances, clean up speech, hide emotions, tolerate whatever abuse comes their way, and “proper” black folks act respectably in a losing cause; in their world, resides people like George Zimmerman—a world where Trayvon Martin deserves to be dead.

For two days, Rachel showed us what it looks like to live in hers. If what she stands for doesn’t represent you, maybe you are part of the problem.

- Ajene “AJ” Farrar

AJ has been working as an air traffic controller since 2009, after attending Old Dominion University and George Mason University as a journalism major. She currently lives in upstate New York.