Learning from Rachel Jeantel

To quote Nancy Pelosi, we can now see what's in the Zimmerman-Martin case "without the fog of the controversy". I think the biggest lesson to be learned was from Rachel Jeantel, a friend of Trayvon Martin that testified at the trial. Rachel Jeantel has just had her 15 minutes. Predictable packaged responses full of defensive fury were covered very well by Thomas Lifson's AT article. The left has exhausted her value by attacking and chiding all white people about the racist thoughts they have decided we are feeling. They skipped the fact-gathering and evidence stage and went right for the punishment in a fawning and self-righteous defense of someone not really under attack. I have to hand it to libs, they stand by their own and as long as anyone remembers the girl's name, she will be one of their own. Their message regarding Ms. Jeantel is

"You didn't see what you think you saw" We hardly ever bother to listen these voices anymore. We shouldn't turn away from this young woman, though, because she illustrates something so clearly. She doesn't live in "another world" as her defenders claim, she lives in a prison. Ms. Jeantel knows who she is and has a reputation to uphold in her social circle. Like many young people these days, she doesn't realize that her personal tweets that define and characterize her are indelible. Apparently, after The Smoking Gun (TSG) tried to reach some of her twitter followers, someone, perhaps her, thought she should "scrub" her account. This is a fool's errand. TSG listed in its article on June 26 all the tweets she tried to delete. Her language is colorful and her writing style comes out like written ebonics. She is underage, but clearly actively engaged in drinking and more: "When u drinking & smoking u need good music in ur ears hahaha I feel so good on Sunday" and "I need a drink to sleep dis off fuck dis shit boi." She also made references to Martin's death, referred to acquaintances as "bitch" and "nigga," and wrote about having "jackass lawyers on my ass." We are reading this girl's tweets because we plucked her out of her comfort zone and put her in a fishbowl within our comfort zone, then threw her back. Her testimony clearly showed that her goal was met -- she was obviously more interested in holding her head high upon return to her social circle than anything else. I'm sure her defiance and displays of attitude played well at home. So what is her comfort zone? It is a swaddling, nurturing network of extended families and lifelong friends with a complex and strict set of rules. It is very loving, supportive, and comfortable indeed, and very difficult to leave. It is a rich life in some ways, and all you have to pay to immerse yourself in this sea of caring is one thing -- your future. This is not an African culture or a Haitian culture, it is an artificial creation of self-serving black leadership that bastardized Martin Luther King's message and exploited it for their own aggrandizement and financial gain. I'm all for extended families and caring neighborhoods, but this particular variant is highly structured, possessive, and dangerous. It is a system that deassimilates its members from most paths toward the success this country offers and moves them into islands of limits. It is a prison that saps your life away before you know it. Ms. Jeantel is said to speak Creole, Spanish, and English. She speaks her community's version of English. She cannot write anything but her name in longhand, she cannot read the written word and she is a senior in high school. There are street kids much younger than her in Naples, Italy that can ask you to buy their trinkets in eight languages; they don't have any future either. In order to prosper in a land of prosperity, the language she needs to master is "mainstream", i.e. basic English with generally accepted grammar patterns. She could learn this from the television. I suspect she would be looked down upon in her social circle were she to invest in this ability; she has neither the time nor the inclination to speak in a manner that would be understood and respected outside her comfort zone. When she walked back into her home environment after her brief stint in our spotlight, she went back to a downward spiral of lost promise where her biggest accomplishment will probably be motherhood. In her testimony, she seemed sassy, but somehow sincere. Any credibility she had with the general public at that time has been undermined by her subsequent appearance on the Piers Morgan show. By this time she had, probably with the benefit of many conversations with her peers, embellished her story. The story now contains elements she could not possibly have witnessed, since they happened after she was disconnected from Trayvon Martin. From the prosecution point of view, she suggested unhelpful facts such as Mr. Martin having thrown the first punch and how he probably suspected Mr. Zimmerman of being a homosexual predator. She also allowed as how the jury was "old school" and not of "her generation" which accounted for the verdict. Would true fairness have resulted from a jury of her peers? Jesse Jackson told Harris Faulkner of Fox News (a woman he should not mess with), that "Trayvon didn't get a jury of his peers". Harris shot back -- "they were American" and Jackson indicated they were all women and all white. Excuse me, it was Mr. Zimmerman that was on trial, the jury was of his peers. Is the message that men are better jurors than women? Did he mean blacks have better judgment than whites? Harris resisted the temptation to crush him since she is far more professional than he is, and a whole lot quicker. Jesse Jackson is a shakedown artist who is well past his "sell by" date. His big accomplishment is the introduction of the ridiculous expression "African-American" to our public discourse, thereby dissing many Brazilians, Jamaicans, and Indians with dark skin who are not African. Jesse Jackson is just one of many race-obsessed people in the spotlight these days. I have a message for all of them. You self-righteous self-professed interpreters of black people's needs should stop with the touchiness and do something about the communities like the one in which Rachel Jeantel lives. You want everyone else to change except the people with the problem. We don't need to "understand" them, you need to give them a way out, an alternative. You've made sure they won't listen to us, so you have to do it. All your hypersensitive whining has just extended the cultural trap these people are in -- you are just another pair of arms reaching out and pulling them down. Stop telling these kids that their life style is OK. It's not OK. Instead of keeping these communities on your own liberal back burner for any future use you might have, set them free. How about a "path to citizenship" for these people? I am not talking about the two or three metropolitan disaster zones like Detroit or Chicago, I am talking about the thousands of communities like Rachel Jeantel's. Rachel Jeantel breaks my heart. This girl also scares me to death for one reason -- next year she will be able to vote.