Abstract
This article examines interactions between defense attorney Don West and witness Rachel Jeantel in the 2013 State of Florida v. George Zimmerman trial following the murder of Trayvon Martin. The focus of analysis is how the defense constitutes the term creepy-ass cracker as evidence of violence and aggression on behalf of Trayvon Martin. Their argument is located within an ideological framework of a post-racial American society wherein the defense claims colorblindness (Bonilla-Silva 2014) for their client George Zimmerman. Trayvon Martin’s observation of Zimmerman’s whiteness, as indexed by the word cracker, is positioned as evidence of a culture and an individual with inherently violent, racially motivated intentions. The article examines interactional moments during the defense’s questioning of Rachel Jeantel wherein creepy-ass cracker is positioned as immoral within a post-racial ideological framework, and evidence of racism toward white people. Don West’s use of pauses, hyper-articulated Standard American English, and emblematic deictic terms discursively and linguistically segregate Martin’s and Jeantel’s community from the hegemonic white practices of the courtroom. West’s attempts to assert symbolic control over the semantic meaning of creepy-ass cracker reflect the relative unmarkedness of Standard American English and whiteness in contemporary United States judicial systems and society.
About the author
Tyanna Slobe is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles. As a Linguistic Anthropologist, her research interests include intersections of language and identity, socioeconomic mobility, gender, embodiment, and media. She conducts fieldwork in Santiago, Chile.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kira Hall, John Rickford, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Candy Goodwin, and Laura Michaelis for commentary, support, and encouragement throughout the process of writing this article. I am also grateful to Srikant Sarangi and my anonymous reviewers for valuable feedback, and to Devin Bunten, Evan Coles-Harris, Jonnia Torres, and Irina Wagner for editing advice.
Appendix: transcription conventions
- ?
rising intonation
- underline
stress, increased amplitude
- (.)
pause shorter than 0.5 seconds
- (1.0)
pause greater than 0.5 seconds, measured in Praat
- <words>
non-vocal noise or transcriber comment
- {words}
stretch of talk over which transcriber comment applies
- [IPA]
phonetic transcription
- [
overlapping speech
- [th]
t-release
References
Abuznaid, Ahmad, Caroline Bettinger-Lopez, Charlotte Cassel & Meena Jagannath. 2014. Stand your ground laws: International human rights law implications. U. Miami L. Rev. 68. 1129.Search in Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy. 2004. Hearing what’s not said and missing what is: Black language in white public space. In Scott F. Kiesling & Christina Bratt Paulston (eds.), Intercultural discourse and communication: The essential readings, 180–197. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley Online Library.10.1002/9780470758434.ch12Search in Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy & Django Paris. Whose language gap? Critical and culturally sustaining pedagogies as necessary challenges to racializing hegemony. In Avineri, Netta, Eric Johnson, Shirley Brice-Heath, Teresa McCarty, Elinor Ochs, Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, Susan Blum, Ana Celia Zentella, Jonathan Rosa, Nelson Flores, H. Samy Alim & Django Paris. 2015. Invited forum: Bridging the “language gap”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25(1). 79–81.10.1111/jola.12071Search in Google Scholar
Alim, H. Samy & Geneva Smitherman. 2012. Articulate while black: Barack Obama, language, and race in the US. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Avineri, Netta, Eric Johnson, Shirley Brice-Heath, Teresa McCarty, Elinor Ochs, Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, Susan Blum, Ana Celia Zentella, Jonathan Rosa, Nelson Flores, H. Samy Alim & Django Paris. 2015. Invited forum: Bridging the “language gap”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 25(1). 66–86.10.1111/jola.12071Search in Google Scholar
Baldwin, Sam. 2012. Transcript of George Zimmerman’s call to the police. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman.html (accessed 20 April 2016).Search in Google Scholar
Black Lives Matter. 2016. Online: http://blacklivesmatter.com (accessed 10 April 2016).Search in Google Scholar
Boersma, Paul & Weenink, David (2016). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 6.0.16, retrieved 5 April 2016 from http://www.praat.org.Search in Google Scholar
Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2014. Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. Third edition. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.Search in Google Scholar
Bonilla, Yarimar & Jonathan Rosa. 2015. #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States. American Ethnologist 42. 4–17.10.1111/amet.12112Search in Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary. 2001. The whiteness of nerds: Superstandard english and racial markedness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1). 84–100.10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.84Search in Google Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary. 2010. White kids: Language, race, and styles of youth identity. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511975776Search in Google Scholar
Cheng, Cheng & Mark Hoekstra. 2013. Does Strengthening Self-Defense Law Deter Crime or Escalate Violence? Evidence from Expansions to Castle Doctrine. 43(3): 821–854.10.3368/jhr.48.3.821Search in Google Scholar
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the world and me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.Search in Google Scholar
Collins, Patricia Hill. 2004. Black sexual politics: African Americans, gender, and the new racism. Routledge.10.4324/9780203309506Search in Google Scholar
Delgado, Richard & Jean Stefancic. 2004. Understanding words that wound. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.Search in Google Scholar
Du Bois, John W. 2007. The stance triangle. In Robert Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in discourse: Subjectivity, evaluation, interaction (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 164), 139–182. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/pbns.164.07duSearch in Google Scholar
Duranti, A. 2009. The relevance of Husserl’s theory to language socialization. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19(2). 205–226.10.1111/j.1548-1395.2009.01031.xSearch in Google Scholar
Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical field. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12(4). 453–476.10.1111/j.1467-9841.2008.00374.xSearch in Google Scholar
Goodwin, Charles. 1994. Professional vision. American Anthropologist 96(3). 606–633.10.1525/aa.1994.96.3.02a00100Search in Google Scholar
Heller, Monica. 2011. Paths to postnationalism: A critical ethnography of language and identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746866.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. 1998. Language, race, and white public space. American Anthropologist 100(3). 680–689.10.1525/aa.1998.100.3.680Search in Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. 2008. The everyday language of white racism. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons.10.1002/9781444304732Search in Google Scholar
hooks, bell. 2000. All about love: New visions. New York: Harper Collins.Search in Google Scholar
Hymes, Dell. 1972. On communicative competence. Sociolinguistics. 269–293.Search in Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith T & Susan Gal. 2009. Language ideology and linguistic differentiation.In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 2nd edn, 402–434. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.Search in Google Scholar
Jones, D Marvin. 2013. He’s a black male-something is wrong with him: The role of race in the stand your ground debate. U. Miami L. Rev. 68. 1025.Search in Google Scholar
Kiesling, Scott. 2001. Stances of whiteness and hegemony in fraternity men’s discourse. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1). 101–115.10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.101Search in Google Scholar
Matsuda, Mari J., Charles R. Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, & Kimberlè Williams Crenshaw. 1993. Words that wound: Critical race theory, assaultive speech, and the first amendment. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.Search in Google Scholar
McWhorter, John. 2013. “Rachel Jeantel Explained, Linguistically.” Time. Online: http://ideas.time.com/2013/06/28/rachel-jeantel-explained-linguistically/ (accessed 10 April 2016).Search in Google Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 1995. Silence and authority in the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. In Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz (eds.), Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self, 51–66. New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, Norma. 2008. Homegirls: Language and cultural practice among Latina youth gangs. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.10.1002/9780470693728Search in Google Scholar
Nelson, Debra. 2013. George Zimmerman trial final jury instructions. Online: http://www.scribd.com/doc/153354467/George-Zimmerman-Trial-Final-Jury-Instructions (accessed 15 October 2013).Search in Google Scholar
Ochs, Elinor. 1996. Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In Gumperz, John J. and Stephen C. Levinson, Rethinking linguistic relativity, 407–438. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Rickford, John R. 1999. African American Vernacular English: Features, evolution, educational implications. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.Search in Google Scholar
Rickford, John R. 2013 “Rachel Jeantel’s language in the Zimmerman trial.” Language Log. Online: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5161.Search in Google Scholar
Rickford, John R. 2016. Language and linguistics on trial: Hearing vernacular speakers in courtrooms and beyond. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.10.1353/lan.2016.0078Search in Google Scholar
Rickford, John R., & Sharese King. 2013. “Justice for Jeantels: Fighting Linguistic Prejudice and Racial Inequality in Courts and Schools, After Florida v. Zimmerman.” New Ways of Analyzing Variation 42. Pittsburgh.Search in Google Scholar
Rosa, Jonathan. Forthcoming. Looking like a language, sounding like a race: Inequality and ingenuity in the learning of latinidad. New York: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780190634728.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2001. The limits of awareness. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.), Linguistic anthropology: A reader, 1st edn, 382–401. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.Search in Google Scholar
Silverstein, Michael. 2005. Axes of evals. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1). 6–22.10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.6Search in Google Scholar
Smitherman, Geneva. 2000. Black talk: Words and phrases from the hood to the amen corner. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Search in Google Scholar
Spears, Arthur K. 1997. African-American language use: Ideology and so-called obscenity. In Mufwene, Salikoko S., Guy Bailey, John Baugh, and John R. Rickford (eds.), African-American English 226–250, New York: Routledge.Search in Google Scholar
State of Florida v. George Zimmerman. 2013. CF 1083 AXXX (The Circuit Court of the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit, in and for Seminole County, Florida, July 2013).Search in Google Scholar
Sullivan, Ronald Jr. 2013. “Stand Your Ground” Laws: Civil Rights and Public Safety Implications of the Expanded Use of Deadly Force: Hearing Before the S. Comm. On the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights of the S. Comm on the Judiciary, 113th Cong. Online: http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/10-29-13SullivanTestimony.pdf (accessed 10 April 2016).Search in Google Scholar
Trechter, Sara & Mary Bucholtz. 2001. Introduction: White Noise: Bringing Language into Whiteness Studies. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1). 3–21.10.1525/jlin.2001.11.1.3Search in Google Scholar
©2016 by De Gruyter Mouton
