Jeantel rachel biography
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Deep Listening as Philogynoir: Playlists, Black Girl Idiom, and Love
Here at Sounding Out! we like to celebrate World Listening Day (July 18) with a blog series. This year, we bring your attention to the role of listening when it comes to the sounds of the K-12 classroom, and by extension, the school.
Any day in a K-12 school involves movement and sounds day in and day out: the shuffling of desks, the conversations among classmates, the fire drill alarm, the pencils on paper, the picking up of trays of food. However, in many conversations about schools, teaching, and learning, sound fryst vatten absent.
This month’s series will have readers thinking about the sounds in classrooms in different ways. They will consider race, class, and gender, and how those aspects intersect how we listen to the classrooms of our past and our present. More importantly, the posts will all include assignments that educators at all stages can use in their classrooms.
Time’s up
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During the first week of July, some in America showed their true colors by once again viciously attacking, with malice aforethought, a 19-year-old Black woman, Rachel Jeantel. She was the last person to speak to 17-year-old Trayvon Martin just seconds before he was to die at the hands of George Zimmerman on February 26, 2012.
Ms. Jeantel was born in the nation of Haiti but has been a resident of the United States since age three. But English is not her native tongue. It is her third language. How many languages do her tormentors speak?
Rachel Jeantel is important for two reasons. First, she teaches us about the lessons of respect. Second, she brought credibility and truth to her testimony.
As the State’s witness, Ms. Jeantel was viciously attacked by Don West, the defense attorney, who did everything he could to insult, malign, disrespect, and just literally beat her up verbally. Black and White bloggers chastised her, raising questions ranging from h
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This is a Facebook poster for those who support–and really get–Rachel “DiDi” Jeantel, 19, who was the last person to talk to Trayvon Martin before he was killed by George Zimmerman. The girl has been receiving her share of criticism and contempt because of what she looks like and how she acts, not what vital evidence she has to present, evidence that would convict George Zimmerman for second degree murder (Courtesy: Facebook)
At first, I was let down by her. Then, I was put off. She had all the looks of a girl who knows the ‘hood, and that’s all. She was short, stout and dark, her straightened hair drawn up in a bun, with her big hooped earrings brushing her shoulders. Black dresses, we know, are slenderizing as well as the color of mourning. Her face reminded me of one of those African idols, or even one of those South American figurines from an Incan or Mayan age. At first glance, her neck seemed to be one roll of fat, but on further insp