Unwidowing: Rachel Jeantel, Black Death, and the “Problem” of Black Intimacy

This article focuses on Rachel Jeantel’s testimony during the highly publicized George Zimmerman trial. Zimmerman was prosecuted on charges of second-degree murder in the death of Trayvon Martin, of which he was acquitted in July 2013. I treat Jeantel’s testimony as an act of what Sharon Holland terms “raising the dead” and as a form of black intimacy. In naming Jeantel’s testimony a practice of black intimacy, I am highlighting the ways in which it has become ordinary for black women—as wives, lovers, daughters, and mothers—to become mediums through which slain black men are allowed to speak, mediums who make visible black male pain, suffering, and disposability. I am also underscoring the ways that black intimacies are enacted, enjoyed, and staged in the face of black perishment in an ongoing moment where black bodies are relegated to what Holland calls the “space of death,” whether that space is the material death of bodies like Martin’s, what Lisa Cacho calls the “social death” of persistent devaluation, or the “civic death” of incarceration and criminalization, as Loïc Wacquant writes. The article then asks how and why Jeantel’s intimate act of raising the dead did not allow her access to a privileged class of black women: civil rights widows. Why, this article asks, wouldn’t Jeantel be interpellated as a kind of contemporary civil rights widow, particularly since the media so often insisted on describing her as Martin’s girlfriend? In what ways was her potential widow status undone or unmade? And what was the role of the legal proceeding in this unwidowing?