Conservative radio host Larry Elder lashed out at Rachel Jeantel Wednesday night on CNN because she suffers from a speech impediment.
How the young black woman talked during the trial of George Zimmerman resulted in a combination of sympathy and mockery. Elder suggested that Jeantel was unintelligent and uneducated because of the way she spoke.
However, Jeantel suffers from a structural underbite, a condition which makes it difficult to pronounce many consonants correctly because of the position of her teeth in relation to the tip of her tongue. The condition can only be corrected with surgery.
“Rachel Jeantel needs to get her act together,” Elder said. “If my mother were alive, she would say, ‘How dare she speak like that.’”
CNN host Piers Morgan noted that Jeantel was trilingual — she speaks English, Spanish and Haitian Creole — and had a GPA of 3.0 in high school. She fell behind in school because of an illness, which is why she started her senior year of high school when she was 19-years-old.
“Does she sound to you like anyone you want to hire in any kind of capacity?” Elder responded.
(Source: RawStory.com and CNN)
