Racists
have some slippery ways of denying their
guilt. When charged with administering job or
school application tests that are culturally
biased, they claim the tests are
"merit-based." When racist cops stop and
search an innocent young Black man driving
through a white neighborhood, they cite crime
statistics to back up their actions. And when
racist landlords reject potential Black
tenants on the basis of a phone call, they say
they had no way of knowing the callers were
Black.
Well,
in the case of the landlords, it's becoming
increasingly difficult to crawl behind the
color-blind cover. Research by John Baugh, a
professor of education and linguistics at
Stanford University, and others has
demonstrated that racial identification by
speech takes place all the time, and it has
had several legal implications.
For
example, in 1999 racial identification by
speech was used to convict a Black man. A
Kentucky Supreme Court judge, hearing an
appeal by the man, convicted for drug
trafficking in a sting operation, ruled that
it was proper for a white police officer to
identify a suspect as Black solely on the
basis of the voice he heard in an audio
transmission from a wired cop.
The
officer testified that in his 13 years on the
force he had had numerous conversations with
Black males and knew the voice of a Black man
when he heard one. The judge, upholding the
conviction, stated that no one suggested it
was improper for the officer to identify one
of the voices he heard as being that of a
female. Thus, "We perceive no reason why a
witness could not likewise identify a voice as
being that of a particular race or
nationality, so long as the witness is
personally familiar with the general
characteristics, accents or speech patterns of
the race or nationality in question."
In
this case the defendant was done in by
"linguistic profiling." Surely you've heard of
its sister, racial profiling, a practice
infamously employed by police officers, who
stop and search Blacks simply because they fit
a "profile." In linguistic profiling, however,
the racial cues are aural rather than visual.
The
Racial Imprint
Call
it TWB - Talking While Black. A person has a
telephone conversation with someone he has
never seen before and draws a conclusion about
the race of that person based solely on the
way the person sounds.
Nothing
particularly insidious about that - on the
face of it. We can usually tell if a person is
a man, a woman, young or old, a Southerner or
a Latino in the space of a five-minute
telephone conversation. But linguistic
profiling is somebody "acting upon that racial
or demographic imprint in a criminal way by
denying [the victims] access to a business
transaction that should not be in any way
biased, based on a person's racial
background," says Baugh.
His
own personal experience with linguistic
profiling occurred a few years ago, when he
was looking for a place to live in California.
He would call up in response to an ad in the
paper, but when he would show up, he would
learn that the apartment was unavailable. He
believes that it is because over the phone,
when he uses his "professional voice," he
sounds White. When he appeared in person, he
was handed all sorts of excuses for why he
could not rent - none being, of course, the
obvious fact that he was Black.
So
Baugh went about trying to prove what he had
suspected. Having grown up in the inner city,
in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, Baugh was
exposed to a variety of ethnic dialects and
considers himself "linguistically dexterous."
He began telephoning renters and would say,
"Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you
have advertised in the paper." He would make
some calls using his professional voice. Other
times he would modify his voice, repeating the
same sentence with the same grammar but with
an intonation that was unmistakably Black. He
made more than 100 calls and found that his
"Black" voice got half as many calls back as
his "White" voice. It did not matter that when
Baugh used his Black voice he was speaking
perfect, standard English.
Apparently
if a speaker on the telephone sounds
African-American, he is subject to the same
kind of racial discrimination as he might be
in a face-to-face encounter.
Vocally
Branded
At
least Baugh, when speaking in his professional
voice, got called back and was able to make it
to the second stage of the interview process.
But what about those African-Americans who
call about apartments, or jobs, or loans who
never get called back and have no idea why?
After all, they may be well educated, and
gainfully employed; in other words they look
great on paper. What could possibly put them
at a disadvantage? According to Baugh and
others, it is simply TWB. The work that he has
done with the National Fair Housing Alliance
(NFHA), a civil rights organization that
focuses on housing discrimination, bears this
out.
The
National Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to
deny housing, loans or insurance to anyone on
the basis of race. In loans and insurance,
particularly, most of the transactions are
conducted over the phone. Very often whether
you are able to obtain financing at a
reasonable rate rests on how the person at the
other end perceives you by your voice.
Sometimes the first thing out of an insurance
agent's mouth, once he or she has guessed that
the caller is Black, is "Have your ever had
any claims against you? Have you ever
cancelled?" says the NFHA's executive director
Shanna Smith.
Discrimination
based on linguistic profiling has been
difficult to prove. Unless there is some
smoking gun - a written telephone message,
saying the caller sounds Black,or Mexican or
whatever - judges have been reluctant to hear
such cases. Baugh's research has been employed
by the NFHA to prove that renters, loan
companies and the insurance agents do treat
callers differently based on racial
identification by voice.
Three
Voices
In
one experiment Baugh and others tape-recorded
the same phrase,"Hello, I'm calling about the
apartment you have advertised in the paper,"
changing the phonology - the sound or accent -
of the voice, but always using standard,
grammatical English. All the speakers were
adults. The subjects of the experiment then
had to identify as many social demographics of
the speakers as they could, whether they were
men or women, Northerners or Southerners,
Black, White or Latino, young or old. (Baugh
spoke three different times, using his
African-American voice, his professional
voice, and his Latino dialect.)
Over
75 percent of the time in the Latino case,
over 80 percent of the time in the
African-American case, and over 88 percent of
the time in the instances in which Baugh used
his professional voice, the subjects
identified the speakers correctly as either
Mexican or Puerto Rican, Black or White.
Baugh, using his three voices, was able to
demonstrate that just by manipulating
intonation, he could lead people to very
different conclusions about the speaker.
In
another experiment Baugh's colleague spliced
the word, "hello" out of the complete phrase.
The result was over 90 percent recognition
with accuracy for racial identification, using
that word alone.
The
NFHA chose its linguistic testers based upon
whether a "control" person was able to
identify correctly the race or national origin
of the tester over the phone. Evidence was
gathered in states where it is legal to tape a
phone conversation. When an African-American
tester would call about renting an apartment,
the landlord would lie and say it was already
rented. When a White tester followed up, the
apartment was once again available and an
appointment would be set up for him to come
see the place.
"Sophisticated
Lie"
It
is so easy for landlords to get away with this
kind of discrimination, because all they have
to say is, "Oh, you know what? There are three
people ahead of you. Why don't you give me
your name, and if those fall through, I'll
call you." To the caller that sounds
legitimate. "African-Americans and Latinos
simply don't report that," says Smith. "That's
why we do testing. We can catch that
sophisticated lie that's used to deny
housing."
In
a lawsuit filed last fall, in San Francisco's
U.S. District Court, lawyers for the
plaintiff, James Johnson, attempt to show how
linguistic profiling was used to deny him an
opportunity to seek better housing in the
neighborhood where he lived. Johnson, who
lives in San Leandro, CA and was looking for a
larger apartment two years ago, saw a For Rent
sign in front of an apartment complex on his
block, and called the number listed on the
sign to inquire. He got a voice-mail message,
instructing callers to leave their name and
telephone number, which he did, adding that he
had worked at Kraft Foods as a supervisor for
20 years.
When
Johnson did not receive a response to his
message, he called repeatedly and left several
messages at the same telephone number. He
never got a call back. Exasperated, he gave
up. Months later, Johnson saw a For Rent sign
posted again in front of the same apartment
complex and called the number to inquire -
five or six times, leaving voice-mail messages
each time. Again, no reply.
Johnson
asked a friend, a Latino who "sounds white,"
to call about the apartment. The friend
called, left a message and got a call back on
the same day from one of the owners of the
complex. She told the friend that an apartment
was available. Johnson then filed a housing
discrimination complaint with the local fair
housing center. The center conducted an
investigation, with five different testers -
two Black and three White - calling the
apartment complex owners about availabilities
and leaving their names and numbers in
voice-mail messages. The White testers all got
called back the same day. The Black testers'
calls were never returned.
Glaringly
Different Experiences
The
NFHA has filed suits charging Prudential with
racial discrimination against
African-Americans in Milwaukee, Richmond,
Toledo, Washington, D.C. and Chester, Pa. All
of the testing in those cases was done over
the telephone, says Smith. In some instances
African-American testers would call repeatedly
to inquire about insurance, but were never
called back. The white testers calling the
same agents had glaringly different
experiences. They were given quotes and
encouraged to purchase the insurance.
Furthermore, says Smith, when an insurance
agent thinks that the person on the other end
is white, the agent will market to that
customer a whole array of products that the
African-American caller will never get to hear
about - auto, along with home-owner's
insurance, for example - which can lower the
premium.
In
cases like these, Baugh's research is used to
counter claims by the defendants that they
have no way of telling whether a caller is
Black or not, and that it is even racist to
suggest as much. But common sense tells us
this is not true. Science confirms it.
"Ask"
or "Ax"?
So,
who's screening out Black callers? Very likely
people who are less educated and earn less
money than those on the other end. In some
instances a White person conducting business
over the phone may be asked to practice
linguistic profiling by his or her supervisor.
Smith mentions a case in Alabama where a White
apartment manager contacted the local Fair
Housing group to report that the apartment
owner told her if she suspected that a caller
was Black, to tell him or her nothing was
available. Smith also recalls a conversation
she had with a White woman working for an
employment services company, who had been
instructed to get callers to say the word
"ask." If they pronounced it "ax," that was
one way of identifying them as
African-American. (Baugh says that particular
pronunciation is most commonly associated with
Blacks.) Smith, who is White, says, "We get to
hear these things all the time."
The
only way to put a stop to linguistic profiling
is for those who know about it to report it
and make the offenders pay. No need for Blacks
to hire speech coaches. What's called for is
not more pear-shaped tones, but more
organizational muscle, exercised by the likes
of the NFHA and its local affiliates.
The
National
Fair Housing
Alliance contributed
to this commentary.
