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.
