Chances
are that you have never thought about your voice in terms of color, yet
researchers assert that most of us make assumptions about other people
based on our first impressions even if those impressions are only made
by the sound of someone’s voice. The assumptions we may make about
race, color, ethnicity, sexuality, gender or disability on the basis of
a person’s voice are not by themselves harmful; however, there is a
growing awareness that those assumptions are often used to discriminate
against certain groups.
Dr. John Baugh, a professor of Linguistics and Education
at Stanford University, defines linguistic profiling as “acting on that
racial or demographic imprint in a criminal way by denying access to a
business transaction that should not be in any way based on a person’s
racial background.” Dr. Baugh has devoted much of his career to studying
this problem. Recently, he was been called as an expert witness in
perhaps the most well known case of this kind: Johnson v. Jensen,
which was filed with the U.S. District Court in Northern California.
James Johnson, an African- American, was looking for
housing in the San Francisco Bay area in 2001. He called in response to
a sign he saw in a window and never received a call back. After calling
a few more times to express his interest and receiving no calls in
return, Mr. Johnson suspected discrimination and asked a friend of his
who “sounded white” to call. After his friend received a response, Mr.
Johnson assumed that the landlord had recognized that he was African
American by the sound of his voice and was denying him housing because
of his race. Mr. Johnson then brought a lawsuit against the landlord
using based on linguistic profiling.
The problem in this type of lawsuit is in proving that
the average person can easily distinguish racial differences by the
sound of a person’s voice, even in a very short conversation. Dr. Baugh
believes that his research shows that most people can and do. He further
asserts that this “information” is often used to illegally deny people
housing opportunities.
Dr. Baugh, an African American, grew up in Las Angeles in
a neighborhood where he mastered three distinct dialects: “Black”
“Mexican” and “White (or Standard English).” He left the area and years
later returned to the West coast with his family. His research in
linguistic profiling began after he was repeatedly denied housing during
this move.
He would call about apartments using his “professional”
(Standard (white) English) and be given the opportunities to view them.
Once the landlord met him face to face, however, he was denied the
opportunity to rent the units. He concluded that the landlords had given
him the opportunity to view the apartments only because they believed he
was White.
In his early research, Dr. Baugh tested this theory on
his own. Using the three different dialects at his command, he made
phone calls to landlords in affluent areas of Palo Alto saying the same
thing each time. (“Hello, I’m calling about the apartment you advertised
in the paper.”) He revealed a clear pattern of discrimination against
persons with African American and Mexican dialects as opposed to those
who used “Standard English” or “sounded White”.
Further research has since supported his findings. The
National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), a consortium of over 100 private
not-for-profit fair housing organizations nationwide, partnered with Dr.
Baugh to track housing discrimination based on racial dialect. This
project was funded by a three-year $500,000 grant from the Ford
Foundation.
According to an article published in Science Blog,
NFHA expanded Dr. Baugh’s research by supplying “testers” with racially
identifiable dialects to gauge telephone-based screening of and
discrimination against minorities by housing providers. NFHA found that
landlords used answering machines to screen calls and that “in many
different parts of the country, White callers get returned phone calls
and Black testers do not.”
People working in the fair housing field have long
suspected that housing providers have used the sound of a caller’s voice
to exclude potential applicants from further consideration. Now,
scientific research has produced evidence to transform this widely held
belief into proven fact. This evidence should enhance the ability of
fair housing advocates to establish cases of discrimination based on
linguistic profiling.
Matt
Whittaker, in the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire, asked the
question “What color is your voice?” to introduce his article about
research being done in linguistic profiling. Whatever the color of your
voice, it should never determine where you can live.
