sound of housing discrimination, The

New Crisis, The, Nov/Dec 2002 by Peoples, Betsy

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a voice over the phone may be worth a thousand pre-conceived notions.

Stanford University professor John Baugh has been studying the linguistic nature of housing discrimination against minorities has been for more than 15 years. How we sound on the phone, he contends, affects how the person on the other end responds to us. His research shows that for those in the home buying and rental market, a voice possessing a particular accent, inflection or laced with slang often yields a negative response when compared with a similar inquiry from someone speaking Standard American English.

According to Baugh's findings, the chance of a person of minority descent either buying a home or renting an apartment narrows when the owner or leasing agency can either visually or audibly detect their ethnicity. "These two stimuli influence a minority's success when entering into, and advancing within, the housing market," Baugh says.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Blacks continue to lag behind Whites in homeownership and median home value.

Baugh's interest in housing discrimination based on speech stems from personal experience. In the 1980s, he was looking for an apartment in San Francisco and the process turned out to be quite a challenge.

"I wondered why I encountered difficulty when I showed up in person to rent an apartment," says Baugh, a professor of education and linguistics. "I assumed initially it was because they didn't know I was African American over the phone."

He decided to turn his own frustrating experience into a research project. Having grown up in the inner cities of Philadelphia and Los Angeles and in a northern California suburb in a household where his parents "vigilantly stressed the importance of 'proper English,"' Baugh is well versed in how to shift the inflection of his voice for any given situation.

The former president of the American Dialect Society grew up having to endure the pressure from home to "speak properly" and on occasion he was rejected by some of his peers for sounding "White."

Baugh says he was sometimes cruel to his fellow classmates who were learning English as a second language, making fun of them by mimicking their speech. Today, Baugh, the author of, Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic Pride and Racial Prejudice, adopts various dialects for his research.

In the mid-1990s, he examined how prospective apartment renters are received over the phone, using dialects of American English - African American Vernacular English, Chicano English and Standard American English. He focused on five communities in the San Francisco Bay area and made a total of nearly 1,000 calls. Baugh phoned each rental office three times, with no more than 30 minutes between calls, using the same script ("Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper.") alternating the voice he used each time. He also used a different first and last name and a different return telephone number for each dialect.

Baugh was generally able to get an appointment to see an available apartment when he used Standard American English, usually associated with that of a White person. Most often, the "African American" and "Hispanic" voice prompted the reply "there are no vacant apartments."

"There was a striking pattern of people turning down the ethnic [-sounding] voice," Baugh says. While being interviewed for this story, he adopted accents to demonstrate the voices he used during his telephone research.

Interestingly, his findings, which were published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology in 1999, closely mirrored the racial makeup of the communities he surveyed. In Woodside, which is almost 95 percent White, Baugh got the most confirmed appointments when he used Standard American English. Similarly, in Oakland, which has a greater percentage of Blacks than Hispanics or Whites, Baugh confirmed more appointments using African American Vernacular English.

Shanna Smith, president and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance, says that every time someone calls about an apartment, mortgage, insurance or just about any consumer transaction over the phone, the person they are speaking with is guessing their race or national origin.

"We need people like John Baugh to say it is possible for a person to base their decision on whether or not they will call a person back based on the sound of their voice," Smith says. She adds that out of the approximately 18,000 housing complaints filed so far this year, 90 percent of them began with a phone call.

According to HUD, voice discrimination not only affects racial minorities; often it occurs when prospective renters show up with children after placing a successful phone call.

Baugh stresses that it is incumbent upon society to be more tolerant of our linguistic heritage. His efforts have been fortified by a three-year Ford Foundation grant. In September, Stanford received the award to study the effects of linguistic profiling in access to fair housing, education and equal opportunities.