August 29 marked the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a natural disaster that devastated the Gulf Coast of the southern United States. Since then, many Katrina survivors whose homes were destroyed or heavily damaged have looked to relocate within the region.
Professor John Baugh has been researching the differences between white and black citizens in finding new housing. His work follows closely with a National Fair Housing Alliance study that found that 66 percent of the time, white test callers were treated more favorably than the black test callers. According to their findings, white applicants received housing related offers that black applicants were never offered. Instead, black callers were often bombarded with extra administrative fees.
Baugh calls this phenomenon “linguistic profiling,” which can be thought of as the auditory equivalent of racial profiling, with one important exception: linguistic differences are not based solely on race, but also on gender identity and region identity.
“These issues essentially correspond to the comparison between the dominant language of a particular culture and the dialect or accents, which are seen as nonstandard, uneducated ways of speaking in those societies,” said Baugh. “My research asks the question: is it possible to discriminate against someone based only on hearing their voice over the telephone?”
Baugh’s research was prompted by his own experiences of racial discrimination.
“Although I am African-American, most people can’t tell by the sound of my voice that I am black,” said Baugh.
Baugh said that the research was based on overall statistics rather than individual calls. The reasoning behind this stems from the fact that people who are discriminated against very often do not even know that they have become victims to discrimination.
Baugh’s research shows that many landlords screen prospective tenants either by using answering machines or simply by making a judgment when they hear the caller on the other end.
Baugh recalled one particular account of linguistic discrimination in St. Louis. A black man called a landlord to see if a particular apartment was available. The call was answered by a worker who told him the apartment was not available after hearing his voice. When the man asked his white friend to call the landlord, the apartment was available.
His research found that this phenomenon is not limited to the housing market, but also extends to the purchase of goods and services over the telephone. Over the past fifteen years, Baugh has tested this phenomenon around many major urban cities throughout the nation including San Francisco, New York City and St. Louis. All of the results he obtained revealed a similar pattern of discrimination that NFHA had recently found among Katrina Victims in the Gulf region.
Does the person sound gay? Does the caller sound black? Latino? Asian? Baugh emphasized that when examining linguistic profiling, race becomes the most heated issue in the United States because “linguistics embodies characteristics that reflect someone’s heritage and culture.”
Baugh’s next project focuses on linguistic profiling in the context of criminal procedure. Baugh proposes the creation of a system that enables the witness to pick out the suspect by voice recognition. The concept is similar to visual lineup in which a witness to a crime picks out a potential suspect out of a lineup.
Baugh is a professor in the departments of Psychology, Anthropology, Education and English. He is also chair of the African American Studies department. In 2004, Baugh received a Pioneer of Fair Housing award from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.