If they did reach the company, frequently they were told that what was advertised was no longer available, though it was still available to the Standard English speaker. Many times researchers found that the person using the ethnic dialect got no return calls. Finally, a third caller uses what most people regard as Standard English. Then, a researcher with a Mexican-style Spanish-English dialect calls. First someone speaking with an African-American dialect responds to an ad.
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He tests ads with a series of three calls. However, when accused of racist and unfair tactics over the phone, many companies have played dumb about racial linguistic profiling.īaugh has found racist responses in hundreds of calls. If the availability of an advertised job or an apartment is denied at a face-to-face meeting with a person of color, employers and renters know that they can be accused of racism. Such discrimination occurs across America, says Baugh, who is also a professor of psychology and holds appointments in the departments of Anthropology, Education and English, all in Arts & Sciences. Other employees routinely write their guess about a caller’s race on company phone message slips. Some companies instruct their phone clerks to brush aside any chance of a face-to-face appointment to view a sales property or interview for a job based on the sound of a caller’s voice. His study shows that some companies screen calls on answering machines and don’t return calls of those whose voices seem to identify them as black or Latino. When he was a youngster in Philadelphia, he could tell if she were talking to a white person or a black person on the telephone. His mother knew and took protective action. While Baugh coined the term linguistic profiling, many who suffer from twisted stereotypes about dialect have known for decades about the racist tactic.
In the first two years of his linguistic profiling study, Baugh has found that this kind of profiling is a skill that too often is used to discriminate and diminish the caller’s chance at the American dream of a house or equal opportunity in the job market.īaugh’s study is backed by a three-year $500,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. Such racist reactions frequently break federal and state fair housing and equal employment opportunity laws.
Long before they could evaluate callers’ abilities, accomplishments, credit rating, work ethic or good works, they blocked callers based solely on linguistics. Some potential employers, real estate agents, loan officers and service providers did it repeatedly, says Baugh. Louis, has found that many people made racist, snap judgments about callers with diverse dialects. In studying this phenomenon through hundreds of test phone calls, John Baugh, Ph.D., the Margaret Bush Wilson Professor and director of African and African American Studies in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. John Baugh, Ph.D., the inventor of the term “linguistic profiling,” says that when a voice on the phone sounds African-American or Mexican-American, racial discrimination might follow. However, the inventor of the term “linguistic profiling” has found in a current study that when a voice sounds African-American or Mexican-American, racial discrimination may follow. Sound with intensity greater than 85 decibels can cause ear damage, and sound with intensity above 120 decibels causes pain.Many Americans can guess a caller’s ethnic background from their first hello on the telephone. A moderate conversation has a loudness of about 60 decibels, and thunder at very close range has a loudness of about 140 decibels. The softest sound humans can hear, at the very threshold of hearing, has a loudness of 0 decibels. For example, a sound of 20 decibels is twice as loud as one of 10 decibels, but has 10 times the energy. For each increase of 10 decibels, the sound wave has 10 times as much energy.
The loudness, or intensity, of sound is measured in decibels.
Bats, for instance, can hear sounds with vibrations as high as 100,000 times a second. Other animals can hear sounds at higher vibrations. People with excellent hearing can hear very low sounds, vibrating about 20 times per second, all the way up to high pitches with frequencies of 20,000 vibrations per second. The pitch of a sound is directly related to the frequency of the vibrations of its waves. You hear a sound when its vibrations reach your eardrum, causing it to vibrate. The vibrations are transferred to another medium, usually the air, and travel through it as sound waves. Did You Know? The form of energy called sound is produced when matter moves or vibrates.
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