Prof looks at housing access

Face-to-face confrontation is no longer necessary to provoke racial discrimination. It now travels over telephone lines, too. According to a study published by Penn Sociology Professor Douglas Massey this Sunday, African Americans, lower-class populations and women are being squeezed out of the rental housing market based solely on the sound of their voice. The study concluded that African Americans have less access than whites to rental housing, women have less access than men, and poor African-American women are subject to the greatest discrimination. "White Americans don't want to rent houses to black Americans," Massey said. "They have a lot of preconceived notions about what a black American brings into an apartment rental. If they hear a woman speaking black vernacular English, it probably triggers a lot of stereotyped notions of welfare mothers, kids, problems." "They consider people who speak black English vernacular as less intelligent, less cultured, less wealthy, which is not necessarily true at all," he added. The research, published in Urban Affairs Review, included 474 phone calls to 79 rental units advertised in the Philadelphia area during March and April 1999. The study was conducted by Massey, postdoctoral fellow Garvey Lundy and undergraduates in Massey's sociology research design course. Massey said that landlords often simply did not return a phone call if the voice on the other end triggered certain cues, such as failing to conjugate the verb "to be" or pronouncing the word "ask" as "axe." "African-American speech has evolved in a very distinctive way from its origins in the South," Massey said. "It's an identifiable language with its own structure, grammar and diction. Many African Americans have an inflective pronunciation that also identifies them as black to most native English speakers." Penn Linguistics Professor Gillian Sankoff said the cues that evoke a certain image in the hearer may be even more subtle than grammatical differences or mispronunciations. "A lot of the cues that people use may be not necessarily in words but in intonations, in speech sounds, in what you might call the accent," Sankoff said. "People do discriminate according to images they derive from other people's speech," Sankoff added. "They associate accents and dialects with groups and then jump to conclusions based on these cues." The result, Massey found, was that African Americans were less likely to have the opportunity to speak to an rental agent, and, if they did, were less likely to be told that a unit was available. Additionally, they were more likely to be charged an application fee, and have their credit challenged. A similar experience sparked Anita Henderson to write her doctoral dissertation on this issue. Henderson -- an African American who said she speaks "standard English" -- met prejudice when she attempted to rent an apartment. "I was being steered to the most expensive apartment to discourage me from leasing the apartment because I was black," said Henderson, who was told no cheaper housing was available. But when she called back in her standard English accent, she found that there were more affordable apartments available. "Not everyone is bidialectal," Henderson said. "Not everyone can call up and have a situation when people don't know what their race is." Henderson did a study in which she played recordings of people, black and white, counting from one to twenty. She then asked listeners to identify the speakers' races. She found that there was a series of linguistic elements that listeners identify with race. "People really could discriminate between whites and blacks just by voice," Henderson said. Henderson also found that listeners rated people they percieved to be African Americans as less intelligent, or likely to be on less ambitious career paths. She said that she attributes this preconception to beliefs from the lynching culture in America before the civil rights movement. "When people hear a black voice, they associate certain characteristics with that speech, and they tend to be downgraded," Henderson said. "Black people were downgraded by both blacks and whites." "We've moved away from that sort of overt violence, but to change people's hearts is a different thing," she continued. "We have a lot of racism in this country that is covert now. It is everywhere and it seeps into us, and it seems to have seeped into blacks as well as whites."