The Significance of Linguistic Profiling | John Baugh | TEDxEmory

[Applause] so honestly when's the last time you had a problem said to yourself I need a linguist there's a reason for that two of the most important things that you ever did in life in terms of developing your language happened before you had any memory of it you recognized your mother's voice because you heard it in the womb you weren't even born before voice recognition was part of your life after you were born you communicated with your mother before you could actually speak right so language is so ubiquitous it's so common to our everyday experience we use it in so many of the realms of human existence that it's easily taken for granted right but it's easy to take your doctor for granted when you don't know you have cancer okay and the problem that I'm gonna talk about today is a disease on the body politic linguistic profiling which is a form of discrimination is something that's not well understood all right but before we get to that I want to answer the question that's on the screen what is linguistics the elevator speech on that as linguistics is the science that tries to determine what all human languages have in common what you're seeing in the bottom there is a phonetic transcription and so you're seeing how a linguist would write what is linguistics in phonetic transcription it's one of our tools in the international phonetic alphabet allows a linguist to record any utterance that's produced with the vocal tract it could be gibberish and we can write it down but this is an extremely beneficial tool when it comes to for example documenting and a language that is not yet written we can develop an alphabet for a language any spoken line anywhere in the world beyond phonetics we look at grammatical structures all human languages that are spoken as well as signed languages have a vocabulary that vocabulary has to be in a grammatical sequence for the purpose of this discussion though I want to make an important distinction between a dialect and an accent many people use those terms interchangeably and they are technically different a dialect the dialects in a language vary based on grammatical properties whereas accents vary primarily based on pronunciation I can give an expiry example from my own experience in the african-american community many African Americans make an important grammatical distinction between a habitual state of affairs and a temporary state of affairs by using the word be perhaps nothing at all or is an AR so if I said she be happy that means she's happy most of the time she's a bit rly happy if I said she is happy or she happy that's a relatively momentary state it's a productive grammatical distinction that got many african-american students like myself in trouble when they were in school right so as we move ahead with this I need you to reflect on your own linguistic experiences what's your first linguistic memory right now this is not some cute thing that you said that your parents told you that you don't remember right this is actually your very first linguistic memory the reason that this is important is you all have unique linguistic Heritage's and yet there has to be enough that we share in common through those unique experiences that we can understand each other when we use language it's really quite marvelous in my case my language background strongly influenced the talk today this is a picture of my fourth grade class Los Angeles California you'll notice there's no white students also it's important for me to point something out when people look at me for the first time especially in the age of Obama they often falsely jump to the conclusion that I'm biracial that's a mistake the racial mixing in my family took place so long ago that I don't know who my white ancestors are I am Who I am today because enslaved African women didn't have the dignity to select there didn't have the opportunity to select their own sexual partners and as a result of that mixed-race babies evolved since the time of slavery and I'm the product of that as were some of my classmates as you look this is an extraordinary constellation of students and many of my classmates were learning English as a Second Language it was in this environment in this linguistic incubator that I began to develop some linguistic prejudice of my own I was more comfortable with my friends who were native English speakers and I'm Emmitt and made fun of those kids who were learning English as a second language I began to do some linguistic profiling but then the next year I moved into a very different situation a predominantly white school in the San Fernando Valley where most of these kids began to make fun of the way that I talked coming from the inner-city and in this environment I was also exposed to racial profiling for the first time if you're looking for me I'm in the back row near the near the I'm third from the left on that up there in the top right so these kids right again I'm the only minority student in class a very different linguistic environment and in this environment I'm exposed to a different interpretation of how we look at race how people interact with each other based on race and through that I began to discover what we learned about racial profiling now for those of you that are younger and may not remember the concept of racial profiling was first introduced when it was discovered that state troopers in New Jersey were pulling over much higher numbers of African American and Latino drivers than white drivers even though they represented a minority of the population the police office could see them racial profiling is based on a visual cue so if that's racial profiling then what's linguistic profiling right so linguistic profiling is occurs when someone's denied goods or services typically over the telephone sight unseen based on the sound of their voice and the best illustration of this is in a movie West Side Story yeah now the question comes up is that truly the case if she gets rid of her accent will she in fact get that terrorists apartment and actually when they say get rid of your accent what they really mean is replace your accent okay because if you're getting rid of it you're stopping talking and that makes no sense okay so it turns out I faced this situation in a slightly different way you're listening to my voice I sound like a professional scholar it's what I am right many people who would hear my voice over the telephone would not determine that I'm African American and that's actually what happened to me one year when I was invited to spend a year at the Center for Advanced Studies in the behavioral sciences on the Stanford University campus I went to that community and I was trying to rent an apartment or a home for my my family and I was told in almost every instance please come by see the place you know and when I would show up in person out of about 25 visits there were about four that said oh there's a mistake I'm so sorry we just put the house on the market or we just rented the apartment to someone else right now I became suspicious all right and that suspicion led me to question whether or not I should pursue this perhaps legally or in some other way I talked to some attorneys they said yeah you might have a law law case and I thought you know this is an opportunity for me actually to conduct some research right and so you'll recall the slides from where I grew up as a child I have a fair amount of linguistic dexterity and so what I did was in five different communities in the Palo Alto area I began to call different prospective landlords and I thought that you know I was gonna be quite insightful with this new discovery only to find out that linguistic profiling is in the Bible the Old Testament judges the Ephraim i'ts when they tried to cross the River Jordan we're told say Shibboleth but they pronounced it similar 42,000 of them were told linguistic profiling was lethal then right you didn't just lose your housing you lost your life so it was under those circumstances that I thought well okay it's not my discovery but they didn't have a telephone right obviously they looked the same they dressed the same their hairstyles were the same they had so much in common that the only thing they could use to determine friend from foe was the pronunciation Cybil if purses Shibboleth right so i lo hey can I ask a few questions about the apartment on Park Street my name my name is Quan Hernandez he's gone hello my name is Sanjay Kumar I am caring about the apartment on Park Street not available hello my name is Tyrone Washington I'm calling about the apartment of Park Street hello I am Chen yi my name is Cali Banali I'm Tuan vault hello my name is Moshe Goldberg I use a wheelchair it's gone not available all right thank you yes hello my name is Graham Wellington I'm calling about the apartment for rent on Park Street is that still available what is really housing discrimination is illegal if you think you've been a victim because of your race color national origin sex religion disability or family status call us Fair Housing it's not an option it's the law now that public service announcement was produced after I had done a fair amount of research on this particular issue and the research was established not to look at the grammatical or dialect distinctions that I talked about but to see whether or not you could be discriminated against based purely on accent so I always use the phrase hello I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper right but for the purpose of this experiment I had to modify my speech a little bit you understand so I would call and I say hello I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in your paper right or on another occasion along come on about the apartment you have advertised in the paper right now the psychologist in the room will realize this is a wonderful experiment because it's me right if I'm denied the apartment it's not because I'm a different person it's because they're reacting to my speech now in the San Francisco Bay Area the two communities that you're seeing at the top of the slide East Palo Alto and Oakland are communities where there are majority minority populations they're working class and lower working-class communities San Francisco's a multiracial community and Palo Alto and Woodside are quite affluent and what you can see quite clearly on this slide is depending upon the dialect that I used I got a very different reaction I would always cost toss a coin and use one of the minority Ren additions first the reason that I never used my professional voice first is because I was looking for a pattern of rejection rejection acceptance right had I called first using my professional voice they could have easily said Oh someone's coming to look at the apartment and I wouldn't have been able to detect the pattern of discrimination that we see here well by coincidence of circumstance when I was presenting this research a graduate student at Stanford where I was teaching at the time graduated moved to Washington DC she wanted to get a job with an education agency she wasn't able to do that she went to work for the National Fair Housing Alliance well she's working for the National Fair Housing Alliance they tell her you know we're doing these tests with different testers and we're really running into a problem because our minority testers are often denied an application are told that an apartment isn't available because they sound black or they sound Latino and she said oh my gosh there's a professor at Stanford who's doing this very work you guys should get together right and so we did and in fact I want to thank the Ford Foundation of the Ford Foundation supported my research initially for five years in this country to look at linguistic discrimination in housing employment and in education and then they were kind enough to fund me for a research that allowed me to look at these issues in Brazil in the Caribbean in South Africa in France and in the United Kingdom linguistic profiling is a global problem it's not really a problem that's limited here to the United States but when I introduce this research it's not without controversy because a lot of people think that the type of work that I'm doing is very hard to prove and it is difficult to prove and in fact the issue of whether or not identifying a person's race based on the sound of their voice came up in the OJ Simpson trial whether they're black or white or whatever I don't think even jell-o somebody's you know you can tell if it's a child or not I resent that entire and I think it's entirely inappropriate this statement about whether somebody sounds black or white his racist and I resent it so we need to take into account that mr. Cochran was trying to help his client get an acquittal right his clients accused of murder and what happened was there was a witness at the scene of the crime that claimed that he overheard the voice of a black man saying hey hey hey that triggered mister cochran's objection now it's important to recognize that when you answer the telephone one of two things happen you either recognize the caller or you don't if you don't recognize the caller you will draw demographic inferences it doesn't make you a racist or a sexist we judge whether or not we're speaking to a child or an adult a man or a woman and often we're drawing conclusions about the region of the country where they grew up or their racial background all of that is not linguistic profiling linguistic profiling occurs if you're in a position to deny someone goods or services and you act on those demographic and inferences in a discriminatory way right so I started out by mentioning who needs a linguist an analogy with a doctor in cancer I've given you a diagnosis here's what's interesting the cure for this particular problem does not lie with those people telling minorities that they need to reduce their accent or replace their accent indeed there are many well-educated Americans that mistakenly believe that they don't have an accent everybody has an accent if you speak you have an accent if you think you don't have an accent it's because the manner in which you speak doesn't trigger a negative reaction to you those of us and those of you who think that you don't have an accent if you're willing to be accepting of others whose linguistic backgrounds are substantially different from your own that's how this solve problem gets solved right under those circumstances we can be supportive of a nation of immigrants and move collectively toward a better understanding and appreciation of our fellow citizens many of whom backgrounds are very different from our own so on that note I want to thank you for your time and your attention and hopefully this greater linguistic unity will help us all as we move toward the future thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 29,795

Rating: 4.9609756 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Language, Linguistics, Psychology

Id: GjFtIg-nLAA

Length: 18min 31sec (1111 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019