How Much Does It Cost You in Wages if You “Sound Black?”
freakonomics.com
freakonomics.com
I would conjecture that there is a lot of stigma associated with AAVE (African American Vernacular English) due to rappers and gangs and so on due to media portrayal, so even a rather intelligent person who communicated in AAVE rather than Standard American English would be grouped with the others.
Being from the South, I would be interested to see the same study performed on how much it costs one if they sound "redneck".
There are many southerners who speak with a rather sophisticated gentility, then there are those who speak with a quaint but kind country accent (many farmers). Or just those southerners who use southern words, such as "y'all" and "coke" (as a catch-all term for soda).
The redneck accent I speak of his found in rural places, not just in the south. Often condescendingly referred to as "trailer trash" or "white trash". But I suppose that the distinction is pretty arbitrary and not very well defined.
The problem of many speakers of southern dialects of English in much of the United States is that speakers of broadcast varieties of General American English tend to lump all "southern accents" in a category that includes the redneck accents and the plantation-owner-descendant accents without further distinction. And that is why, as the article reports, there is an employment opportunity disadvantage (on average, other things being equal) to sounding like any kind of southerner.
(I have been to all fifty states, having traveled to many states as a Chinese-English interpreter on contract for International Visitors Program of the United States Department of State. I can remember one case of a very upper-crust Mississipian, who was then living in Alabama, having an English accent that to my Midwestern ear was quite nonstandard, even though I was aware that in the south it would be taken to be the accent of an educated person from prosperous family.)
So for better or worse, I have neutral American English.
Pretty good being on top.
I think that the most non-standard redneck accents I have heard are those in Vermont. It's a strange mix of hippie and redneck.
And then there are southerners who use "soda" as a catch-all term for pop :)
The article did examine "sounding south" as well, with results similar to "sounding black".
The conclusion one might draw from your comment and the research is that to most Standard American English speakers, AAVE sounds unprofessional.
I suppose I don't see how there is any distortion going on.
Often some rap song becomes wildly popular, and it makes use of a novel word combination, or even invents a new word, which then quickly finds its way into AAVE.
Alternatively, many regional words or phrases in AAVE get used by a rapper who gives the word or phrase a wider audience, which then propagates throughout the larger community.
This is a bit of an oversimplification (one could do a linguistics PhD on this topic alone) , but, to conclude, I believe it goes both ways.
Either...? Typically, cultural immersion with a lack of "code-switching." That is, if you hang around black people, you begin to sound black. This is true for all cultures.
You raise a good point, though, that Americans stereotype "sounding black" with "hanging around black people", and "hanging around black people" with lower averages for maximum level of received education, and transparently correlating that with (10% lower) income.
There is much to learn about how much the brain does behind our backs.
What you are describing is someone that does not represent a minimal standard of professionalism, which is a very different thing.
My god, sometimes I wonder where people on Hacker News comes from. You mean to tell me you never heard Will Smith talk? He sounds totally black and totally educated. You never worked with a person that has a "black" accent?
If there is any real fault to this article, it is that the study was presumably done in and around Chicago, where racism to a level that offensive to any taste, is rampant.
This culture of racism is what the article is attempting to describe:
Even when speaking a second language I did the same. There was what people spoke and what one was taught (in Chinese).
Even today I do this. When talking to friends I speak one way, when talking in a professional setting I speak differently --tend to enunciate better and drop the slang, drop contractions and shorthand and the uhms and ahhs, etc.
I've seen guys with 'blue collar' speech let go before guys with more educated speech --the blue collar-speech guy was probably better at what he did than the other, but the blue collar guy could be insensitive, as it were, less refined in dealing with others.
With regard to names. When I was in the East, I adopted a local first and last name. It's what people kind of expected of me. Some people just Sinolized my North American name, on the other hand.
And given this distinction between "sounding black" and "sounding unprofessional," one might harbor some doubt as to whether the study in question controlled for perceived professionalism when estimating the effect of perceived blackness. One might even go so far as to post a comment suggesting that factor might have been overlooked or conflated with the phenomenon being estimated.
Anecdote: I'm a white guy who grew up in the inner city, and one of the most important things I ever did for myself was ridding my ghetto accent. The difference in the way people perceived me over the years is very different.
The simple fact is that humans use short-cuts all the time. I may not like the short-cuts, but I can't blame people that heard my inner-city ("black") accent and assumed that I went to schools with lower education standards and that I am culturally different than they are. Bot assumptions are pretty spot-on, to be honest.
Did I? Well, I suppose taking a skeptical view towards new research could be described as a "human-nature attitude." I really don't know what exactly you're reading into readme's and my posts.
On a personal level I grew up with 'air force' kids since my Dad was in the Air Force and we moved from base to base, and we all spoke alike (in terms of accent) pretty much regardless of race. One year when my Dad was stationed at Andrews AFB, one of my friends, who was black, was taunted by other blacks in our public school in Maryland because he 'sounded white' which I found really confusing. It was hard on him and I really didn't know what to make of it. That said, later in life I found that generally teasing on accents was common. So it was clearly something which caused others to respond.
We might look at smug, entitled "aristos" in a period French Revolution film, or look at slave owners in a pre-Civil War period piece and think ourselves better. We might look at those characters treating the urban poor like dirt or see a smug and shortsighted slave owner talking about the music of black slaves as if it were a primitive sign of their inferiority -- and shake our heads and feel smart knowing what we know as 21st century persons. But in the spirit of "What You Can't Say" let me say that there is just as much shortsighted abusive smarminess, smug superiority, and shallow judgment of people by their superficial features in our day as in those times past. And yes, this includes the West Coast, the Bay Area, and no small part of the startup scene.
Remember that the historical persons such that characters mentioned above were based on thought of themselves as cultured, enlightened, and sensitive, much as many of today's knowledge workers do. Remember also that many of them were utterly blind to their own shallow judgements and earnestly thought of themselves as winners in a meritocracy, as many persons do today. Now note that only a minority of such individuals were actually as enlightened as they thought they were.
And lastly, there are those among you who have or will overcome the blindness of your own subculture and time, but remember that only very rarely does this come without some form of shock, surprise, or pain.
EDIT: Another instance where we can relate some media to the subject -- the powerful executives portrayed in Mad Men equated sounding like a top-tier university white male with "sounding professional." They equated looking like one of them with "looking professional." Just as much of that goes on today as did back then, it's just that the styles have changed.
The way support in India use American names and try to fake Texan or Australian accents sometimes makes me think they do not have much cultural pride (when they should). If a company is clearly outsourcing they should not try to hide it.
It doesn't have anything to do with pride. They make more money if they sound local to their customers.
Why is this? For people who are born in America, I don't understand why some would sound different than others. How can you possibly tell race just by listening to someone's voice, unless there are anatomical differences?
Yes, you can make a pretty good guess because of intonations, glottal stops, timing, and etc. They're generally tied with the communities (for example, I'm Asian, and though I have spoken English my entire life, people can still tell by the slight off-ness of my accent)
There are many of these things which can give you some insight on someone's background. Is it soda? Or pop? Or "coke" as a generic term?
Do you use "hella" or "wicked" as a modifier, as in "hella cool" or "wicked fast"?
There's the whole "ya'll" thing, and don't forget "all ya'll". Are you "fixin'" to do something? How about "ain't" and "busted"?
This is just word choice. There are all sorts of different ways to pronounce the same words, too, and those also give you some idea of where someone might be from.
The United Kingdom and Ireland have this kind of cultural picking by ear down to a fine tuned art - identifying an Irish builder that's spent a decade with cockneys or a Welsh lesbian that attends a Scottish knitting circle is a matter of course.
Somewhat less tongue in cheek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_WC9PM6S0Q
As for grammar, everybody who's been to high school in the US has had a grammar book that teaches correct (not "correct") grammar. There really is a right way and a wrong way.
It's optional.
>Oh, and there is no standard English.
This is wrong. There absolutely is a standard American English. Jesus Christ, no wonder young people can't get jobs. They don't teach English in school any more.
Of course it is optional. Use of the word "ain't" is sanctioned by most English dictionaries, and is thus optional as well. Omitting the comma undermines your point.
> This is wrong. There absolutely is a standard American English. Jesus Christ, no wonder young people can't get jobs. They don't teach English in school any more.
You said Standard English, not Standard American English. Regardless, Standard American English is an accent. It is not a grammar specification, nor a vocabulary. As such, its use does not preclude slang, and it doesn't preclude cultural modification of grammar.
You might want to stop before you embarrass yourself further.
This is the dumbest thing you've said yet, and that's jumping a pretty high bar.
>You might want to stop before you embarrass yourself further.
I was just going to suggest this to you. You're talking in circles.
You know what? You're right. There's no reason to try to persuade people to speak standard English. After all, the world needs ditch diggers too.
In most well paid professional contexts, English speakers are expected to be able to understand other English accents, including the most common accents from England, Ireland, Scotland, India, New Zealand, and Australia. They are also expected to be able to communicate with people who still have major shortcomings in their English, due to the fact that English may not be a native language. Standard American English is nothing more than regionally distinct lowest common denominator of intelligibility. It's use does not signify intelligence nor education any more than other accents.
Which is entirely outside the scope of discussion. We were talking about whether or not a person could speak American standard English. This isn't about other countries, by the way, so if you're going to continue why don't you go ahead and read the article.
>Standard American English is nothing more than regionally distinct lowest common denominator of intelligibility. It's use does not signify intelligence nor education any more than other accents.
If it's just a question of accent then I would agree. But if it's a question of grammar and word choice I don't. The article isn't clear on that point, since Freakonomics is about junk science that titillates and not about actual science. If you "sound black" because you have an accent that's just a reflection of where you grew up. If you "sound black" because your grammar is bad it really does reflect on your education.
A dialect is a combination of accent, vocabulary, and grammar. And no, it doesn't reflect your education. It reflects the culture in which you were raised.
There literally is no Standard English, let alone a Standard American English dialect. If you have been taught that there is, you have been taught incorrectly. All languages evolve, as a result of culture (including pop culture), geography, and time period. Even today, linguists have no consensus on the proper third person pronoun to use for an anonymous or hypothetical person. Some might say "He", some might say a randomized version of "He" or "She", and some might say "They". As of 30 years ago, all of them would have told you "He", and that anything else was bad grammar. But culture (acknowledgement of sexism) combined with common usage (which was/is incorrect grammar) have definitively changed the accepted standard.
Languages change. This isn't just an attempt at being politically correct...it is a fucking truism. The simple fact that I am referring to you as "you" is an acknowledgement of this fact. A strict interpretation of "you" requires usage in a plural second-person context. Culture, specifically in the reference to royalty in the plural (an implicit acknowledgement of royalty as being ambassadors of God), changed it from a plural pronoun into a singular pronoun in limited use cases. Contextually improper and uneducated overuse of the form led to its complete abandonment as a plural pronoun. It is now considered a grammatically correct singular pronoun in every known English dialect today.
Any sort of attempt to legitimize one dialect as proper or as a standard is a pure manifestation of xenophobia at best. Within the context of the article, people confuse the African American Vernacular with the lack of an education. In reality, it is a racist expectation that those belonging to one culture conform to the independently evolved standards of the culture that systemically isolated them and abused them for hundreds of years. I never said that the article was about other countries. It is about the ability to look past someone's dialect to see their education and experience. "Sounding Black" doesn't make you stupid. It makes you different.
And if you can't learn to get over it, you don't deserve a well-payed professional job...the kind of job where you will meet and talk to people from thousands of different backgrounds, all of whom will be noticeably different from you. You deserve the ditch digger job where you can be racist and expect everybody else to conform to what you grew up with. And yes, that last sentence was grammatically correct as of a few decades ago. Get over it.
Are black kids too dumb to learn standard American English? Who is the racist here?
That is the type of thing the article is talking about. Once your speech patterns are set (by age 10 or so), barring a concerted effort, that's the way you're going to talk for the rest of your life.
Note: I'm not talking about the (legitimate) lexical and grammatical differences between Standard American and AAVE, I mean the way speech sounds. The accent. The way that you can tell someone born and raised in Texas from someone from New Jersey just by listening to them.
The point of the article is that if you happen to have grown up in an environment that leads you to sound identifiably Black, then all else equal, you will have lower wages.
You can say that you don't care; that's fine. You're allowed to be callous. But you can't imply that the person who sounds Black has only to change their (ingrained) accent to solve their problem. That takes the blame from society and places it on the victim, thus perpetuating the evil. You're not allowed to be evil.
But the article doesn't distinguish between accent and things like grammar and word choice. I agree an accent is just an indicator of your origins, but poor grammar and slang are a legitimate indicator of a substandard education. That's what I meant about speaking standard English. Employers aren't charities - they have a legitimate interest in hiring people who sound professional. The study would have been a whole lot more useful if it made some attempt to separate accent from grammar and slang.
If you read the article (you did read the article, right?) you'll see they mention (in passing, of course, because it's the NYT and coastal liberals don't care) people who "sound southern" have the same pay disparities. Which makes me wonder how well controlled the underlying study is, frankly. This may all just be a statistical artifact of the fact that bankers and stockbrokers in NYC make a lot of money compared to everyone else.