Title: History of Racial Profiling in Linguistics

Johnson, Patrice D. "Linguistic Profiling." The Black Commentator. 2 Apr. 2002. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. .

This article gives many of the facts about racial profiling in linguistics. At the beginning of the article, a few example of how racial profiling can be an issue and how the discriminator avoids being accused of it. When individuals are charged with giving culturally biased tests as part of a school or job application, they simply say that the test is “merit based”. When police officers stop and search a young black male that is driving in a predominately white neighborhood, they justify it by giving crime statistics. When a landlord chooses to discriminate against a possible black tenant because of a phone call, they say they had no idea that the possible tenant was black. In the case of the tenant, being accused of discrimination is becoming much more difficult to avoid. Landlords are beginning to “vocally brand” individual voices of possible tenants. The most common answer that the callers get if the landlord profiles the individual as a minority is what is called a “sophisticated lie”. This line typically goes something like “There are three people in front of you but I will put your name down in case they don’t work out”, when the fact is that landlord will never call back. Based on the article, this scenario is becoming more and more common everyday.

Rice, Patricia. "Linguistic profiling: The sound of your voice may determine if you get that apartment or not." Washington University in St. Louis News & Information. Washington University in St. Louis, 2 Feb. 2006. Web. 19 Nov. 2009. .

This article takes John Baugh’s linguistic profiling experiment into detail. Baugh is credited with inventing the term “linguistic profiling”. His experiment is backed by a three year, $500,000 grant through the Ford Foundation. This experiment comprises of a serried of phone calls to companies about applying for a job or potentially leasing or buying a piece of property. Baugh uses several voices including a “professional voice”, a Latino voice, and an African American voice. The results of these tests are quite interesting. The person answering the phone for the company tends to pick out the Latino and African American voices and tries to avoid a face-to-face meeting with the individual. Some companies even go to the extent of screening calls on an answering machine and simply not returning the calls of those that have a “minority” voice. On the contrary side of things, when Baugh called the same company using a different voice he oftentimes received a more welcome response and many times succeeded in scheduling a face-to-face meeting.