Black voices, white voices: the cost of accents

BY COINCIDENCE, two big new films feature race, voice and the telephone in America. In Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman”, based on a true story, a black policeman, successfully putting on his whitest-sounding voice, convinces a Ku Klux Klansman he is a supporter. (When the time comes to meet the group in person, he enlists a white partner.) And in Boots Riley’s “Sorry to Bother You”, the down-on-his-luck young black protagonist, Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), takes a job in telemarketing. A wise old black colleague (played by Danny Glover) tells him: “You wanna make some money here? Use your white voice.” And as if flipping a switch, Mr Glover’s character demonstrates it. Cassius learns his own white voice (played by David Cross, a white comedian), and soon he is on a rocket-ride to success.

“Sorry to Bother You” is an absurd magical-realist romp. The truth of race and voice in America is not. The second half of the film is more about free-for-all capitalism than it is about race. But the thread that links them is that sounding black is costly.

Americans know instinctively that “Cassius Green” is more likely to be black than white, and many studies have shown that applicants with typically black names get fewer responses from potential employers than otherwise identical ones with white names. But voices offer clues to race, too, through timbre and accent. In 1999 John Baugh, a black professor at Washington University in St Louis, who grew up in Philadelphia and Los Angeles and has several accents at his command, rang round estate agents and found that they were less likely to offer him properties in white or Hispanic neighbourhoods when he used his black voice. When he used his white voice, he was mostly offered white neighbourhoods and when he used his Hispanic voice he was mostly offered Hispanic ones.

Two decades on, Kelly Wright, a graduate student at the University of Michigan, carried out a similar study. Ms Wright is the daughter of a German mother and an African-American-Cherokee father, was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, and has a native command of black, standard American and southern white accents. She made recordings of all three accents, and had a group of 340 subjects rate the person they heard. Speaking in her black accent, she was judged to be more “difficult” and “poor” than when she used the other two. The white accent was considered the most “pleasant”, “educated”, “attractive”, “confident”, “trustworthy” and “rich”. The southern accent scored between the two on most of the rankings. Sounding southern and white costs you a bit; sounding black costs a lot.

Ms Wright is now updating Mr Baugh’s study, calling property managers to find out whether they respond with offers, enticing information or special deals. Overt discrimination—“you can’t see the place”—remains rare, she says; subtle steering towards this or that kind of home is commoner.

The British discriminate on the basis of class and region more than race. British newspapers often report on studies of which accents sound the most pleasant or intelligent (Received Pronounciation, south-eastern and posh without being grand), which the most annoying or ill-educated (Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester). Ambitious people from outside the south-east are told to “lose their accents” (speak RP, in other words) if they want to do well.

The consequences of voice discrimination are profound. Consider those studies of estate agents. A house in a good area is a ticket to a good school, which allows your children to mix with the right sort of people and thus acquire the right accent so that the virtuous cycle continues. All of this, of course, works the other way around, too.

Society can approach this problem in two ways. One is to expect everyone to learn the most mainstream, least noticeable accent. Black Americans who sound like Barack Obama can expect to be condescendingly called “articulate”, but at least they will face less discrimination. Not everyone, however, has a white parent from whom to learn that accent, and adults can’t easily change the way they speak. An alternative is for people to stop judging each other on the basis of their voices. People can be inarticulate in standard accents, or eloquent in looked-down-upon minority ones. Accent prejudice isn’t just wrong; it’s irrational.