WRIT1001 _ Research Essay_ Outline
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Topic 2: In “The Sound of Racial Profiling: When Language Leads to Discrimination,” Fridland argues that
the way one speaks and the colour of one’s skin can lead to discrimination. She is particularly sensitive to
this being the case for Black people in America who are overly represented in the criminal justice system.
Consider Fridland’s argument in exploring cases of
negative
or positive discrimination based on the way
one looks and the way one speaks in any one of the following environments:
the criminal justice system
,
education, government, or the workforce. Choose a case study or two to support your argument.
Intro and Thesis
The relationship between race, language and racism plays a key role in reflecting and defining the way
human societies are structured. In “The Sound of Racial Profiling: When Language Leads to
Discrimination”, Valerie Fridland introduces the prevalent issue of how social identity and language are
connected in contexts where African American English varieties are involved. She asserts that bias is
often also related to how we speak, and raises the question of its implicity in how we make decisions
about our interactions or evaluation of those we hear. Through Fridland’s argument, it is evident that
matters of fairness and discrimination lie at the core of linguistic profiling which disadvantages Black
people in America who are overly represented in the criminal justice system.
The body
Paragraph #1 -
Linguistic profiling. The problem with racial discrimination when a voice sounds African
American.
●
The concept of “linguistic profiling” is the auditory equivalent of visual ‘racial profiling.’ As with
racial profiling, linguistic profiling can have devastating consequences for those US residents who
are perceived to speak with an undesirable accent or dialect.
○
Case study
: In a current study, John Baugh has found that when a voice sounds African
American or Mexican American, racial discrimination may follow. In studying this
phenomenon through hundreds of test phone calls, it was found that many people
made racist, snap judgments about callers with diverse dialects. His study shows that the
person using the ethnic dialect got no return calls. If they did reach the company,
frequently they were told that what was advertised was no longer available, though it
was still available to the Standard English speaker. In no test calls did researchers offer
company employees information about the callers’ credit rating, educational
background, job history or other qualifications. “Those who sound white get the
appointment,” Baugh says.
○
It becomes linguistic profiling once someone attaches their implicit biases to the fact
that callers sound as if they are part of a certain group or community and decide to
discriminate against them. It is an easy way for people to quickly make assumptions
about a caller and decide if they are part of a community, they have a prejudice against.
While turning away a caller on the phone may sound mundane, linguistic profiling is
another way for those with implicit biases against people of colour to potentially put
minorities in disadvantaged situations.
●
The language features that are associated with generalized negative traits and the attitudes held
against the speakers, can have a very real impact on those who happen to speak (or even just
look like they speak) non-standard dialects. The problem is not really with the speech itself, but
with the attitudes, we hold about the speakers of these dialects. The credibility, employability, or
criminality
we assign to voices can have a very real impact on those who happen to speak (or
even just look like they speak) non-standard dialects.
Paragraph #2 -
its effect in court on witnesses’ credibility and statements
➔
Statements from Black people are unfairly disadvantaged in court and other institutional settings
as a result of linguistic barriers and may be told that they are unintelligible because they speak
with an accent.
●
Witnesses have based their testimonies on linguistic profiling that occurred during the crime
when they overheard the suspect. In other cases, linguistic profiling has led to crucial witness
testimony being thrown out because of discrimination attached to a witness’s speech.
●
Speech-based prejudice can be an especially insidious form of racism because people don’t
recognize how deeply cultural stereotypes and attitudes inform their views about speech. People
may chalk up negative feelings toward a speaker to the difficulty of comprehension rather than
racial bias. They may think to themselves, “I just don’t understand that person” or “they aren’t
speaking clearly” when in fact, racism and linguistic judgments are intertwined.
○
Case study
: Researchers designed an experiment where subjects listened to statements
read by people with foreign accents and decided on the truthfulness of the information.
During the first phase, they corroborated the hypothesis that people tend to distrust
foreign accents and give less credibility to their statements.
○
Example
: In the criminal trial,
Florida v. Zimmerman
, the effect of linguistic profiling in
the courtroom is shown. In 2012, defendant George Zimmerman was charged with the
murder of a 17-year-old black male, Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman would later be
acquitted on these charges due to insufficient evidence, a result that was met with
backlash from across the nation, especially from those who believed that Martin’s killing
was racially motivated. A potential contributor to this outcome was the prosecution’s
key witness Rachel Jeantel’s use of African American English. She was ridiculed as
inarticulate, not credible, and incomprehensible, and due to unfamiliarity with the
dialect, court transcripts of her testimony were highly inaccurate. Jeantel was on the
phone with Martin during his encounter with George Zimmerman, and her testimony,
which went on for nearly six hours, longer than any other single witness at the trial.
However, according to one juror, her testimony played no role whatsoever in their
decision.
-
Rickford and King’s research, (Language, Volume 92, Number 4, 2016, pp. 948-982)
demonstrated that Jeantel spoke a regular-rule-based variety of English even though her speech
was not the ‘standard’ English typically expected in courtrooms. During the trial, lawyers on both
sides regularly problematized Jeantel’s language, claiming not to understand her and attempting
to make her seem like an inarticulate, desperate, and untrustworthy witness. After Zimmerman
was acquitted, one juror stated that the jury ignored Jeantel’s testimony entirely because they
reacted negatively to the way she spoke.
-
Within discourses that reproduce ideas about ‘correct’ or ‘proper’ English, forms of Black
language come to the emblematic of negative traits. In conversations commenting on how ‘bad’
Jeantel’s English might be or how difficult she was to understand, the discourse of ‘standard
English’ allows conversational speech to discount and reject anything she had said.
-
Because she spoke with an AAE accent, Jeantel’s speech was often misinterpreted, and her
credibility was attacked. As such, the courtroom failed to understand or respect Jeantel’s speech,
which was not a butchering of the English language, but a systematic, rule-governed, way of
speaking shared by many people in the black community.
●
As Rickford and King’s work highlights, the lack of credibility and unintelligibility associated with
unfavoured linguistic varieties could affect judicial rulings. There is an obvious change regarding
juror appraisals on the increased negative evaluations and guilty verdicts when witnesses spoke
African American English. There is a long history of Black people being discredited or ostracized
for speaking AAVE even though it is an acknowledged dialect that has its own grammar system.
●
Not only was Jeantel’s vernacular pivotal in the disregard of her critically important testimony in
this case, but in numerous other cases in the United States and around the world in which
witnesses or defendants use a vernacular rather than the mainstream variety, they tend to be
misunderstood or discredited, and encounter dialect unfamiliarity or prejudice in courtrooms
and potentially unfair judicial outcomes. Moreover, lawyers, judges, and foundations committed
to social equity and justice seem almost completely uninformed about how ‘language can stand
as a barrier to justice or equal opportunity’.
Paragraph #3 -
its effect in identifying and charging a suspect and the dissatisfactory racial
classifications that have been used in the courts
➔
It is shown that subtle and often unconscious linguistic practices predispose us to react to and
think about people differently depending on their race. Research on the effect of accents in the
courtroom is limited, though cases have used stereotypical Black accents to identify offenders.
○
Example
: Linguistic profiling can often be relevant evidence in court cases. For example,
if the victim of a crime could not see the perpetrator but heard his voice, that evidence
can be invaluable to proving the perpetrator’s identity at trial. On the other hand, courts
are tasked with enforcing anti-discrimination laws. If a person discriminates against
someone else based on how that person speaks, then they have most likely violated
state or federal anti-discrimination laws. These are the two main ways that linguistic
profiling appears in courts. Courts generally allow the use of linguistic profiling in
criminal cases to help identify the perpetrator of a crime, and also generally accept that
discriminating against someone because of linguistic profiling violates anti-
discrimination laws.
○
Case
: In
United States v. Card
, a witness was able to describe the speaker as “sounding
black” but could not testify that someone “acted black” or that someone who “sounded
black” was more likely to have committed a crime (implying that they were more likely
to have committed the crime because they were black). Courts’ willingness to allow
witnesses with sufficient experience to testify that someone ‘sounded black’, is distinct
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from allowing testimony that says that a person ‘acted black’. Though the Card court was
not definitive about testimony that the robbers “acted like” African Americans, they
accepted that witnesses can, with the proper foundation, testify about the dialect of a
speaker. What is most troubling about the appearance of linguistic profiling in criminal
law is that witnesses are regularly allowed to testify to the race of the speaker based
solely on the linguistic inferences gathered from the speaker’s speech, without
additional identifying information. The majority of the case law includes cursory
references to testimony offered by a witness that a perpetrator ‘sounded black’ or
‘sounded white’ (Smalls, 2004).
○
Case
: In the case of
Clifford v. Commonwealth (1999)
, the Supreme Court of Kentucky
affirmed the conviction of Charles Clifford, an African American man whose conviction
was based on linguistic profiling. In
Clifford
, the police organized a sting operation with
an informant. The informant set up a meeting between an undercover officer and
Clifford at the informant’s apartment. Another officer, Smith, monitored the sting
through a wire. The informant emerged from a bedroom with $75 worth of cocaine. The
informant later testified that this cocaine was his and that he had sold it to the officer,
not Clifford. Finding that the recording of the operation was inaudible, the court allowed
Smith to testify that he heard the voice “of another male, the voice of a female, and
then later a fourth voice which ‘sounded as if it was of a male black.’” Under cross-
examination, Smith’s testimony showed the shakiness of this evidence:
Q. Okay. Well, how does a black man sound?
A. Uh, some male blacks have a different sound, of their voice. Just as if I have a different sound
of my voice as Detective Birkenhauer does. I sound different than you.
Q. Okay, can you demonstrate that for the jury?
A. I don’t think that would be a fair and accurate description of the, you know, of the way the
man sounds.
Q. So not all male blacks sound alike?
A. That’s correct, yes.
Q. Okay. In fact, some of them sound like whites, don’t they?
A. Yes.
Q. Do all whites sound alike?
A. No sir.
Q. Okay. Do some white people sound like blacks when they’re talking?
A. Possibly, yes.
-
Smith was sentenced to twenty years in prison as a persistent felony offender. On appeal, the
court concluded there was sufficient evidence to reach this conclusion. It was entirely improper
to permit Officer Smith to testify that the fourth voice on the videotape “sounded black.” This
type of testimony would be improper in any context, but it is all the more so because the
defendant was the lone black man sitting at the defence table.
●
In criminal cases, our brain’s tendency to categorize speech can help establish a suspect’s
identity. In many cases, the court has ruled that testimony based on linguistic profiling does not
require expert testimony but that it does require sufficient experience to testify that someone
‘sounded black’. Here, discourse linking Black language with negative stereotypes produces a
context in which the discourse silences the voice of Black people and may result in wrongful
convictions and systematic racism.