Reply #16: Over-the-phone housing discrimination is a big problem.

[Kingshakabobo]

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3812/is_200211/ai_n9114882


>>>>>"I wondered why I encountered difficulty when I showed up in person to rent an apartment," says Baugh, a professor of education and linguistics. "I assumed initially it was because they didn't know I was African American over the phone."


>>>>In the mid-1990s, he examined how prospective apartment renters are received over the phone, using dialects of American English - African American Vernacular English, Chicano English and Standard American English. He focused on five communities in the San Francisco Bay area and made a total of nearly 1,000 calls. Baugh phoned each rental office three times, with no more than 30 minutes between calls, using the same script ("Hello, I'm calling about the apartment you have advertised in the paper.") alternating the voice he used each time. He also used a different first and last name and a different return telephone number for each dialect.

Baugh was generally able to get an appointment to see an available apartment when he used Standard American English, usually associated with that of a White person. Most often, the "African American" and "Hispanic" voice prompted the reply "there are no vacant apartments."

"There was a striking pattern of people turning down the ethnic <-sounding> voice," Baugh says. While being interviewed for this story, he adopted accents to demonstrate the voices he used during his telephone research.