You Talkin’ to Me? – The July/August issue of Legal Affairs, the new magazine from the Yale Law School, has an interesting article on “linguistic profiling,” the ability to identify speakers’ race by their speech and thus to engage in long distance (or at least out of sight) discrimination. The theory will be tested in an upcoming housing discrimination case in San Francisco that, according to the author, “offers a potential breakthrough in discrimination law.”
Since the article indicates that listeners are able to identify black “dialect” when it is street language rather than “professional English” spoken by a black, it would be interesting to see whether landlords discriminate more against callers they identify as black than against, say, hillbillies or rednecks. Could an accused landlord offer in defense the excuse that “I run a high class joint and won’t rent to ungrammatical riff raff of whatever pigmentary persuasion”? But wait, that might exclude editors at the New York Times! (See my comment on them here).
Y’all come, y’heah!
