Use of Black English and Racial Discrimination in Urban Housing Markets
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- 1 March 2001
- journal article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Urban Affairs Review
- Vol. 36 (4) , 452-469
- https://doi.org/10.1177/10780870122184957
Abstract
The authors argue that racial discrimination in housing markets need not involve personal contact between agents and renters. Research indicates that Americans can infer race from speech patterns alone, thus offering rental agents an opportunity to discriminate over the phone. To test this hypothesis, the authors designed an audit study to compare male and female speakers of White Middle-Class English, Black Accented English, and Black English Vernacular. The study was conducted during the spring of 1999 in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. The authors found significant racial discrimination that was often exacerbated by class and gender. Poor black women, in particular, experienced the greatest discrimination.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect IdentificationJournal of Language and Social Psychology, 1999
- The Effects of Black English and Code-Switching on Intraracial PerceptionsJournal of Black Psychology, 1994
- Racial Discrimination in Housing Markets during the 1980s: A Review of the Audit EvidenceJournal of Planning Education and Research, 1990