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290 C h a p t e r 9 R A C E A N D E T H N I C I T Y

Stealth Racism in the Rental Market: What You Reveal by Your Voice

T he past often sounds unreal. Discrimination in public accommodations was once standard—and legal. With today’s changed laws and the vigilance

of groups such as the NAACP and the Jewish Anti- Defamation League, no hotel, restaurant, or gas station would refuse service on the basis of race–ethnicity. There was even a time when white racists could lynch African Americans and Asian Americans without fear of the law. When they could no longer do that, they could still burn crosses on their lawns. Today, such events will make the national news, and the perpetrators will be prosecuted. If local officials won’t do their job, the FBI will step in.

Yesterday’s overt racism has been replaced with today’s stealth racism (Pager 2007; Lynn et al. 2008).There are many forms, but here’s one: Sociologist Douglas Massey was talking with his undergraduate students at the Univer- sity of Pennsylvania about how Americans identify one an- other racially by their speech. In his class were whites who spoke middle-class English, African Americans who spoke middle-class English with a black accent, and African Amer-

Unlike today, racial discrimination used to be overt. These Ku Klux Klan members are protesting the 1964 integration of a restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia.

Down -to-Earth Sociology

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Men

Women

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Pe rc

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Middle-Class English

White Accent

Callers who were told an apartment was available

Middle-Class English

Black Accent

Black English

Vernacular

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FIGURE 9.9 Cloaked Discrimi- nation in Apartment Rentals

Source: Massey and Lundy 2001.

icans who spoke a dialect known as Black English Vernacu- lar. Massey and his students decided to investigate how voice is used to discriminate in the housing market.They designed standard identities for the class members, assign- ing them similar incomes, jobs, and education. They also de- veloped a standard script and translated it into Black English Vernacular. The students called on 79 apartments that were advertised for rent in newspapers. The study was done blindly, with these various English speakers not knowing how the others were being treated.

What did they find? Compared with whites, African Americans were less likely to get to talk to rental agents, who often used answering machines to screen calls.When they did get through, they were less likely to be told that an apartment was available, more likely to have to pay an appli- cation fee, and more likely to be asked about their credit history. Students who posed as lower-class blacks (speakers of Black English Vernacular) had the least access to apart- ments. Figure 9.9 summarizes the percentages of callers who were told an apartment was available.

As you can see from this figure, in all three language groups women experienced more discrimination than men, another indication of the gender inequality we dis- cussed in the previous chapter. For African American women, sociologists use the term double bind, meaning that they are discriminated against both because they are African Americans and because they are women.

For Your Consideration Missing from this study are “White English Vernacular” speakers—whites whose voice identifies them as mem- bers of the lower class. If they had been included, where do you think they would place on Figure 9.9?