Megan Figueroa: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.
Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon.
Megan: I'm Megan Figueroa.
Carrie: Today we have an email I'd like to start with, technically emailed us before the last episode. I thought we'd save it for this time.
Megan: Oh, my gosh. You just sounded like you were bragging about how popular we were. We are.
Carrie: Oh, my God. Speaking of popularity, suddenly on Twitter, we finally live on Twitter.
Megan: Yes, finally.
Carrie: Welcome to any new listeners who came to us via that Twitter thread by Gerald Roche.
Megan: Yes, that's exciting because we have a really important episode today.
Carrie: Yeah, it is really important. But anyway, we'll get to that in a minute. So we have an email today from Ed. "Hi, Carrie and Megan, just wanted to first of all say thank you for the great podcast work. I've been listening to you guys for about a year now, and it's been fab. My name's Ed and I just finished my master's at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. I ended up studying a whole module on linguistic discrimination there and loved it. In fact, my professor told me about this podcast originally."
Megan: Oh, awesome.
Carrie: "While I was there, I wrote a paper and eventually a dissertation about filmic representation of real/fake dialects. I had a lot of fun doing it, and I thought maybe it would be something you guys would like to talk about on the show in particular, I wrote about Hollywood Engine English, which is a variety of English that only exists in the media and not real like to simplify, but the issue runs much cheaper than that. There's a particular book on the subject called Dialect in Film and Literature by Jane Hodson, which I believe covers certain issues in the field pretty well. If you like, I can link you to my particular paper too." Yes, please send it to us. I should have responded sooner.
Megan: Yeah, we can share it.
Carrie: Yeah, we'll put it up on Tumblr our website.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: We'll share it on Twitter, so yes. "Hope you guys are doing well, Ed." Thanks, Ed.
Megan: Yes, thank you. I always like to hear pop culture stuff that's related to linguistic discrimination or linguistic injustice as Gerald said. I loved that. That was great.
Carrie: Yes, because it's both, right? Of course, it's discrimination.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: But that leads to injustice. That's the whole point.
Megan: For sure. I think that it's important that we talk about how it's reflected in our pop culture because that's something everyone can connect to and see and start being responsible consumers of media and all of that.
Carrie: Yeah. Engine English is very problematic for a lot of obvious reasons.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: It makes Indigenous Peoples of North America sound slow and dumb. It's also represented, like when it's written, there'll be hyphens everywhere between every syllable to make it look like, almost like gibberish.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: It really upsets me.
Megan: Yeah. Are you talking about a novel and when they're doing dialogue?
Carrie: Right.
Megan: Yeah. Oh, speaking of, well, not a novel, but a book.
Carrie: Nice transition.
Megan: Thank you. Finally, that's all I ever try to do is just be smooth.
Carrie: That was only one of the smoother ones.
Megan: Thank you. Yeah. We got an advanced reader copy of Word Slot by Amanda Montel. What was it? Was it Lisa Davidson who tweeted at us and said that Amanda was her student?
Carrie: I believe that's right. Yes.
Megan: Yes, and asked her about the IPA or the international phonetic alphabet spelling of word slot to put on the title of the book. That she was excited that she went with...
Carrie: Her recommendation. Yeah.
Megan: Yeah, it's really nerdy from the start because it has IPA on the front.
Carrie: That's true. I appreciate the good use of the IPA.
Megan: Yeah, I've actually seen Amanda Montel on lots of websites because she writes about a lot of things. But I haven't gotten that far into it because I have given myself three books to read this month by Black Women. I'm reading Eloquent Rage right now, by the way, which is relevant to us too. Just as we've talked about before, like tone policing and all of that anyway. Right? Cool. How far have you gotten?
Carrie: I've read the preface in chapter one, so I'm very early days. But I have lots of things, like lots of stickies.
Megan: Oh, my gosh. Listeners, I can see all of the stickies sticking out of her book. It's very professorial..
Carrie: Oh, God. I guess I still have some professorial tendencies. Like the very first thing, it was actually the very first thing that jumped out at me in the preface, I'll just read it. "We're also living in a time where we find respected media outlets and public figures circulating criticisms of women's voices, like that they speak too much with vocal fry, overuse the words like, and literally, and apologize in excess. They brand judgments like these as pseudo-feminist advice aimed at helping women talk with "More authority so that they can be" taken more seriously. What they don't seem to realize is that they're actually keeping women in a state of self-questioning, keeping them quiet for no objectively logical reason. Other than that they don't sound like middle-aged white men." This is exactly what we've been saying.
Megan: Listen over and over again.
Carrie: Listen, everybody.
Megan: I don't want to say that our whole podcast, when we talk about women could be just summed up in one paragraph, but like, almost. This is very close, almost. That is what we've been saying over and over and over again.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: We're trying to shut us up. We're not going to shut up. So just don't take those, that kind of advice, man.
Carrie: What did you call it? Benevolent sexism, which is not you who first came up with it as I once lied, that paragraph stuck out. It stuck out to me too. Yeah, I feel like I've only read a little bit of it, but I'm like, "That's what we've been fucking saying." We're getting the good word out like other people who are trying to get the good word out.
Megan: Yes. So that's exciting.
Carrie: Yeah, in chapter one, she talks about swear words, like content things which we talked about in one of the other episodes as well. Basically, she comes with similar conclusions.
Megan: Yes. It's a very simple cover but I think that it is done well because people are going to be like, "What is this book with a word slot? Just like splashed across the front of it?"
Carrie: It looks like a dictionary entry. So if you're like at all interested in anything to do with the photography, I think you'll be like, "Yeah, I need this book." So well done.
Megan: Yes. I don't know if it was her or if she has a cool marketing person or the Harper Wave.
Carrie: Yeah, there's a lot of people involved in this decision, probably. I'm looking forward to reading more of it. If anything else comes up that makes my eyes bug out, I'll definitely bring it up in future episodes.
Megan: Yeah. If anything raises your hackles, but like in a good way, like, "Oh, we're in this fight together", which has been my experience in the first 18 pages.
Carrie: Very cool. If anyone wants to send us any more advanced reader copies.
Megan: It is my dream. This is what I have been doing this podcast for. Just kidding.
Carrie: Honestly, when I was like in undergrad, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I just knew that I liked reading and linguistics, of course. But I knew I liked reading and I thought, "What if I could have a job? What all I had to do is read."
Megan: Oh.
Carrie: Yes. If this starts into that....I mean
Megan: Oh, my God.
Carrie: I'm going to be so stoked. Sign me up. I am really excited about this episode. I don't know, so important. I hope that everyone who listens shares it with somebody and this episode is about housing discrimination with PhD student Kelly Wright. Please listen, and share. It's so important. It's really, truly very important.
Carrie: Today we're here with Kelly Wright, who is an experimental socio-linguist who's pursuing her doctorate at the University of Michigan. Her work combines theory and methodology from sociolinguistics, neuroscience, phonetics, corpus linguistics, and machine learning. Right now, she is studying dialect discrimination in the housing market looking specifically at how perceived racial and regional identities shape access and opportunity for minority speakers. Thank you so much for being here, Kelly.
Kelly Wright: Thank you for having me.
Carrie: Yeah. I'm so excited to chat with you today about this. I was just in New York for the LSA and I went to the Tenement Museum. Do you know it?
Kelly: I do, yes.
Carrie: Yeah. it's really cool. Unlike anything I've ever seen. You get to go in the Lower East Side into an old apartment building and they tell you the stories of people that live there. I think so much about renting and housing discrimination, and so I'm so excited to talk to you about this. Just kind of start from the beginning really and set up some context. What is housing discrimination? What does it look like in real life?
Kelly: Yeah. In 1968 we passed the Fair Housing Act here in the United States and that protects home buyers from discrimination based on a number of protected classes. So that is race, color, sex, national origin, religion, familial status, or disability. That list has actually never been edited. So those are the only classes that are protected under the Fair Housing Act to this day, it's been 50 years. It's fine.
Carrie: Right. Nothing's changed in that timeframe. Yeah. Not all.
Megan: Yeah.
Kelly: The wheels of progress go slow or something.
Carrie: Right. I'm not exactly sure, exactly what color means. What it legally looks like. There are a couple of different ways. So there are discriminatory housing ads, and you'll notice that if you look at like any Craigslist ad is like, "Does this look discriminatory? Please flag it." So that would just be like basically somebody saying something very specific like, "No Muslims" or something like that. Right? Which does happen.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Which I have seen in my work.
Megan: Well, is this kind of similar to how I've seen ads that say we are LGBT friendly because there must be ads out there that are discriminatory?
Kelly: Right. Usually, the cases that are most successful are about that kind of thing. There are also some different terms and conditions that are given to different people. So basically, if you might have like two people of different backgrounds in a family, one person calls one day and gets a different offer than somebody who calls the next day. So I've heard a lot of personal stories from people sharing that kind of thing with me after I started talking about this stuff publicly. There's also steering is something so I show up, I don't look like I sounded on the phone and they suggest a property in a different area, or I call about a property in a lower income area and they suggest something in a higher income area that that's illegal. They're supposed to give me information about what I call about. Yeah. So this is what housing discrimination looks like, you just don't get access to anything that you can't afford.
Carrie: Wow.
Megan: I guess I'd never thought about the opposite, where they would tell you something about something that's higher. Right?
Kelly: Right.
Megan: That costs more.
Carrie: Right. Yeah. We don't normally think about it in that direction. Yeah.
Megan: Yeah.
Kelly: I get that a lot, especially from people who are like American and are looking for property in another country, like in the UK or they move like to Germany or something, and they're like, "Oh, you definitely don't want to be here. You want to be with other American speakers in a different place, like this kind of place."
Kelly: I get a lot of stories from people who are just like, "No, I really want to live in this neighborhood." Like, "I just like it here. Or it has exposed brick." It's what everyone wants right now.
Carrie: Do you know anything about the laws in the UK or Germany or do they have similar kinds of housing laws?
Kelly: I don't know as much about them. I haven't studied individual cases there. It's just like anecdotal evidence from people who know, I work on this and call me and like, "This has happened to me, this has happened to me." So it's definitely, it's ubiquitous.
Carrie: Oh yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Megan: Yeah. When I lived in downtown Phoenix where it's quite expensive, when I was applying for an apartment, they were happy to have me because I qualified as low income and I am stereotypically someone who they don't find threatening. In Arizona, or at least in Phoenix, I don't know if it's like a local thing, but you have to have a certain amount of low-income people in apartment buildings.
Kelly: Right.
Megan: Housing.
Kelly: That's actually where I did my pilot work in Phoenix.
Megan: Oh, really?
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: Oh.
Carrie: That's interesting.
Megan: Oh, my gosh. I have housing discrimination against you.
Carrie: Actually, not at all.
Megan: Yeah. But no, it did happen to me. I was like, "Oh, this person that's "Selling me this apartment", is excited that I'm low income.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: I just knew that they were like, cha-ching and I was like, this is fucked. Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah. I actually didn't know that. That's interesting. Yeah, some like unexpected pilot results kind of. That sort of like puts into perspective some of the places where people were like, "Oh yeah, it's great. Come down here." Because maybe they perceive me to be a little more lower income than others.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah.
Carrie: I'm going to go back and look at those notes.
Kelly: Yes.
Carrie: Yeah, like leads into the next question, which is about language. So what does language have to do with housing discrimination since this is a language podcast?
Kelly: Yeah, everything. Discrimination still legally is an act that only occurs in proximity. So I have to be in front of you for you to establish my membership of one of those protected classes. My race, my color, my national origin, my familial status. But how you sound on the phone actually keeps you from getting to the door in a lot of circumstances. So there has never been a successful case of dialect discrimination tried in the United States in the 50 years because discrimination is something that has to happen in physical proximity. You have to see me, although that's ridiculous. We know that we recognize individual voices and individual characteristics from people's voices. We've shown that in several different types of scientific studies in cognitive science psychology and linguistics. So what I'm doing is trying to build out evidence to be used exactly for that, to allow people to go into the courtroom and say, "I sound this way." When people hear me, they hear a black person, or they hear an older person, or they hear a Southern person, and that comes with certain attitudinal assumptions about a voice.
Carry: That's really important. You're telling us the answer to this next question that I had, and I know the answer, are there certain speakers that are affected or discriminated against more than others?
Kelly: Yeah. Well, what's surprising about this phenomenon is that it actually works in all directions. So basically it's like we want our neighborhood to be our neighborhood sort of phenomenon.
Carrie: Okay. Yeah.
Kelly: It's like in the African American community, if somebody sounds more affluent or white they may say, do the steering thing and be like, "You don't want to live here. Maybe you won't fit in or this kind of stuff." So it is basically just different-sounding people. However, minoritized people and minoritized speakers are at a disadvantage in general in the housing market. So sounding more like a member of a minority community, whatever minority community that might be, puts you at a disadvantage on the phone.
Carrie: Can we hear some examples of what that might sound like linguistically?
Kelly: There was a study done 20 years ago by Pernell, it's already embossed. So John Baugh is a linguist, and he has three native dialects. So I'm using my three native dialects in this study.
Megan: Which are?
Kelly: Which are African American English, Southern American English, and standard American English? I emphasize that they're my native dialects because people often ask me if I am performing these when I'm doing the work, it's like, "Nope. I have three voices. They represent who I am what I do and where I'm from." It's funny because we do this kind of study with bilinguals and nobody ever is like, "When you're performing Catalan or when you're speaking standard Spanish, it's like, "Nope, I just speak two different languages." My African American voice is something more like, "Hello, I'm interested and looking at an apartment and I'd like to learn more about your property." The Southern voice is like, "Hi, I'm calling today to find out about what apartments you all might have available." Then the standard voice is more like this, except it's more like a radio voice. It's kind of like, "Hello, I'm calling to learn more about your property."
Megan: Whoa.
Kelly: It's like, really?
Megan: Excuse me.
Kelly: You want to talk about vocal fry? That's pretty much all that it is. Yeah.
Megan: Listeners, we have one person here with us.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: I swear.
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: Amazing.
Kelly: I tested those voices early on in this study to make sure that people were hearing three different people and what they thought about those people. So in an utterance, like I just gave you just a couple seconds long, we got three very different attitudinal assessments. So actually the African American voice is interesting because it's all the extremes. It sounds less pleasant, less feminine, less trustworthy, less confident but more poor, more difficult, and more masculine than any of the other voices. The Southern voice, it's the least masculine and the least difficult sounding. It's also the most feminine sounding, which is interesting and the standard American voice sounds the most educated, the most rich. There are different measures for rich and poor-sounding voices. So it's the least poor and the most rich, and the most pleasant, the most confident, the most trustworthy. The range is within about 20%. So the African American voice sounds 20% less trustworthy than the standard American voice. Those words that we asked people actually came from a national survey of rental professionals that I did. So I asked people, "How do you describe an ideal tenant?" They used words like confident, educated, and trustworthy.
Megan: It's just confidence that has to do with having, being an ideal tenant.
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: "Get out of town."
Carrie: That's interesting.
Kelly: But they were just talking about like, people over the phone. Like people come with questions ready, and they ask, like this kind of stuff.
Carrie: Okay.
Kelly: They know what they're doing, basically.
Carrie: You're not wasting their time.
Kelly: Exactly.
Megan: Because their time is so precious, right? Oh my gosh.
Carrie: [crosstalk] people waste your time.
Megan: What do I have to do? No, but I'm hearing these assessments that people have of the three different voices that you use, and there's like a brock just like, feel it the pit of my stomach. I'm just like, "I'm not surprised, but can't we be better?" I'm also trying to be understanding because these are like narratives that we've all lived with our entire lives. We don't even know we're doing this a lot of times, but it's so gross when you hear it out loud.
Carrie: Yeah, it's interesting because we talked about these things in previous episodes, although the one about Black English hasn't come out yet.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Southern English and how Southern American English, yeah. It's so associated with femininity does not surprise me. Given what we talked about with Beth Troutman.
Megan: Yeah. When you used this Southern voice, I was like Southern Bell. So I went straight to a femininity thing.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: Yeah. In my mind. Yeah.
Kelly: It's interesting because I was a little surprised about the masculine-sounding part of the African American voice of like, I didn't know what to expect when I put those measures out there. But the fact that they even tipped the scale towards like this like the masculinity was interesting. Because the standard voice is so low, right? The F0 is just at the floor for the standard voice and yet the other one is much more. Yeah, so it's interesting.
Carrie: When we talked to Nicole Holliday about this exact same kind of study and also about Black English, but especially like Black Men's English. So it tends to be associated with masculinity, just that particular variety. So Black Men sound more masculine, so it doesn't actually surprise me that much, that even though you're a woman, that would still apply, the conception is black equals male.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Which is a whole other thing to unpack.
Kelly: It's true. It's absolutely true. We see that in Nicole's work in Norma Mendoza-Denton's work on Chicano as well of like this like hardness with any sort of dialect that's sort of mostly characterized in the media by male speakers.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Right.
Megan: The dangerous male speakers, right? If we're consuming media and movies and TV.
Carrie: Of course. Yeah.
Megan: Yeah, but I'm thinking, "Oh, yep." The way that we perceive Chicano English is going to be like cholo. Right? Or like this very gangster type of El Chapo.
Carrie: Yeah, or now we're having drunk except he's a spit, that's different. Since he's a Spanish speaker from Mexico.
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: I know. But I think it still infects the feeling about it.
Carrie: It's true. Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah. People don't make that distinction.
Carrie: No.
Kelly: Yeah, so my study is designed to...
Megan: Yeah, these are like second distinctions, right?
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: You're asking people to do these assessments, they're like, "This is a gut feeling."
Kelly: Right. The thing is, it happens, we can make accurate identifications in the space of a breath. So just me breathing in to say the word "Hello," just "Hello." That's enough for you to know that I'm female, to have a good idea of what my age is.
Carrie: Wow.
Kelly: And race. So you can get all three of that in just like a couple hundred milliseconds. So I give them 1 to 2 seconds of stimuli and I am a different person. They craft an entirely different person in their head, which is crazy. Yeah. So my study is designed to look at the interplay of region and race, with respect to the standard, because this thing does happen in all directions. So it's like some areas will want a Southern speaker over a standard speaker or a black speaker. So it's like that paired with the housing history of this city.
Carrie: You go back to the standard voice immediately, and we've talked about this before, but on a different podcast you reminded me of Maria Bamford. Do you know her?
Kelly: No.
Carrie: Oh, okay. God, no one knows her. So she's a comedian and she has like this really strange, like, high-pitched voice normally, but she can put on that radio voice that you did and it makes her sound like she uses it on purpose to make her sound like more competent. Because her whole thing is "I'm mentally ill." So she puts on this voice and she's like, "Suddenly I'm a normal human being and I have all this money." She uses it really effectively and it's interesting.
Maria Bamford: Oh, I've been seeing this, the therapist, the rapist therapist. I can't say it properly because I don't take it seriously and the therapist said, "You should really sing your anxieties aloud. It takes the power away from them. Like, singing them aloud will make you feel as anxious. Just sing them aloud." "Why don't we call those anxieties gremlins? Why don't we just call them anxieties?" "Okay. Would you feel more comfortable with calling them goblins?" "Okay, goblins."
Carrie: Yeah. We talk about this a lot of standup comedy doesn't exist without style-shifting. It is like only people moving between these like very characterological voices. It's really fascinating to me how it's like people don't think you can do this with a voice. Okay. Yeah. We need to do one on standup comedy now, I'm realizing.
Megan: I'm interested in whether or not this is my gut instinct and I know better. I think is that this is a city problem. Is that true?
Kelly: Well, it's sort of an everywhere problem. It's interesting, right? Because rural areas have really a set character to them. There's not a lot of like different, like in a rural area, it's not going to be like, this is the black part of town and this is the whatever part of town, right? There's just town and there's not a lot more there. This problem plays out in a lot of cities simply because of the history of cities in the United States particularly with the highway project from Eisenhower that literally split cities in half and reinforced areas that were already segregated and were becoming desegregated, legally, but then reinforced those separations with physical structures. Then the redlining that has gone on with all of the homeowner's loans when they started in the late 70s, really reinforced keeping those areas to have their own character. That just didn't happen as much in rural areas simply because they didn't put highways down and people weren't getting loans.
Megan: Yeah, that was my feeling. You must know blockbusting.
Kelly: Yes.
Megan: Which is something I just learned about. I wonder, I'm sure you read it, the color of law.
Kelly: Oh, I actually have it. Yeah, it is on my desk. I'm taking a class at the law college this semester, and it's very fascinating.
Megan: Yeah, so I got it at the Tenement Museum, that's why I brought it out.
Kelly: Oh, nice.
Megan: I would recommend it to everyone because I just thought Blockbuster was like a video store. But Blockbuster, an example of it is when they would hire an African American woman who has a baby, to just walk through white neighborhoods and basically like the realtors would be like, "Oh, well, looks like the element that we didn't want to come in or coming in. So you better sell your homes to us dirt cheap and get out of here."
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: It's fucked up. I had no idea about this. Yeah, so red lining and then all that other stuff. I mean, we have quite a history of segregation here.
Kelly: It is. It was absolutely amazing to me to see how complicit government officials and businesses were in white flight. You think that it's just like, "Oh, this was a product of the times." It was like, "No, people literally drove white people out of cities." Like they drove them out. Yeah, and then instantly we're like, "Look how bad our cities are." I was like, "Well..."
Carrie: It was by design, right?
Kelly: Yeah. You can see how this is still playing out now in dialect discrimination.
Carrie: Absolutely.
Megan: Is this kind of work mostly like over-the-phone type stuff?
Kelly: Yeah, I am. So I'm just calling people so they don't see me. I just called and I have like a series of questions that I ask about a certain property. They're like publicly listed properties and numbers. I just search on a search engine and see that I have particular neighborhoods of interest. I've done a ton of archival work. So going back to the corpus linguistics and machine learning and things like that. I have a very large corpus of apartment descriptions going back a number of years like how people were talking about property in the area. I also have a ton of these red-lining documents of people who went into an area and wrote down street by street, like, "I saw X spooks today."
Megan: Oh, God.
Kelly: Right.
Carrie: Oh.
Kelly: Yeah, like published government documents.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: Right. It's been a lot of correlating the character of a neighborhood over time. Now, I'm doing the experiment, and then later after I've gotten the calls I have perceptual experiments planned for sort of what is the material in the voice that people are picking up on that builds this like social identification, which is something that has alluded us so far in a lot of our experimental designs. John Whorter has coined the term Black Scent. But we don't actually know what the material correlates of that. So that's what I'm working towards.
Carrie: Yeah, because I'm wondering how that's going to interact with Southern too.
Kelly: A lot of people have asked, "How do you account for like Europe?" It's a female voice as well, I'm like, "Well, at least it's all my throat." I am the same person I've controlled for speaker variance by using my own voice in all three. So I actually think that buys me some good control there. But yeah, we'll see. Yeah, I can't speak to the fact that sometimes, maybe it does have to do with me being a woman and not me being Southern-sounding or black-sounding. But I will say that most of the people that answer the phone are female. There just aren't a lot of males that are doing this property managing thing. Not in the kinds of places that I'm looking at. Perhaps I'm looking at rental properties specifically. I agree because you don't usually get it. They want to see you, they want to meet you. It makes more sense that I'm actually there for owning a house, that kind of thing.
Megan: Right. Exactly.
Kelly: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: Maybe later.
Carrie: Plus, yeah, there's a bunch of other things going on too.
Megan: I'm wondering if that's a thing that's changed now if it was mostly men when the original study came out. Do you know?
Kelly: Yeah, I don't know. I know that they made a large number of calls and the housing market has changed so much. I think that a lot of people in linguistics now are talking about the problems that we have with replication.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: Yeah. As we are in all the social sciences.
Kelly: Right, exactly. I ran into that issue. I was going to try and replicate the Bay Area, which is where the original study was done, so different now. The area that was the poorest has $303 million homes in it now. So it just simply wasn't possible. Things have changed so much about how the housing market works. There are individuals in the market and that didn't used to be a thing.
Megan: Oh, yeah. That makes sense.
Kelly: I've talked to John Baugh a few times about the kinds of places he called, but I never asked actually about like, "Did you get more men on the phone than women?"
Carrie: Yeah, that'd just be interesting to find out if there's been any shift. Because when was that study again?
Kelly: It was in 1999, published in 1999.
Megan: Yeah.
Kelly: It can't be that different, right?
Carrie: I don't think there was that much of a shift. I think that probably by the early 90s, it was mostly women. I'm going to guess. So how about in person, I know this isn't here about your study, but I know you can't always tell, but have you experienced discrimination in the housing market when you show up?
Kelly: I don't know if I necessarily have. I've lived in several places and I've gotten different apartments. I've never had someone sort of like count me out after meeting me. I have tons of people who've told me stories of this. When I first started doing this study, I realized very quickly, because I only use my African-American voice with my family and a few friends that I was not prepared to use it on the phone.
Carrie: Oh, interesting.
Kelly: I had a really hard time I pick up a phone and I talk to a stranger, I don't use my African American voice and that says something.
Carrie: Yep.
Kelly: We talked about this a lot. I was like, "It's got to be inauthentic and weird and I can't maintain it. Because I immediately want to accommodate what do I do?" So I practiced for like four months. Everything that I was reading aloud in that guise, and I was using it at the grocery store and at the bank and around and I was like, "Oh, people treat me differently." As so differently just hearing this voice come out of me. Also, a lot of people ask me if I'm Latina. I mean, I'm mixed race so people just don't see blackness in me when I'm out and about. Yeah, that didn't happen when I was using my African-American voice. It was clear that they were like, "Okay, your questionable ethnicity makes sense now."
Megan: Yep.
Carrie: Yep.
Kelly: Literally, those few months really honed in for me how potent it is and how using my standard voice or Southern voice with strangers most of the time because there's something about it that just comes out when I greet someone. Because as a little kid, people tell you to be polite. They tell you to be nice to people when you're out and that was my main dialect for most of my life, the Southern voice. Yeah, it makes a big difference and maybe that has something to do with being in Michigan. I don't know.
Megan: Okay. This is where you were doing the practicing out in the world in Michigan.
Kelly: Right, because that's where I am. So it was just in my daily life around here in Ann Arbor, a suburban Detroit.
Megan: Where did you develop your Southern voice?
Kelly: I'm from Knoxville, Tennessee, the largest city in Appalachia.
Megan: Oh, okay.
Kelly: It's an urban Appalachian dialect, which is considerably different than others. It was noticeably urban to other Southern speakers.
Carrie: Yeah. Even I could tell, you sounded like a very polished Southern.
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: Polished just, yeah. We talked to Paul Reed about Appalachian.
Kelly: Yeah.
Megan: I could tell that I have so much to learn about the region.
Kelly: Paul Reed and I went to the same undergraduate university.
Megan: Oh, really?
Kelly: Yeah. He's a good friend.
Megan: He is a gem.
Kelly: He's a sweetie.
Megan: What a guy.
Kelly: Anyway, that's so true.
Megan: Yeah. I actually want to go back to something. You mentioned earlier, that people were noting whether someone might be old. Do you find ageism is a thing that happens?
Kelly: Maybe, yeah. It definitely happens on the phone and so I have this one question that sort of gets a little more at the person's assessment of me as a speaker. I ask sort of a good fit question at the end. I'll have people say like, "A young woman like you won't have trouble with this, that, and the other thing." So they're definitely like hearing the youth in my voice. I guess I sound and look younger than I am. I think that it matters a lot. That seems to be one of the more salient characteristics in these earlier studies. It's challenged at all in 2016. I can send it if people are interested, but that's the first thing people pick up on in a voice. A voice that they don't know is age.
Carrie: Even before gender.
Kelly: It is one of the more salient characteristics, it's near-simultaneous age and gender. But you do get age, especially with this minoritized voice that sounds more male. It's like, as I'm trying to figure out if you're a man or a woman, I already know if you're older or younger than me, and you use yourself as like this, it's like an egocentric perception of like, "Is this person above or below or in the same line as I am?" I actually do that. So in the first few seconds of the call, I put down my perception of their voice too. So I'm also looking at, "How that might affect what I am doing and what I've perceived in the other person?" This is a criticism that a lot of people gave the original study. So I'm trying to build that in.
Carrie: Yeah, that makes sense that it could be a confound, but yeah. It also makes sense that you're comparing your age to who you're talking to, because like lots of languages, you have to know that instantly so that you use the correct forms. We're not as aware of it in English, but I know that clearly we are aware of it. We're just not using that information in quite the same way.
Kelly: Right. It's just not encoded in our morphology, but it's definitely something that people make productive use of in other languages, absolutely.
Megan: Do you know what they're picking up on? Is it like frequency?
Kelly: I'm not sure. Yeah, I wish.
Carrie: Probably both.
Kelly: If it's in the literature, somebody sent it to me, please. I've been looking forever for any study that was talking about what people are looking for. I swear I've tried to read them all. That is a fruitful space for someone to do that work. If anyone is interested, please pick it up. I encourage it.
Carrie: If you're looking for a dissertation topic, here you go.
Megan: Yeah.
Kelly: It's there. Good luck getting a bunch of older people into the lab though, but yes.
Megan: Oh yeah, I get that. I work with babies.
Kelly: Okay. Yeah.
Carrie: Surely there's a way to get the retired population.
Kelly: Do you think so?
Carrie: Surely, yeah.
Megan: Yeah. I could talk to talk to you about this all day. I'm wondering if you have any practical advice for our listeners. I don't suspect that we have like a ton of property managers as a demographic. But I hope that if we do have them, that this is enlightening. But what about someone who isn't a property manager? Just the everyday person.
Kelly: Yeah. I think we've been doing a lot of linguistic, like diversity and knowledge, inclusion stuff on campus here. I keep getting this question and so my answer is evolving, but I don't have well-formed actionable solutions except for...
Megan: Oh, we're not expecting that.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: I think our ears can be as prejudiced as our eyes. So it really is just something of making that statement over and over again for people in the classroom and then also, just sharing that information of like, people possess different voices. It isn't just about belonging to a minority community. Every single speaker, and I would argue singer and writer does this, right? We change the style of the language that we use depending on who we are and what the situation is. So anywhere that you have to open your mouth to accomplish a task, this matters. It's not just about minority voices, right? It's about giving people the awareness that we have like this linguistic flexibility, this mutability in our voices that we use every day and that's really cool that we can do that. I still have such wonder about the latitude that we have when we're speaking. I think that encouraging people to see that in themselves, to hear their own breadth of production is a good place to start being the awareness of the fact that people who are minority speakers might be treated differently can rise organically from that space. Yeah, so I like it that people make like "I don't talk to my friends like I do with my boss." Yeah, that's basically the same thing. It's just that when I talk to my friends, I talk in a different dialect.
Carrie: It's also important to remember, I think that the way that we speak isn't a protected class, but look at what it's doing. I don't know what there is to be done about that at like a policy level, but everyday people like us know that that is a problem, that we aren't protected because of this, and yet it has such ramifications.
Megan: Well, we need an RBG on our side.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: On the basis of voice.
Carrie: Exactly. Yes.
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: We got enough talent, enough linguists who could help write the amicus brief.
Kelly: Yeah.
Carrie: Does this come up in your law class?
Kelly: Yes and no. That's actually what I'm doing. So I've been working with a number of collaborators at the Southern Poverty Law Center, and then also someone at the University of South Carolina on this particular issue of making discrimination something that can happen just through voice alone. That's part of what the perceptual studies that I have planned are for because we need some sort of evidence to say, "You put my voice on a spectrogram. It has these characteristics that mean people hear blackness." This little, whatever because we still don't know what to point to.
Carrie: Yeah. Right.
Megan: Right.
Kelly: Says that I have this in my voice says that I'm Southern says, and these assessments of saying like, "When people hear this, they hear less trustworthy, they hear less confident." So I'm working on that. There's actually a lot of like, literature on things like voice prints and stuff like that. So it's out there, it's just a matter of synthesizing it around the right kind of case. Unfortunately, you need someone to suffer this to be able to stand behind them and support them. The fact that no case has ever been successful, there's really no reticent to attempt it. So it will happen to somebody important enough at some point that it ends up mattering to enough people at once. But I'm confident that this will change. I think that there is enough momentum in different areas for voice to become more legally recognized in general.
Carrie: Yeah, me too. Yeah.
Megan: Well, and I think it also helps that there are politicians that are running for president that are actually using as their platform, like housing and housing discrimination. You would hope organically that this would come up.
Carrie: Not necessarily, because they don't think about voice that much, politicians, I mean they use it, they use their voices...
Megan: You would think that they would because they know...
Carrie: Yes.
Kelly: They know about Regional features, that's for sure.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yes.
Megan: Because they use them and then when they're like, "I'm going to put on the little Spanish. I know when I'm talking to Latinx people", even though a lot of Latinx people don't speak Spanish. They're definitely like doing these things and you're right though. It's not always conscious.
Kelly: Well, It is conscious at a different level than what we're talking about. I just don't think that they think that much about language in general in these kinds of terms, but especially voice, they just don't think about it. But that's our job.
Carrie: Right.
Kelly: That's our job. If people are using us as a platform saying that they want to get, fight against housing discrimination, then we can say, "Oh, well then also look at this while you're doing it."
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Exactly. Here's the thing. I think maybe we should direct this to the candidates that are talking about it, this actual episode. Let's just send it to them.
Megan: Yeah. Well, Cory Booker, in his announcement was like "Right out of the gate."
Carrie: This is what...Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah. Julian Castro was the director of HUD?
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah, exactly.
Megan: The housing and urban development.
Carrie: Right. Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah, for the non-Americans.
Carrie: Yes.
Megan: Yeah. No, it's really important because I remember, this is why I got really interested in it, I don't know if it's called a policy brief, if cops are called for a domestic violence issue, you cannot evict this person. Because that was happening a lot, is that people were being evicted from their homes when they called to report that they were being abused. So that's another thing that we may not think about when it comes to housing discrimination. Language is another thing that hopefully gets to be important or gets to be talked about in these arenas so, yes. No, we'll send you Kelly to everyone that we can. I think this is such an important episode. A really important topic. I was so stoked when I saw it, I don't know how it happened. I think Dominique Canning for some reason, was like saying something, and then I was like, "What does Kelly Wright look at, oh my God, we got to have her on."
Kelly: Oh, my gosh, thanks.
Megan: Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah, it's been a long road and I'm really glad that it's hard to do, it's hard to invite discrimination into my daily life.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: You're to just be like, "I'm going to sit down and allow someone to do this to me on purpose." But I really feel like, it's worth it.
Carrie: Yes, absolutely.
Kelly: Yeah. This has been going on since the beginning of our country. Ever since we were building houses, people were being shut out of the more desirable areas. So I hope that there's significant motion on it at some point in my lifetime at least, please.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah.
Carrie: I think this is the next thing, there's many other areas of discrimination that we need to fight. But by what I mean like non-lististically. It's time for linguistics to be part of that conversation.
Kelly: Yeah.
Carrie: It really is.
Kelly: I really think that just making language cooler is something that will really help a lot of people. People just don't know what we do as linguists.
Megan: No.
Carrie: No.
Kelly: I think that like Walt Wolfram's efforts at North Carolina to get linguistics into the history of North Carolina textbooks that are taught in every public school. It's those kinds of efforts that I think are building, the groundwork for these movements. It really is, I think just increasing awareness.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: When I do outreach and there's people are passing by a booth. If I'm doing some sort of outreach like that, I'll be like, "You want to hear about so-and-so language or whatever." I've had people be like, "Why would my language be important?"
Carrie: Oh my gosh. It's so important. It's so interesting.
Megan: Yeah. There are so many people who just don't even know to think about how amazing their voices are.
Kelly: I have a lot of hope for it because it's making its way into popular culture. Like with the movies like Black Klansman and Sorry to Bother You, this past summer those were two movies about people using voices for these. Well, maybe Sorry to Bother You. It wasn't about social change, but it was very much like, it's like about this fluid movement of language in different spaces and how powerful it is. How really powerful it is for us when we start to think about a person who they are, you always say like, "I don't know that person, like, sounded sketchy or something like that."
Megan: Yeah, it's true.
Carrie: Yeah.
Kelly: It's [crosstalk] much of, we do a lot of work when we're listening.
Megan: Yeah, definitely. Well, you're doing the good work. You are putting in the work. So thank you for your work.
Carrie: Yeah, thank you.
Kelly: Of course. It's so important. I appreciate your interest and support.
Megan: Yes, please, anytime that you make some progress on this, send it to us so that we can share, we have a little bit of a platform that we can use.
Kelly: Of course.
Carrie: Yeah, definitely.
Kelly: Yeah.
Carrie: Thank you so much for being here with us.
Kelly: Yeah, thank you. That was so super fun. Thank you for having this podcast and talking about the things you all have talked about. It's wonderful. I've been a huge fan from the beginning. I'm really happy to be here.
Megan: Thank you.
Kelly: Thank you.
Megan: Thank you. When I say it this time, gosh, I just mean it in a different, like in a just more powerful way. Don't be an asshole.
Carrie: Don't be an asshole.
Megan: Thanks, Kelly.
Kelly: Thank you.
Carrie: Thank you.
Carrie: The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon for Halftone audio theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at Vocal Fries pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod AT gmail DOT com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.