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Sentences to ponder
If one believes Grogger’s effects are causal, then investing in the ability to not “sound black” looks to have a huge return — roughly of the same magnitude as getting one more year of schooling.
Here is much more, by Steve Levitt, all of interest. Two other points: "sounding southern" is almost as bad for your wages as is sounding black and blacks who "sound white" earn the same wages as whites, of course adjusting for education, work experience, and so on.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 8, 2008 at 07:14 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
An interesting but little-noted development of recent decades is a a new black male accent that's distinctively black and distinctively educated-sounding at the same time. You often hear it from younger black men wearing those little wire-frame glasses that became popular among college-educated black men in the 1990s.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jul 8, 2008 8:32:06 PM
An interesting but little-noted development of recent decades is a a new black male accent that's distinctively black and distinctively educated-sounding at the same time. You often hear it from younger black men wearing those little wire-frame glasses that became popular among college-educated black men in the 1990s.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jul 8, 2008 8:32:24 PM
I'm not sure if this is related, but I noticed that in personal ads in Africa, people will often note that they're "light" colored (if they can).
Posted by: M. Hodak at Jul 8, 2008 8:44:02 PM
What's really being (potentially) penalized here is the inability to code-switch, not sounding black/southern per se. I have a thick twang when I go home but when I am around northern and east coast professionals, you bet I newscaster it up.
Posted by: Amber at Jul 8, 2008 8:58:39 PM
Re: Amber's comment -- Yes, I wonder if sounding black is a proxy for somehow being less receptive or adaptive to your surroundings.
Posted by: mk at Jul 8, 2008 9:43:48 PM
I love the phrase "newscaster it up."
Posted by: srp at Jul 8, 2008 10:21:44 PM
The 'sounding southern' thing is, I think, interesting.
Racism is not, I think, so much a 'white vs black' thing but merely how people are - the dominant culture gets to call the shots. People who vary from what is normal pay a price.
Note that I don't think this is a good thing - but it does seem to be reality.
The dominant culture is white and European - and people who throw around a lot of y'alls and 'heys' don't fit the dominant culture anymore than a guy speaking black.
Which sucks - 'y'all' is a perfectly good collective pronoun.
Posted by: Brian Dunbar at Jul 8, 2008 10:34:28 PM
Code-switch is a fancy way of saying assimilate.
Posted by: Jason Armstrong at Jul 8, 2008 10:34:49 PM
If you consider the fact that being able to speak French in France is an extension of the same skillset, you realize how obvious this discovery is. Without this ability, Dana Carvey would be broke.
Posted by: Cobb at Jul 8, 2008 10:56:44 PM
My first thought is 'residual confounding' - but (although I found the paper difficult to understand) I suspect this was the authors view as well. I think he is saying that identifiably black speech pattern is a signal for lower productivity, which seems plausible.
I suspect that if better controls were used such as IQ (instead of years of education, which is a crude measure of ability) and the personality trait conscientiousness (which, like IQ, is known to predict salary) then the apparent effect of speech patterns would disappear.
In other words, the speech pattern is 'merely' a signal of underlying cognitive ability and personality type.
Posted by: BGC at Jul 9, 2008 12:36:00 AM
Hmmm - also plays out in housing discrimination, apparently - http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=357
Though regardless of how you sound on the phone, when you show up, the landlord seems to care little about how you speak - http://www.huduser.org/publications/hsgfin/hds.html . Some things seemed based on something other than willingness to assimilate. Wonder what it could be? Hmmm.
I'm sure more research is required, as the answer can't be easily explained in black or white terms, can it? Even if a minor trend can be seen in the data - that is, brown seems even less fashionable this decade than black.
Posted by: rent_to_own at Jul 9, 2008 5:53:35 AM
I like 'Newscaster it up'. Note now that all major broadcast news outlets have a mix of accents: British, Asian, Irish. But you never hear Southern dialect, or Black or even Australian. Those obviously are perceived as 'less than'..
Posted by: outback at Jul 9, 2008 8:16:52 AM
I am a Southerner (from Tennessee) living in NYC, working as a consultant to businesses in Manhattan. I have a strong southern accent that has somewhat dulled in he past two years, but I refuse to lose it completely. The southern accent is associated with backwardness, but the only way I can change this is if I prove my intelligence while also maintaining my accent to some degree. That's my plan, anyway. I'll change the perception one person at a time.
Posted by: Brian D. at Jul 9, 2008 8:19:18 AM
reminds me of something one of my law school professors (in Colorado) taught:
Always over-prepare for trials and negotiations, but do NOT do anything to discourage the notion of large-coastal-city lawyers that you are a hick from the sticks. It can give you a considerable advantage.
Posted by: chug at Jul 9, 2008 8:29:09 AM
Boy it seems to me that that a slight bias could throw those results off.
Posted by: Floccina at Jul 9, 2008 9:48:01 AM
I would love to know about trait-on-trait biases (a black person's bias against a "black sounding" accent, a southern person's bias against a "southern sounding" accent, etc). Anyone aware of this angle of research related to the OP?
Posted by: Chris at Jul 9, 2008 11:11:40 AM
BGC,
the paper DOES control for IQ, namely the ASVAB. I would expect voice to be a signal more of conscientiousness than IQ, but the paper notes that white-sounding-blacks have IQs 4/5 of the way to whites.
Posted by: Douglas Knight at Jul 9, 2008 3:09:00 PM
It would be interesting to measure the relative economic performance of US immigrants from the Caribbean, who I presume do not have the same speech patterns as the longer-established US black population.
Moreover this finding might explain the widely differing economic performance of African-American men and women - women generally being much better at code-switching than men, but no better at changing their skin colour. Sorry, 'color'. (Is there spelling prejudice as well, I wonder?)
Posted by: Roderick Sutherland at Jul 9, 2008 8:01:33 PM
