Talking While Black

Steven Levitt writes up some new research on race, speech patterns, and earnings done by Jeffrey Grogger:

His main finding: blacks who “sound black” earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not “sound black,” even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn. (For what it is worth, whites who “sound black” earn 6 percent lower than other whites.)

Follow at the link for an explanation of how who "sounds black" was determined. Whites with strong southern accents appear to suffer from a similar problem, though I think that since the experiment wasn't really designed to measure that the estimate is very imprecise.

Comments

Is this supposed to be surprising in any way?

Posted by Anthony Damiani | July 10, 2008 8:53 AM

It took a study to reach this conclusion? I could have told you this based on anecdote a couple of decades ago. Even the worst white racists I know will fawn over a black person who doesn't sound or act black. There's a "see? it can be done" aspect to this, and it can actually be used as an excuse to dismiss black people who haven't taken the trouble to acquire a white accent.

I happen to find a light black or southern accent quite attractive, but I'll admit that the heavier ones sometimes put me off.

Posted by M.C. | July 10, 2008 8:58 AM

In the study, the evaluators of the "blackness" of a voice were five white grad students.

Anyway, this is an excellent argument for a separate African-American nation. Maitres chez-nous, mofos.

Posted by Vive les Africains Libres | July 10, 2008 9:04 AM

I'm fine with having a study done to confirm this suspiscion. Otherwise we become more like them, whose "everbody knows" is the substitute for actual knowledge.

Oh, and raise your hand if Bill Clinton helped rehab your visceral reaction to a white man with a Southern accent, even just a teeny bit.

Posted by ThresherK | July 10, 2008 9:08 AM

What about regional accents?

At least in academia, I've seen people drop their native English accents in order to be taken "seriously."

Anyone from Mississippi working in NYC? Is it the same kind of thing?
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | July 10, 2008 9:23 AM

This explains why Jason "White Chocolate" Williams should, in actuality, be getting a max contract.

Posted by norbizness | July 10, 2008 9:32 AM

I'm an English teacher in an inner city school district. All my students "talk black" when they are speaking casually. Frankly, I want to know why you seem to imply that lower salaries for those who "talk black" on the job is racist? From my experience, I can tell you that "talking black" exclusively can usually be correlated with a more limited vocabulary, even figuring for the fact that it's a language difference. For example the word "fuck" and all its corresponding expletives are used in place of a whole number of more specific words. Limited vocabulary reduces your ability to think critically. The ability to think critically is usually correlated with job success.

ALso, at the risk of being accused of racism myself, can we be honest and say that "talking black" on the job is probably also often associated with a poor work ethic? Over the years, I have observed that those students who refuse to moderate their language in the classroom or on the job are less likely to find success academically or at work because the refusal to moderate their language usually correlates with anti-social behavior. Anti-social behavior is not conducive to job success.In order to help my students with job success, I use my English classroom to explore language and why it's important to increase one's vocabulary, and to moderate one's speech in professional situations. I try to teach them the difference between casual language and professional/public language, that there is nothing wrong with either, but that as a practical reality, they need to learn both. THose who are open to the reality, are more pragmatic/realistic, less rebellious/hostile in general and tend to have a better work ethic in the classroom, which I think are traits that are more compatible with work success in the real world, which in turn will probably correlate in the long run with promotion and salary increases.

And I allow my students to use "black" talk when we're goofing off or talking casually or personally. It's when I go into English teacher mode and when we are having class discussions about literature or other English topics that I expect attempts at standard American English or use of vocabulary. I do this not because I am prejudiced against their casual language-- as a lover of words, and the ways in which teenage slang contributes to the evolution of what becomes standard English, I enjoy their casual language and want them to interpret it for me -- but because I want to help them have success in the workplace, and if they don't practice with me, it will be harder for them to shift gears as they get older.

I think that the issue is much more complicated than just bigoted bias against linguistic differences.

Posted by cnnr | July 10, 2008 9:56 AM

I never realized that races had accents. Socio-economic groups? Sure.

So if "talking black" means using the speech patterns and mangled grammar of a disadvantaged socio-economic group, I'm not sure why it would be surprising that that would hurt you in the job market (and in a variety of other ways).

I'd assume that speaking like an uneducated white hillbilly wouldn't help you, either.

It seems like the assumption here is that educated = white.

Posted by jim | July 10, 2008 9:58 AM

I'm an English teacher in an inner city school district. All my students "talk black" when they are speaking casually. Frankly, I want to know why you seem to imply that lower salaries for those who "talk black" on the job is racist? From my experience, I can tell you that "talking black" exclusively can usually be correlated with a more limited vocabulary, even figuring for the fact that it's a language difference. For example the word "fuck" and all its corresponding expletives are used in place of a whole number of more specific words. Limited vocabulary reduces your ability to think critically. The ability to think critically is usually correlated with job success.

ALso, at the risk of being accused of racism myself, can we be honest and say that "talking black" on the job is probably also often associated with a poor work ethic? Over the years, I have observed that those students who refuse to moderate their language in the classroom or on the job are less likely to find success academically or at work because the refusal to moderate their language usually correlates with anti-social behavior. Anti-social behavior is not conducive to job success.In order to help my students with job success, I use my English classroom to explore language and why it's important to increase one's vocabulary, and to moderate one's speech in professional situations. I try to teach them the difference between casual language and professional/public language, that there is nothing wrong with either, but that as a practical reality, they need to learn both. THose who are open to the reality, are more pragmatic/realistic, less rebellious/hostile in general and tend to have a better work ethic in the classroom, which I think are traits that are more compatible with work success in the real world, which in turn will probably correlate in the long run with promotion and salary increases.

And I allow my students to use "black" talk when we're goofing off or talking casually or personally. It's when I go into English teacher mode and when we are having class discussions about literature or other English topics that I expect attempts at standard American English or use of vocabulary. I do this not because I am prejudiced against their casual language-- as a lover of words, and the ways in which teenage slang contributes to the evolution of what becomes standard English, I enjoy their casual language and want them to interpret it for me -- but because I want to help them have success in the workplace, and if they don't practice with me, it will be harder for them to shift gears as they get older.

I think that the issue is much more complicated than just bigoted bias against linguistic differences.

Posted by cnnr | July 10, 2008 9:59 AM

Did anyone read the paper to see whether "sounding black" related to tone and accent, or whether it included grammar usage?

Following up on cnnr's comment about the association of failure to moderate speech and a poor work ethic, I know people who are white who have the same problem. Some people take so long to develop the ability to interact with people as adults that they have a hard time speaking this way when they get into the workplace, and they suffer as a result. Part of it is lack of discipline, and part of it is simply lack of exposure to mainstream social norms, which become harder to adjust to the older you get.

Posted by Tyro | July 10, 2008 10:17 AM

I learned at a young age that you speak one way w/your friends and at home and another way at work or in public (I'm a member of what I'm sure is a pretty small demographic - a black man who's parents and grandparents all have college degrees). The problem, I think, is that too many people are told that it's okay to speak any way you'd like. I'd say that having a thick Brooklyn accent, or speaking like a surfer from California would also hold you back in the workplace. The timing of this is interesting - yesterday, walking by the guard's desk at work, I suddenly realized that I didn't understand a word the 2 security guards were saying. Like me, they were both black men in their 30s - but our backgrounds (socially, economically, etc.) have diverged so much from our common past, that I had to really pay attention to understand them. Granted, when I talked to them, I found myself falling into their speech patterns pretty easily, an experience I'm sure most people who grew up learning 2 or more dialects are familiar with.

Posted by Douglas | July 10, 2008 10:21 AM

It's harder to study and test - but yeah, people like it when other people speak in the same culture and familiarity level that they do. Gasp! We are not a meritocratic society, and people are judged on superficial things.

In other news, bosses like it better when employees come in on time even when they have nothing to do, and care about what clothes you wear in the office!

Posted by Shock Mouse | July 10, 2008 10:32 AM

this post went up two hours ago. someone call Steve Sailer and make sure he's ok.

Posted by cletus | July 10, 2008 10:43 AM

No, cletus, let's not.

Posted by Persia | July 10, 2008 11:26 AM

I'm white, and grew up in East Tennessee; my natural English accent is about what you'd expect. I've spent 10 years working on speaking like a non-redneck, because I hated being assumed to be stupid and ignorant just because of my accent.

And now, according to my wife, I codeswitch really noticeably, depending on who I'm looking at.

Posted by SamChevre | July 10, 2008 11:50 AM

Did anyone read the paper to see whether "sounding black" related to tone and accent, or whether it included grammar usage?

I didn't read the paper, but it is clear to me from the story that this is about accent, not grammar and vocabulary. The sermon about Learn-to-talk-good-to-get-out-of-the-'hood is beside the point, though unimpeachable common sense.

There is/b>, beyond question, a distinctive and widely recognizable black American accent. People who speak with it get discriminated against it all the time in telephone interactions. The people doing the discriminating, when called on it, say Who, me?,/i> How could you tell somebody's race over the phone?

The leading academic in this field is a guy named John Baugh, at Stanford. (I assume he's still there.)

Posted by roac | July 10, 2008 12:06 PM

<b> and <i>, roac? Really? Talk about the need to get out of the hood...

Posted by scythia | July 10, 2008 12:12 PM

Well, that's offensive. Sorry, but until they fix the Preview function, mistakes are going to be made in html tags, as R. Reagan would have put it.

I tried to download the article but it froze my browser. Baugh has apparently moved to Washington U.

Posted by roac | July 10, 2008 12:27 PM

The paper reports the military's ASVAB entrance test scores for each group, which I've converted to an IQ-style scale:

Whites who sound white 105
Whites who don't sound white 103
Blacks who don't sound black 99
Blacks who sound black 89

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 10, 2008 1:04 PM

It's class, not race. I'm sure a similar study made in, say, England, would produce similar results.

Posted by Henderstock | July 10, 2008 1:11 PM

For more details on the study, and the relationship of wages to the homeboy phenomenon, see:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/07/sounding-black.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 10, 2008 1:24 PM

Well my instinctive reaction to hearing a white southern accent is to thing "stupid racist christianist redneck" so I certainly can get behind the conslusions of the study.

Posted by MNPundit | July 10, 2008 1:31 PM

Cletus should be banned for, say, 10 days as a warning.

Posted by roac | July 10, 2008 1:46 PM

"even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn"

The post indicates that the reasearchers controlled for intelligence in determining that those who "sound black" earn less. As reputable social scientists would. But their results are valid even if one believes that those who "sound black" are on average less intelligent than this who do not. What the test does show (and Steve Sailer and cnnr should take notes here) is that controlling for this fact, a dumb person who sounds black will make 10% less than an equally dumb person who doesn't sound black. Similarly a smart person who sounds black will make 10% less than an equally smart person who doesn't sound black.

Got it?: no matter whether you're smart or dumb, if you sound black, you're likely to end up making 10% less than a person of your intelligence who doesn't sound black.

I know that's painful, but some who are mathematically challenged (e.g., Sailer) seemed to be missing the point by touting irrelevant data about whether those who sound black are likely to be less intelligent than those who do not.

Posted by David in NY | July 10, 2008 4:14 PM

The simple explanation is that "sounding black" involves adopting an identity that was born, matured, and exists outside of the American professional mainstream. Like identifies with (and prefers) like. An analagous situation would be the rapper who "sounds white". He (or she) might find himself with fewer recording opportunities than the conventional "black sounding" rapper.

Posted by Joel | July 10, 2008 4:46 PM

David in NY asserts:

"I know that's painful, but some who are mathematically challenged (e.g., Sailer) seemed to be missing the point by touting irrelevant data about whether those who sound black are likely to be less intelligent than those who do not."

If you would follow the link in my comment above, you would see that I wrote two days ago:

"In other words, Grogger has already adjusted for the big IQ gap between distinctly black and indistinctly black panelists, and there's still a wage gap."

I went on to point out, in regard to Grogger's other finding that those with Southern accents also made less, all else being equal:

"I noticed when I was at Rice U. in Houston that a couple of my classmates had siblings attending local colleges who sounded much more Texan than they did.

"Whether black or Southern, it's part of the homeboy phenomenon. Using a neutral national accent suggests you are willing to do what it takes to get ahead in this country, while using a subgroup accent suggests you are loyal to the values of your neighborhood and aren't as willing to make sacrifices."

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/07/sounding-black.html

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 10, 2008 4:48 PM

David in NY,

Sailer's data certainly isn't "irrelevant." If it were true that people who "sound black" are generally less intelligent than those who don't, that would be extremely relevant even if the study controlled for intelligence, because sounding black could be accurately perceived as a proxy for lacking intelligence. In that case "sounding black" could just as easily be thought of as "sounding dumb." It wouldn't be surprising that dumb people who don't sound dumb make more money than dumb people who do - they're more effective at masking their lack of intelligence from employers.

Of course I don't know whether Sailer's data is accurate, or whether it really proves the hypothesis described above. If it does, however, it would change the question from why people who speak in this way are paid less, to why the 5 grad students associated the manner of speach it with a black speaker.

Posted by Alex | July 10, 2008 4:49 PM

Here's Grogger's study of 402 white or black individuals whose lives are being tracked as part of the 1997 National Longitudinal Study of Youth sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The ASVAB is the superset of ten tests given to applicants for enlistment. The military actually concentrates more on the subset of four more IQ-like tests known as the AFQT. For example, during the golden age of military recruiting, 1992-2004, the U.S. military virtually banned the enlistment of anybody with an IQ below 92 (30th percentile). Only 1% of new enlistees during that period came from the bottom 30% of the IQ bell curve. So, the overall ASVAB, which includes stuff like knowledge of auto mechanics, isn't as good an IQ test as its AFQT subset, but it's still pretty good.

http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/About/publications/working-papers/pdf/wp_08_13.pdf

The military enlistment entrance exam (ASVAB) scores by race and accent are reported in standard deviation from national mean form in Table 6 on pp. 39.

Grogger writes:

"The final column indicates that the mean ASVAB score for blacks is 0.85 standard deviations lower than the mean for whites. This is similar to the racial differences that appear in many standardized tests (Jencks and Phillips, 1998).

"Indistinctly identified whites score 0.16 standard deviations lower on the ASVAB than distinctly identified whites. The difference is greater for blacks. Distinctly identified blacks score .66 standard deviations lower than indistinctly identified blacks. It should come as little surprise that test scores differ between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks, since test scores factored into the definition of the two groups.

"What is surprising is the magnitude of the difference. To put it in perspective, the gap between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks amounts to three quarters of the gap that exists between blacks and whites.

"Similarly large differences appear in years of schooling. Mean highest grade completed among indistinctly identified whites is 12.49 years, compared to 13.22 years among distinctly identified whites. Again, the gap is larger for blacks. The difference in mean highest grade completed between distinctly and indistinctly identified blacks is 0.9 years. This is larger than the gap of 0.83 years between blacks and whites overall."

[Keep in mind that the respondents are in their early to mid-20s, so many haven't finished schooling.]

"Table 7 presents the relationship between speech patterns and ASVAB scores somewhat differently. For each quartile of the ASVAB distribution (within the speech sample), it presents by race the share of speakers whose race was distinctly identified by listeners. The first column shows that the link between speech patterns and ASVAB scores is quite weak for whites. With the exception of the lowest ASVAB quartile, 81 to 84 percent of whites were distinctly identified as white. In contrast, the link between speech patterns and ASVAB scores is quite strong among blacks. In the lowest quartile, 82 percent of black speakers were distinctly identified. That share declines monotonically by quartile to a low of 25 percent among those at the top."

[There are only 8 blacks in the top quartile of ASVAB scorers, but 6 of them didn't sound distinctly black. In contrast, of the 45 blacks in the bottom quartile of test scores, only 8 of them didn't sound distinctly black.]

"Together, Tables 6 and 7 show that skill and speech patterns are highly correlated among black speakers. At the same time, the correlations among white speakers are much weaker."

Posted by Steve Sailer | July 10, 2008 5:52 PM

John T. Molloy:

Live for Success
http://www.amazon.com/Molloys-Live-Success-John-Molloy/dp/0688004121

He covered all this very thoroughly. If you want to be successful in the corporate world, there are certain things you should do. Whether you want to do them is a decision you have to make.

Molloys' books are based on research, not on someone’s perception of style and fashion.

What is the most effective raincoat color? Twenty actors are asked to deliver a package, past the secretary, directly to the president of a company. Ten wear black coats and ten wear beige. Who gets in?

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | July 10, 2008 5:57 PM

To give away the ending to the question posed by RSH, the answer is that the guys with the beige trench coats get in.

Which just goes to show that corporate America has normalized the condition of "fashion victim" into a virtue.

But then, I think that wearing khaki pants with a tucked-in polo shirt makes you look like an overgrown 12-year-old. Others feel that this is appropriate upper-middle class casual dress.

Posted by Tyro | July 10, 2008 6:09 PM

DavidNY -- I was actually making several points, not just one, but the one that directly relates to your point had to do with anti-social behavior and success:

I wasn't strictly making a point about IQ intelligence), I was talking emotional intelligence -- somebody who is unwilling to adapt to society and the social mores that dictate success, is less likely to be successful.

If you're willing to shoot yourself in the foot because you're not willing to conform to the standards that will improve your economic prospects, or in order to keep a job, then how smart is that? I don't care what your IQ is, if you refuse to adapt, you're not going to get ahead.

Posted by cnnr | July 10, 2008 6:33 PM

and whether or not we think that's fair (I don't necessarily think it is), it's reality. THose who maximize the limits of their success (and those limits are highter the higher your intellectual IQ) are those who have the emotional intelligence to adapt to reality. Those who can't or won't adapt, suffer the consequences.

Of course, the most exceptional of those who resist adapting to reality have the power to actually change reality to their own benefit, but people with those kinds of gifts are rare.

Posted by cnnr | July 10, 2008 6:44 PM

To the teacher that teaches un the inner city school and all others that believe in "black talk"...I am a Black person and does not "talk black". It is unintelligent, to put a group of people in one category, because of race.
If you are white, does that mean that you are more intelligent, because you are white?
I have met some ignorant, trash looking, white people and currently attend college with one. All she is concerned with is getting the financial aid money and passing college courses with D's while doing so!
I, on the other hand will have my own business soon, is not on welfare, is not in poverty, and do not think that "talking black" is across the board for all black people. Learn to take people as individuals, ould be the intelligent approach.

Posted by Andrea | July 22, 2008 10:24 AM

To the teacher that teaches un the inner city school and all others that believe in "black talk"...I am a Black person and does not "talk black". It is unintelligent, to put a group of people in one category, because of race.
If you are white, does that mean that you are more intelligent, because you are white?
I have met some ignorant, trash looking, white people and currently attend college with one. All she is concerned with is getting the financial aid money and passing college courses with D's while doing so!
I, on the other hand will have my own business soon, is not on welfare, is not in poverty, and do not think that "talking black" is across the board for all black people. Learn to take people as individuals, ould be the intelligent approach.

Posted by Andrea | July 22, 2008 10:27 AM