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I can't even talk the way these people talk, 'Why you ain't,' 'Where you is' ... and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk,... And then I heard the father talk ... Everybody knows it's important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.

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You've got to stop beating up your women because you can't find a job, because you didn't want to get an education and now you're (earning) minimum wage,... You should have thought more of yourself when you were in high school, when you had an opportunity.

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Posts: 1892 | Registered: Mar 2002  |  IP: Logged | 

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Cosby made headlines in May when he upbraided some poor blacks for their grammar and accused them of squandering opportunities the civil rights movement gave them. He shot back Thursday, saying his detractors were trying in vain to hide the black community's "dirty laundry."

"Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it's cursing and calling each other n------ as they're walking up and down the street," Cosby said during an appearance at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition & Citizenship Education Fund's annual conference.

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He's a brave man, that's all I have to say. I agree with him, but I understand why people are upset. Maybe if the community heeds his words, then complaints of racism will be taken more seriously.

Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged | 

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Voice Recognition
Can ‘Hello’ Cost You a Home If You're Black?

By Steve Osunsami

Dec. 6 — It was simple. James Johnson needed a place to live. In April, he saw a "for rent" sign outside a San Francisco apartment building. Although he left several messages, he never heard back.

He says he really needed the apartment. It was close to work. It had plenty of room for his two children. It was affordable.
So when he never got a call back, Johnson was greatly disappointed. As he explained, "I always thought that if you had good credit and stuff like that, you wouldn't have a problem."

But there apparently was a problem: his voice.

"I believe in my heart that they were definitely discriminating against me for sounding black," Johnson says. "Being black."

Johnson asked a friend to place a call. Mark Hernandez is Latino, but sounds "white" over the phone, Johnson says.

Hernandez says the landlord returned his call that same day. "They left me a message that says 'yes, you responded to our rental ad,'" says Hernandez. "'Here's our number, please call us back.'"

A frustrated and angry Johnson then took his story to a fair housing agency called the Eden Council for Hope and Opportunity. The nonprofit organization sent five investigators to the phones: three callers whose voices sounded "white," and two who sounded "black."

Messages left by the "black" callers were never returned. Those left by the "white" callers were returned within hours.

"It was pretty blatant," says Angie Watson, the fair housing counselor who ran the investigation. "They were definitely not returning calls if you sounded like you were a black person."

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Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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Studies Say Identification Is Easy

But there is new research, already used in court, that suggests it's easy for person to use voice to identify race.

In two separate studies, Stanford University linguistics professor John Baugh showed that most Americans can identify race with incredible accuracy — sometimes with help of only a single word, a word most Americans use every day.

"We presented that single word to over 300 students at a university on the East Coast," Baugh says. "And there were over 80 percent positive ethnic identifications based on the single word."

And what was the single word?

"Hello."

To test the theory, ABCNEWS gave Baugh and a group of his students a tape of New York residents reciting nursery rhymes, and we asked them to guess the race, age, sex and national origin of each speaker.

Every student correctly identified whether each speaker was male or female, and most of the students correctly identified the race of all but one or two speakers.

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Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003  |  IP: Logged | 

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You know Rat, I'm really embarrassed. I read that post several times, but never clicked on the link because I thought it was linked to the story from the actual graduation.

sndrake, that's not all.

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Discrimination in hiring is still a significant cause of Black unemployment. A 2003 study of job applications showed continuing employer discrimination. Researchers at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent fictitious responses to help-wanted ads, with either white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Brendan Baker) or black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones). The white-sounding names were 50% more likely to be invited for an initial interview than applicants with black-sounding names. Black resumes weren’t helped much by stronger credentials.

Similarly, in 2003 a sociologist at Northwestern University, Devah Pager, sent white and Black men with and without criminal records to job interviews, and found that white applicants with prison records were more likely to be hired than Black applicants without one.

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To isolate the effect of a criminal record on the job search, Ms. Pager sent pairs of young, well-groomed, well-spoken college men with identical r´sum´s to apply for 350 advertised entry-level jobs in Milwaukee. The only difference was that one said he had served an 18-month prison sentence for cocaine possession. Two teams were black, two white.

A telephone survey of the same employers followed. For her black testers, the callback rate was 5 percent if they had a criminal record and 14 percent if they did not. For whites, it was 17 percent with a criminal record and 34 percent without.

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Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001  |  IP: Logged | 

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I think it's important for non blacks to look at why they are feeling whatever this article evokes. Why is this article being so widely circulated?

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I think that non-racist whites see this as a vindication of sorts. When you yourself are doing everything you personally can to avoid discrimination, it does feel good, for once, not to have blame heaped on your shoulders

Posts: 1907 | Registered: Feb 2000  |  IP: Logged |