National Fair Housing Alliance, Stanford University Professor Announce New National Research on Linguistic Profiling in Housing

6/24/2002

From: Talia Inbar of NFHA, 703-741-7500 or 202-310-8790 (cell)

WASHINGTON, June 24 -- The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), the nation's leading civil rights organization focused on the elimination of housing discrimination, today announced a new partnership to track housing discrimination based on racial dialect. The project will utilize NFHA testers nationwide and will be conducted in collaboration with Stanford University Professor of Education and Linguistics, Dr. John Baugh. The work will expand Dr. Baugh's research on linguistic profiling in which Dr. Baugh uses racially identifiable dialects to gauge telephone-based screening of -- and discrimination against -- minorities by housing providers. The announcement comes on the heels of President Bush's new push to boost minority home ownership.

"We commend the president's new initiative to provide down payment assistance to minority home buyers to help level the playing field in home ownership," said NFHA President Shanna Smith. "But as long as housing discrimination continues to shut out even highly qualified minority consumers from home ownership opportunities, the playing field will never be level. Dr. Baugh's research is a perfect complement to the President's resolve to increase home ownership opportunities for all Americans."

Dr. Baugh began his research in 1997 when he was denied housing during face-to-face meetings with prospective landlords. The results of that research, based on ability to obtain appointments over the phone to view apartments, exposed a clear pattern of racial bias against persons with African American and Mexican American dialects in contrast to Standard English callers who "sound white." Dr. Baugh's findings were independently reaffirmed and amplified in a 2001 University of Pennsylvania study which documented the number of times African American or white callers received return phone calls in response to requests that were left on answering machines. Again, a clear bias in favor of Standard English and against African American vernacular English was affirmed.

"Even though the courts are reasonably well equipped to prosecute cases of face-to-face discrimination," explained Dr. Baugh, "they have a hard time understanding and applying the law to linguistic profiling, and that's where this research will help. I look forward to working with NFHA to implement a national program of research that will build a body of irrefutable evidence on which the courts may draw in hearing fair housing cases."

Thanks in large measure to a major grant from the Ford Foundation's program on Asset Building and Community Development, Professor Baugh and his colleagues, together with NFHA, will implement later this summer a controlled testing program to determine the extent to which different racial and ethnic groups are likely to encounter discrimination in various housing markets based on linguistic profiling. Dr. Baugh and NFHA also plan to extend their research into new domains, such as racial bias in access to insurance and by predatory lenders.

In 1987, Dr. Baugh encountered housing discrimination in his efforts to relocate his family. Although Professor Baugh is African American, his speech does not convey his racial background. Dr. Baugh made several telephone calls for appointments to view prospective properties without any difficulty, but in some instances he was told in person that the properties were no longer available or that children were unwelcome. This experience prompted Dr. Baugh to conduct a series of experiments to determine the extent to which linguistic profiling might inhibit equal access to fair housing.

About Dr. John Baugh (http://www.stanford.edu/ 7/8jbaugh/) Dr. John Baugh is a Professor of Education and Linguistics at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. Dr. Baugh taught briefly at Swarthmore College before moving to the University of Texas at Austin where he began to study the social stratification of linguistic diversity in the United States, with particular attention to American English dialects. In 1990 he moved to Stanford University, where he expanded his research to include literacy and language policies related to education, medicine, and the law. Most recently he has undertaken international comparative studies of linguistic profiling in England and South Africa, as well as other countries where English serves as a national language. Dr. Baugh has published extensively, devoting most of that effort to matters of social equality among linguistically diverse citizens in the United States and abroad.

About the National Fair Housing Alliance (http://www.nationalfairhousing.org) Founded in 1988, the National Fair Housing Alliance is a consortium of more than 100 private, non-profit fair housing organizations, state and local civil rights groups, and individuals from 37 states and the District of Columbia. Headquartered in Washington, D.C., NFHA, through comprehensive education, advocacy and enforcement programs, provides equal access to apartments, houses, mortgage loans and insurance policies for millions of people. NFHA pioneered agreements with several of the country's largest insurance companies, including State Farm, Allstate, Nationwide and Liberty Mutual. These agreements have changed insurance underwriting guidelines, funded local programs to expand housing opportunities in urban neighborhoods, and modified the use of credit reports for securing insurance.