I believe it is natural to determine people’s race and gender linguistically, but the wrong comes in when a person has pre-conceived notions about an individual’s nature based on their speech. Still, I don’t like the label linguistic profiling because it comes across that determining who a person is by the way they sound is wrong, and to me, it’s not. It is natural and common to recognize voices and it helps us learn more about each other. I use to have a huge problem with the “you talk white” or “you talk black” ordeal, but I realized that it is just an identifier. Like everything, there are different cases so proper-speaking people aren’t always white, but usually white (according to what you deem is or is not proper).
Like Rice in Linguistic Profiling and in the movie, I can usually tell whether my mother is talking to a white or black person on the phone, but I am not always right. I also do not assume because my mom is talking to a white person that the conversation will be different from if she was talking to a black person - I just recognize that the person is of or is not of a certain race. So my question is, what is linguistic profiling called if someone isn’t really profiling? Is it still linguistic profiling? If so, is the problem really linguistic profiling or stereotyping in general, and how wrong is stereotyping? If we don’t think negative of the people we’re stereotyping, isn’t stereotyping just putting people into categories? The Sociological definition of stereotyping according to Dictionary.com is “a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group: The cowboy and Indian are American stereotypes.” So therefore, don’t all of us fall into some category, whether or not we satisfy all the requirements for that specific group? The readings therefore confuse me for they somewhat but not always blame something that is done naturally and healthily. We stereotype be nature, not nurture and the unsupported and unreasonable thought of prejudice is a whole different thing. In the end, prejudice is just whether we get equal opportunity or not. Yes, it is wrong to withhold opportunities from people because you are prejudice, but I personally don’t want anything from you if you are going to judge me at all, whether it be by the way I talk, walk, look, or act. It is not wrong to make assumptions, it is just wrong to act out of hatred on those assumptions. And moralistically, hatred is wrong in itself.
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9 comments:
I agree with your statements. The way someone speaks is generally associated with a stereotype. Especially "talking black." You see all these white kids dressed "gangsta" and talking like they're from the ghetto, so you can't really picture anywhere else that "talking black" would be normal. I know if I was listening to someone talking with a nice southern accent and was relating everything to either NASCAR or hunting, I couldn't hold him as intelligent as someone speaking with an Oxford accent and talks objectively. The main reason I think people regard a "Standard English" as a "correct" way to speak is that you tend to lose the idioms and odd pronunciations that can make it harder to get the point across to people not in the same region as you.
I agree with a lot of what you were saying but some I may have some different opinions. I tihnk it is wrong to right away judge someone based off of how they sound. Yes, you're right in that it is natural to determine someones race linguistically but just because it is natural does not mean it is right. There are a lot of things that are natural for us to want and that doesn't make them good for us. I think because it is natural to judge it is just as natural to have pre-concieved notions about their behavior. But I believe something has got to change in your mind so that you are able to be strong enough not to act on those notions. I think the wrong is already in when we're thinking, but the wrong that we can easily control is our actions. I loved the blog and found a lot of it very intelligent.
I completely agree that sterotyping is a natural reliance of all organisms. I mean if an animal has fangs, snarls, and looks like its about to bite your head off it is probably not wrong to run like **** in the other direction, or play dead. However, when sterotyping is being used as a tool to lable mere difference, that isn't a threat to anyone but still instills fear from not understanding the object of that fear, then its nothing more than having the predjuce of prefering to hide and hate, than to understand and accept. We should accept the assumptions we make about someone, unless they have unfounded negative basis, use these assumptions to create some rules of communicaitons (meaning what topics, words, and phrase to stay away from), and adjust these principles for the individual as we learn more about them.
I can totally relate to what you said in the blog. I can always tell if the person my friends are talking to on the phone is white or black with how they talk to them. This isn't exactly a bad thing unless you use it to judge a race. Stereotyping is natural but should not be used judge a person negatively.
As humans, we do stereotype and place prejudices on people based on things that are different from us and I think this is very wrong of us to do that. We do not have to treat anyone differently just because of the way they speak or act. There is no "proper" English no matter what people say.
guI really can not agree with you on this topic. I think it is wrong to judge a person by their voice or anything else for that matter. If the race of the person on the other end of the phone is not going to effect the conversation then what does it matter? Why is it that some that sounds uneducated is labeled black but someone talking proper is assumed to be white. When I talk to people on the phone I do not try to guess their race. If you don't know a person stereotyping is wrong period. You can't just assume that a person is black, white, smart, dumb, mean, nice, gay, straight or anything else just by the way they sound. I can think of many times that my race has been mistaken and many people say that's a good thing, but I ask them why? Why is that the African American male that has grown up in a low income neighborhood will never get the opportunity that some white kids get. Not because he is uneducated, but because he grew up in the neighborhood he did and all he knows is the "ghetto slang." Don't judge a book by it's cover, a man by his color, or a caller by their voice.
I have the same opinion as many of the others. Naturally, we do stereotype. It is just a naturally occurring action. However, doing so can be practiced in different ways. Someone who stereotypes negatively and judges people without actually knowing them is stereotyping in a destructive way.
I believe that everything Kendra had to say is correct. People do stereotype others linguistically very easily and most of the time, do not even mean to. It just happens naturally. The point she brings about stereotyping vs. profiling is interesting to me, because it is something that i have overlooked, which seems very obvious and normal. People's minds automatically stereotype people in a group; however, the wrong occurs after the classification of race and how you choose to go about it.
I think that there is a great point in this blog post, and the point being that we all sterotype. Many of us sterotype people not because of any hatred towards that person, but because it helps us to understand them better. We think that if we sterotype that person then all of a sudden we know who they are and we are not threatened by the unfamiliarity of their presence. I do believe that this is an important tool that we all have,and that our motives behind sterotyping are usually not that bad.
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