The Cost of Sounding Black

My kids drive me crazy with their grammar (some of it probably on purpose). I feel like they were never too young, or now too old, to learn the correct way to speak. This is what parents are supposed to do, or so I was taught. It’s not ‘me and so-and-so’, but rather it’s ‘so-and-so and I’. Instead of ‘where you at?’ it’s ‘where are you?’ And kids pick up bad speech like colds. I am not above dryly asking my son if he plans on working at McDonald’s after high school, grammatically speaking. So, I was intrigued to see some research on the actual cost of sounding identifiably ‘Black’.

My backdrop for this post is the Urban League’s (UL) consistent yearly lament that the average Black person earns approx. $.73 for every White $1 pocketed - due to employer racism. To hear them tell it, racism makes Black kids and their parents forfeit the benefits of reading, writing, and arithmetic, stem to stern, dropping out at the 55% level. And business owners, presumably White, should promise to make up the gap by hiring and paying these poorly prepared youngsters, anyway. I don’t think it works this way! But hey, let’s not let UL logic cloud the discussion too early.

Let’s jump right to the analytical punch line. University of Chicago Professor Jeffrey Groggers reports (here) that, “Even after controlling for measures of skill and family background, black speakers whose voices were distinctly identified as black, by anonymous listeners, earn about 12 percent less than whites with similar observable skills. Indistinctly identified blacks earn essentially the same as comparable whites.” But, unlike the Urban League, the professor prefaces his bomb, “Among blacks, speech patterns are highly correlated with measures of skill such as schooling and AFQT [Armed Forces Qualification Test] scores. They are also highly correlated with the wages of young workers.” Shazzam!

You mean it is common knowledge that if a person sounds ignorant they are more likely to actually BE ignorant? Also, and to the point, if you are more intelligent than you sound in the interview, you will leave cash on the bargaining table (if you get the job at all)? Keep going! And nobody cares about how bad you had it? And even with racism, you have to go to school and learn something in order to get a decent job? Hey, somebody lied.

Now the Urban League does not think it lies by conveniently labeling the wage gap as evidence of employer racism. Racism certainly does exist. But, by doing so, and ignoring important details, they put the plight of the Black kid into the hands of toothless social programs that hand out withering bonus points at the end of the school day, to the lucky few.

Dear Professor: With all due respect, the cost of sounding 'Black', as you represent it, is the cost of having fewer skills, and is really the cost of marginalized lives, and it’s much higher than 12%, as I see it.

James C. Collier

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