When Voice Recognition Leads to Bias

Dec. 6, 2001 -- 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."

Discrimination Called Common Across Industries

Shanna Smith, executive director of the National Fair Housing Alliance, says it's a familiar practice, not only in housing, but also in banking and other industries. "Our testing in the insurance industry has shown that when blacks and whites leave messages on the answering machine, that whites get the return phone calls and the blacks don't," Smith says.

Johnson is suing the landlord for "linguistic profiling," a form of racial discrimination the courts have yet to fully recognize. His case will be set for trial early in the new year.

The landlord in this case denies every one of Johnson's allegations, including discriminating over the phone.

Professor Kimberle Crenshaw of Columbia Law School in New York says the landlord is offering a typical yet effective defense.

"For the most part, all cases of discrimination are difficult to prove," she explains. "[But] these are among the most difficult cases."

"[Linguistic profiling] adds another layer of difficulty because of the deniability factor, because the individual can say 'I never heard the voice, I never got the message. I didn't know the person was African-American,'" says Crenshaw.

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.

Legal experts point out that this is not an exact science, but then, historians remind us that neither were the segregation-impact studies that eventually led to the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court decision, which integrated American schools.

What James Johnson hopes is the law will once again catch up with what he feels is the reality of the times.

ABCNEWS' Eddie Pinder contributed to this report and produced the television segment.

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