Linguistic Profiling

I didn't do so well with the quiz. My first problem was having to type in the name of the race, which had me stumped for my first few guesses. I thought it was obvious that the first person was black, but I wrote down "African American" first, having been programmed to think that was the politically correct term when I was a kid. When that didn't work, I moved onto number two, who sounded like a middle aged white man that had better things to do, but I first wrote (and probably misspelled) "Caucasian," but had no trouble having my next guess be "white." After I got that right, I went right back to the previous one and guessed "black." I didn't have a problem with the rest of the people who were white and black, and I guessed the Indian guy right away, but I had to cheat to find out everybody else. With the Hispanic people, my greatest exposure to their voices has been through the media, where they all seem to have either really thick accents or to speak in Spanish, so when their voices came up on the quiz, Hispanic didn't even come to my mind.

My favorite video was the third one, where the guy was trying to understand his cat. It reminded me of times when my mom, who has a hearing loss, has answered the phone only to find that the person (usually a telemarketer) is near impossible for her to understand due to their heavy accents, or even if they're talking quietly or there's background noise. In these situations, she'll often hand off the phone to me and puts me in a somewhat awkward situation. I come to the phone knowing that the person will be hard to understand, but not knowing why, and as soon as they start talking I automatically think, "ah, they're Indian" or "they're from the south." Sometimes I have to ask them to repeat themselves multiple times, and I start feeling embarrassed and angry, more so if I can tell that they're a telemarketer because I don't really care what they're saying, my response will be the same - "Sorry, I'm not interested." The part of me that's embarrassed feels that I should be able to understand this person, and they must think I'm an imbecile for asking them to repeat themselves five times, but the part of me that's angry wants to get back to what I was doing before and wishes this person was more audible so I would stop feeling so embarrassed and they'd stop thinking I was such and imbecile.

Anyway, it's hard to say why people discriminate based on dialect. I think that linguistic profiling is more like cataloging or categorizing the person one hears into a certain group, whereas linguistic discrimination is making a judgment based on what one hears, and I think that people tend to do both when they hear someone's dialect. So in my situation with the telemarketers, I profiled them and made an estimate of where they might come from, and since we don't get a lot of callers with unexpected accents at our house, my discrimination was against them (instead of for them), since their accent probably indicates their profession as a telemarketer, and I hate being bothered by telemarketers. So it seems that the discrimination is more situation based than the profiling, like if someone introduced themselves to me and they had a dialect different from my own, I wouldn't think, "they're probably just trying to sell me something stupid," but since I'm interested in other cultures and from my profiling I could tell they weren't from around Salt Lake, I'd probably discriminate for them (that sounds sort of silly...maybe I've missed the mark with that phrase...).