White Liberals Dumb Down Speech to Black People
December 2, 2018 5:23 PM   Subscribe

A liberal might use different words when speaking to a white person than to a black person. A new study suggests that the words you (a liberal) use may depend on whether the club secretary’s name is Emily (“a stereotypically White name,” as the study says) or Lakisha (“a stereotypically Black name”). If you’re a white liberal writing to Emily, you might use words like “melancholy” or “euphoric” to describe the mood of the book, whereas you might trade these terms out for the simpler “sad” or “happy” if you’re corresponding with Lakisha. But if you’re a white conservative, your diction won’t depend on the presumed race of your interlocutor.
posted by MovableBookLady (27 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: So, yeah, this really isn't working out. Maybe it can be reposted later with some helpful analysis / context / additional reporting so people aren't immediately jumping to an assumption that this is all about LIBERALS ARE THE REAL RACISTS -- taz



 
I feel like "dumb down" and "sophistication of vocabulary" are very problematic. Over the last few years, I have put in a lot of effort to improve readability of what I write for a general audience. There's nothing dumb or unsophisticated about making your language accessible to a diverse audience. The authors seem to speculate quite a bit about what the data is telling them and I am not so quick to follow them.
posted by snofoam at 5:50 PM on December 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


Queue a bunch of white liberals complaining about lack of rigor in the methodology and the misinterpretation of the statistical approach. To be followed by a smaller number of POC voices saying, "no shit."
posted by ActingTheGoat at 5:50 PM on December 2, 2018 [12 favorites]


I haven't read the study but it seems like the names aren't just representing race but also class. Maybe they pretested the names for class affiliation and they were found to be similar but otherwise, that's a big design flaw.
posted by k8t at 9:49 PM on December 2, 2018


...and white people code-switch like this
posted by naju at 10:05 PM on December 2, 2018 [9 favorites]


I am quite sure that white people do this; I am less convinced that the behavior is actually correlated with ideology in this way.
posted by mellow seas at 10:08 PM on December 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


But what about liberals writing to conservatives?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 10:20 PM on December 2, 2018 [2 favorites]


Yes, what mellow seas said.
posted by praemunire at 10:23 PM on December 2, 2018


there's nothing dumb or unsophisticated about making your language accessible to a diverse audience.

what is this to the purpose? the summary of the paper is not talking about a diverse audience. it's talking about a presumed black audience. an audience of one person, which by definition cannot be diverse no matter the imaginary person's imagined demographic.

this kind of obfuscation of the obvious, and the equation of "black" and "diverse," are not unrelated to the point.

a single study of this type proves nothing. and I try not to believe things too quickly when they sound too plausible. but this sounds plenty plausible.
posted by queenofbithynia at 10:23 PM on December 2, 2018 [8 favorites]


I'm interested in the blatant assumption that liberals show in using simpler words for a presumed black person. It may be classism but I'm more likely to think they do it because of deep-seated racism they fail to acknowledge. And if they're thinking "well, I don't want to make this (supposed) black person uncomfortable so I won't use any big words," that's condescending even if it isn't classist or racist (but it's actually both to my mind).

Even more interesting is the finding that conservatives don't adjust their language at all because they don't care whether they might be misunderstood.

Of course, a single study proves nothing, but it does present an interesting approach for further investigation.
posted by MovableBookLady at 10:49 PM on December 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


an audience of one person, which by definition cannot be diverse no matter the imaginary person's imagined demographic.

It's schroedinger's audience - the audience itself is not diverse, but until you open the box it contains all the potential options from a diverse set of possibilities.

I think the finding seems pretty plausible, but making that joke also makes me wonder if seeing a name that made them think the audience was someone not exactly like themselves could have actually triggered some awareness of 'writing for a diverse audience'. I think you could check for that by using names that were associated with different groups, like Arabic or Chinese, or maybe attaching a random characteristic like .. favorite tv show?
posted by the agents of KAOS at 10:57 PM on December 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


Assuming Emily is "exactly like themselves" while Lakisha is not is the racist thing we're talking about, jfc
posted by naju at 11:05 PM on December 2, 2018 [12 favorites]


> the summary of the paper is not talking about a diverse audience. it's talking
> about a presumed black audience. an audience of one person, which by definition
> cannot be diverse no matter the imaginary person's imagined demographic.

If you tell me to write a letter to a black person but that's all the information you give I have to write a letter to a diverse audience. A diverse black audience.

What's more, given that blacks in the United States are rather famously poorly served by our educational system, if you want to reach the largest part of the audience you'd best skip the SAT words. I suppose you could show your support for educational reform by excluding the audience you're talking to, but it might be better if you kept the same content but rewrote the language for people who got screwed out of a decent education.

I do think there is a tendency to think of white people as more educated than they are though. We're discussing this in a little blue bubble where "stereotypically", "melancholy" and "euphoric" are supposedly normal words that white people use to communicate. I would not suggest you use those words in a letter to a random white audience, you will not hit nearly as large a target as you think you will.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:06 PM on December 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


If you tell me to write a letter to a black person but that's all the information you give

it wasn't, of course, all the information they gave. in that particular letter-writing scenario, they were told to write a letter to a book club secretary. this is not only in the linked article, but even in the summary paragraph above.
posted by queenofbithynia at 11:18 PM on December 2, 2018 [3 favorites]


So this article is written by a white liberal and aimed at blacks? Thereby disproving itself?

That's what I get from the headline, and particularly the use of 'dumbing down', which is a phrase popularised by a white reactionary (a Mr. Bloom) to describe the ways Americans make themselves into intellectual refuseniks. For the purposes of this article, the word of choice should be condescend or patronise: "White liberals condescend when they speak to black people". But for some reason the editor cannot make that decision. Is it because the Post is condescending towards its readers?

Aside from that, the sample of 50 speeches by white politicians sounds like it's not exactly representative of wider relevance. There are other factors that may have influenced the writing in those 50 speeches, like regionality, gender, educational attainments, and so forth. Overall, the article looks like a convenient excuse for the Post to jump on a hobby horse and gallop at the nearest windmill.
posted by rustipi at 11:19 PM on December 2, 2018


Queue a bunch of white liberals complaining about lack of rigor in the methodology and the misinterpretation of the statistical approach.

Yeah, what does science matter to a scientific study, when you've got truthiness? Thank goodness Fox News and the Pepe the Frog crowd won't waste any time on that science crap when they use this study as proof that the libtards are the real racists!
posted by Ursula Hitler at 11:23 PM on December 2, 2018 [4 favorites]


I'm reminded of Communication Accommodation Theory.

The authors say, "White liberals may unwittingly draw on negative stereotypes, dumbing themselves down in a likely well-meaning, ‘folksy,’ but ultimately patronizing, attempt to connect with the outgroup."

They say they haven't done research on this, but I'd be interested in what other outgroups this happens with. Older folks? A group of people who have power over the talker? A group of people the talker has power over? People who come across as less educated but who are white?

I have a lot of thoughts on why this could be happening, but what we really need to understand that is more research rather then idle speculation.
posted by gryftir at 11:23 PM on December 2, 2018 [1 favorite]


To be followed by a smaller number of POC voices saying, "no shit."

Oh, damn it. Now I'm not sure if you meant that POC would be saying "no shit" that this study is right, or "no shit" to the idea that the science on this thing is questionable. I'd like to rescind my snark, pending further data.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 11:30 PM on December 2, 2018


Huh, I find the premise plausible enough, that liberals might be inclined towards speaking more "conscientiously" when they are aware of a race difference and that their idea of conscientious may, none the less, still be seriously flawed. In speech it isn't unusual to adopt the speech patterns of those we interact with especially when you see yourself as more the outsider to the topic being discussed or at the place of exchange. White liberals choosing to remove words that they might deem as being "too white" like euphoric in those instances may be felt less as a purposeful dumbing down than a desire to shift aesthetic modes to the audience.

That is of course problematic in some ways the article points to, but there is, I think, potentially more to it than the article suggests by labeling it simply dumbing down. Euphoric isn't intrinsically more "smart" than happy, though it is fancier or more rare in its use, so there may also be some question of why people do sometimes choose euphoric in the sense of potentially wanting to seem of higher status than in their normal interactions rather than dumbing down by using the more common term. I think it's a complex subject, but worthy of study from different directions.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:33 PM on December 2, 2018 [2 favorites]



this is all so embarrassing to read I may die of it.

it isn't unusual to adopt the speech patterns of those we interact with

sure sure. except in the letter example whose word choices you're examining, there WERE no speech patterns to adopt, the recipient wasn't real, it was just a name selected to suggest a race. all these imaginary special extenuating circumstances were not there.sometimes blatant racial bias is exactly what it looks like. jesus.

you want to make this about about how happy is a better word than euphoric, go ahead. break out the Strunk & White, switch it around, make it about why white liberals don't think Emilys deserve the courtesy of good blunt style. why not. anything to get away from the apparently unbearable premise.
posted by queenofbithynia at 11:46 PM on December 2, 2018 [16 favorites]


sure sure. except in the letter example whose word choices you're examining, there WERE no speech patterns to adopt, the recipient wasn't real, it was just a name selected to suggest a race.

Yeah, I know, the point was that people adapt their speech for a number of reasons and while racial bias certainly may be one of them, it isn't the only possible answer here or at least not in the simple way the article suggests which is why I said it's a worthwhile study to follow up on to get more info about.
posted by gusottertrout at 11:54 PM on December 2, 2018


Y'all are being trolled. This is a garbage article about garbage science.

See Here. Figures 1 and 2 are enough to regret the time wasted.

Some notes:
* The authors rely heavily on comparisons between major party presidential candidate speeches, without actually discussing speechwriters. This is real bad.
* The mean deltas in their quantitative metrics between "ingroup" and "outgroup" audiences on these speeches are identical (0.55 vs 0.55) between Republican and Democrats, but are presented as evidence of a difference. (I stopped reading after this).
posted by dsword at 11:59 PM on December 2, 2018 [6 favorites]


dsword, do you think Fig. 1 is saying that Republican candidates used a *lot*more competence words when speaking to a white audience? So much so that they seem to be arbitrarily increasing the complexity of their speech? Perhaps in order to help themselves and the in group feel more sophisticated?

In other words, instead of looking at the ways a speaker might talk down to a group, some speakers may overestimate the capacity of their audience, as shown by a dramatic increase of competence words.
posted by rustipi at 12:46 AM on December 3, 2018


See also: infrahumanisation, or the idea (held consciously or subconsciously) that people from minorities are incapable of feeling the more “sophisticated” emotions like melancholy or euphoria, but only feel coarse, basic emotions like anger, lust and sadness.
posted by acb at 12:49 AM on December 3, 2018


Assuming Emily is "exactly like themselves" while Lakisha is not is the racist thing we're talking about, jfc


I don't think that assuming participants would identify some recipients as black based on their name was actually meant to be a notable part of the study, it's a fairly standard methodology.
posted by the agents of KAOS at 12:53 AM on December 3, 2018


This thread is a total clusterfuck and makes me disappointed in Metafilter.

Unfortunately, reactions like this are too normal, and are the reasons why I usually simplify down conversations about race for white folks who don’t get it, or don’t get that they might not know that they don’t get it.
posted by suedehead at 1:45 AM on December 3, 2018 [10 favorites]


Another framing: significant proportions of white people perceive a communication gap with minorities/those who don't share their background; they are divided into the liberals (who simplify their language to attempt to communicate) and conservatives (who use complex language to assert dominance).
posted by acb at 2:15 AM on December 3, 2018 [2 favorites]


Weil, so schließt er messerscharf, nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot at 2:37 AM on December 3, 2018


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