The concept of a Muslim accent is less well formed than that of a
Chinese or Swedish American, but it is still distinctive to many and
becoming more so in the course of a decade of war in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
A family of Pakistani immigrants living in San Francisco public
housing was improperly denied an emergency transfer to another
apartment after someone broke into their home, desecrated their Quran,
defaced their passports and shredded their traditional clothing, according
to a federal court lawsuit.
After the August 2005 incident – which took place during a time of
intensified anti-Muslim sentiment in the country and while the San
Francisco Housing Authority was under court order to better protect
tenants from hate-motivated crimes – agency officials ruled that the
break-in at Ashan Khan’s apartment was a simple burglary and didn’t
qualify the family for an emergency apartment transfer, according to the
family’s reports (Lagos 2007).
Summary
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s National Fair
Housing Alliance has been using phone auditing to examine suspected
cases of housing discrimination linked to aural (rather than visual) traits
with some success. Landlords advertising apartments, insurance
companies offering low home insurance rates, banks eager to sell
mortgages, in all aspects of the housing industry, the NFHA continues to
find evidence of linguistic profiling to the detriment of people of color and
people who speak English as a second language.
The growing body of literature on linguistic profiling produced by
scholars, government agencies and non-profit civil rights organizations
points to a simple conclusion: Anglos are more likely to have calls
returned; they hear a wider range of possibilities and may be offered
monetary incentives; they are quoted better rates on insurance and
mortgages before the persons making these decisions have ever checked
references or credit ratings. But the investigation process is long, the legal