Linguistic profiling is using someone’s dialect, accent, or other cues from speech to make judgements or assumptions about other characteristics this person may have. Whether we like it or not, we are all guilty of linguistic profiling. John Baugh at TEDxEmory teaches us that we all come from unique linguistic heritages, but there are commonalities we can use to understand each other when using language. While we use these things we share in common, we are often using language to place people on a spectrum between similar to us and different. This starts as early as we can understand language and diversity. Baugh tells a story of growing up in class as a child with many non-native English speakers and straying away from them and even making fun of them. Then Baugh moved to a predominantly white area and was on the other side of this profiling fence.

While everyone is capable of linguistic profiling, those who are more likely to be victims are hyperaware of this profiling and where they may encounter it. Black American comedy keeps social issues at its center and has become a place for healing where people can laugh about these harsh realities. Deon Cole is a very popular African-American comedian and actor from my home town Chicago, Illinois, who stars in the hit TV show Black-ish and often uses comedy to talk about the reality that a man like him lives in America. In his stand-up special, Cole Blooded Seminar, Cole jokes about this awareness in a segment titled, “What it means to manage your blackness” (starting at 3min 12sec–explicit language). Cole makes a smooth transition into this social commentary by giving us the familiar setting of sitting on a plane while passengers board, hoping to keep passengers away from the middle seat next to him. He is going to “turn his blackness up.” he says to the crowd, “See white people, y’all can be white all day long. Black people can’t be black all day long. Society don’t play that.” He does not mean this in a literal sense, but black people cannot live their comfortable reality all of the time because we are aware of how we will be perceived. He tells a lady in the crown that the Black man she works with does not really act like that. Cole says that when you go into a job interview you “cut that Black sh*t off,” then he codeswitches into what would be considered a proper tone with enunciated words and jokes about using words he does not know such as behooves. So as passengers board the plane, Cole puts his headphones in and sings his rap music aloud to ward off passengers.

Similar to Cole’s statement on job interviews, Baugh uses a scene from the classic movie Westside Story where a Hispanic woman aspiring for a terrace apartment is told that she’d better get rid of her accent. The way that people sound is very much a tool or a barrier in achieving certain things in life. Baugh himself experienced this when his professional tone escaped linguistic profiling when calling to see about an apartment only to be turned down, when the renters saw him in person. Due to experiences like these, minorities are always conscious of the way we speak in certain situations, whether it be a job interview, applying for housing, school, or interacting with the police. This awareness makes it hard to live an authentic life. As Deon Cole said, “Black people can’t be black all day long.”