Hearing Blackness and Criminality: Examining Listeners’ Criminalization of Black American Speakers

Sociolinguistic research reveals that listeners racialize voices with notable accuracy—even without visual cues (Haley, 1990, as cited in Thomas & Reaser, 2004 ; Purnell, Idsardi, & Baugh, 1999 ; Thomas & Reaser, 2004 ; Weissler, 2021 )—and criminalize Black speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) ( King & Rickford, 2023 ; Kurinec & Weaver III, 2019 ; Jones et al., 2019 ; Rickford & King, 2016 ). Despite this, AAVE speakers are offered no federal legal protections, even within US institutions. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination based on race, color, and national origin, but not language ( Civil Rights Act of 1964 , Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d). Thus, to build a case to offer these protections, this study investigates whether listeners’ criminalization practices are driven by their auditory perceptions of Black speakers’ race or the speakers’ objective linguistic practices (i.e., using sound-level correlates of AAVE). One hundred US-based speakers participated in this study, providing speech samples that were auditorily racialized by 300 listeners. Another set of 100 listeners completed an online experiment designed to assess their association of the speakers’ voices with criminality. The results were insignificant for all speaker groups except Black men. For this group, when listeners perceived a Black man's voice as “sounding Black,” his voice was associated with more crime-related imagery. This association was not mediated by the men's use of three prominent AAVE features, suggesting that listeners’ criminalizing responses may stem from racially biased listening practices rather than from the speakers’ actual language use—potentially offering grounds for legal recourse under Title VI.