#npr code switch

Our favorite bookworms over at the Code Switch blog talked to Jocelyn Nicole Johnson about her new collection My Monticello -- a collection of short stories and a novella that follows a group of Black and brown characters living in and around Charlottesville, VA., infamously the site of the violent Unite the Right rally in 2017.

"I really wanted to push," she tells Karen Grigsby Bates. "What if this went on unfettered? What would happen? What is the natural consequence of supporting this, this extreme movement? And asking those questions in the hopes that we might do something different."

Check out the full conversation here!

The global response to COVID-19—better known as coronavirus—has made clear that the fear of contracting disease has an ugly cousin: xenophobia. As the virus has spread from China to other countries, anti-Asian discrimination has followed closely behind, manifesting in plummeting sales at Chinese restaurants, near-deserted Chinatown districts and racist bullying against people perceived to be Chinese.

We asked our listeners if they had experienced this kind of coronavirus-related racism and xenophobia firsthand. And judging by the volume of emails, comments, and Tweets we got in response, the harassment has been intense for Asian Americans across the country—regardless of ethnicity, location or age.

A common theme across our responses: Public transit has been really hostile. Roger Chiang, who works in San Francisco, recalled a white woman glaring at him on the train to work, covering her nose and mouth. When he told her in a joking tone that he didn't have the coronavirus, she replied that she "wasn't racist—she just didn't want to get sick.

When Xenophobia Spreads Like A Virus

Protests In 140 Cities Across The Nation -- How Did We Get Here?

“How exactly is it that blackface is everywhere and nowhere at once?

Nicholas Sammond argues in his book, Birth Of An Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy And The Rise Of American Animation, that many of the conventions of blackface are actually hiding in plain sight, like, for example, that icon of Americana, Mickey Mouse.”

Julia Wohl, RAD intern

I came across a clip from a September 1979 episode of All Things Considered featuring NPR reporter Steve Proffitt. He explores the mechanisms behind the computer-generated voice of the Speak & Spell, a device from Texas Instruments with synthetic speech capabilities that quizzes its user on their spelling ability. I thought Proffitt’s piece offered an opportunity to dissect how the TI team defined a “normal” voice, how the TI team’s choice resonates with news broadcasting pronunciation standards, and how these similar standards have a bearing on the present.  

The team of TI engineers is regarded as the first to implement speech synthesis capabilities into a small and affordable computational device. Within two years of the introduction of the Speak & Spell, both Bell Labs and Intel introduced similar devices that used digital signal processing. These advancements paved the way for smartphones and smart speakers. 

Gene Frantz, interviewed by Proffitt for the story, and his team of engineers found the broadcaster’s vocal tract to be a viable model for the Speak & Spell. Alice Helton, a linguist with whom TI engineers worked closely, chose the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language to govern the standard of pronunciation. Helton chose the voice, too. She recalled they decided to use the Dallas-area radio announcer Mitch Carr, who reported for NPR and is currently a radio broadcaster for KRLD in Texas. 

NPR journalists have continued to examine why and how the voices of news broadcasters and AI assistants alike reinforce ideas of how people in certain roles are supposed to sound. 

In a 2018 Code Switch episode, hosts Shereen Marisol Meraji and Gene Demby draw the same conclusion as Frantz: the meaning of “normal” is subjective. Meraji and Demby offer important context to the first formal academic definition of the “normal” American dialect. They explain that in 1924, linguist John Kenyon of Hiram College surveyed accents of the people surrounding him and developed a set of pronunciation standards. Kenyon published his standards in dictionary form in 1944, and by 1951 the National Broadcasting Company (now NBC) had adopted it to guide their news broadcasters towards clarity in their communication. A regional standard for communication became a national one. 

The multitude of dialects spoken, heard and understood across the nation complicates Kenyon’s and NBC’s standards for clear communication. Speakers and listeners, including machines that are programmed to detect a voice and emit one, perceive specific dialects as more normal and clearer than others for a number of reasons. Sometimes, people’s accents or native language can impede their ability to communicate with each other, depending on who the speaker and listener are, and can result in discrimination. 

In the same 2018 Code Switch episode, Meraji and Demby interview an aspiring broadcast journalist from Baltimore named Deion Broxton. Listen to Broxton recall how he visited a speech therapist to adjust his accent, starting at 00:13:33.

In other instances, a listener’s perception depends on the gender of the speaker. The Speak & Spell’s male-sounding voice stands in contrast to today’s familiar chorus of female-sounding voices, which guide users on smartphones, smart speakers and public transit. 

I called Frantz to learn more about why the engineers chose the voice of a man and a news broadcaster in particular. He explained to me that higher frequency voices, or voices often associated with being female, went above a threshold the device could capture. Additionally, the higher the frequency that is sampled, the more storage required in the device. Confined by their budget, the initial device did not have sufficient storage capacity for a higher frequency voice. So engineers were forced to model a lower frequency voice, one generally associated with men, which would take up less storage space on the device.

As Scott Simon found in a 2011 radio essay, there are several other explanations for the decision to assign a female-sounding voice to a computer. Rebecca Zorach, director of the Social Media Project at the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality shared with CNN, “Most such decisions are probably the result of market research, so they may be reflecting gender stereotypes that already exist in the general public.” 

Robert LoCascio, a leader of the Equal AI initiative, offered an alternative explanation to NPR’s Laura Sydell in 2018. He told her, “The male-dominated AI industry brings its own unconscious bias to the decision of what gender to make a virtual assistant.” 

Over on the Code Switch blog, our colleague Leah Donnella talked to Alex S. Vitale, author of the 2017 book The End of Policing, about what roles police should and shouldn't play, what he makes of the current protests and what actual change in the way police in this country do their jobs might look like. Find that conversation here.

AAAAHHH I’ve been waiting for this all week! Our pals at Code Switch are big readers and big romance fans, and this week they’re celebrating Black Kiss-tory with a look at the best of Black romance (which of course has to include a conversation with the legendary Ms. Bev). Check it out here! 

There's a long tradition of white people trying to understand what it would be like to step into black people's shoes. But the journalist Grace Halsell went one step further: She attempted to step into black people's skin.

Using vitiligo treatment pills to help darken her complexion, Halsell traveled and worked in Harlem and Mississippi in 1968, passing as a black woman. She documented her experiences in her 1969 book Soul Sister, which she said she hoped would help white people to understand what it was like to be black. (She was inspired by John Howard Griffin, whose 1961 book Black Like Me took a similar approach.)

As you might imagine, Halsell's foray into blackness was controversial. But it also struck a chord. Lyndon Johnson provided a blurb for the book, and it sold more than a million copies.

The Limits Of Empathy