Letters: ‘Justice Cannot Be Deaf’
Readers—including members of the National Court Reporters Association—react to the finding that court stenographers often misunderstand Black English.
Could Black English Mean a Prison Sentence?
A new study presented 27 Philadelphia court stenographers with recordings of Black English grammatical patterns; the stenographers, the study found, made transcription errors on average in two out of every five sentences, and could accurately paraphrase only one in three sentences.
The Black English gap, John McWhorter wrote in January, can affect people’s lives at crucial junctures: “Black people are overrepresented within the criminal-justice system, and race relations in America
