What you are describing is someone that does not represent a minimal standard of professionalism, which is a very different thing.
My god, sometimes I wonder where people on Hacker News comes from. You mean to tell me you never heard Will Smith talk? He sounds totally black and totally educated. You never worked with a person that has a "black" accent?
If there is any real fault to this article, it is that the study was presumably done in and around Chicago, where racism to a level that offensive to any taste, is rampant.
This culture of racism is what the article is attempting to describe:
And given this distinction between "sounding black" and "sounding unprofessional," one might harbor some doubt as to whether the study in question controlled for perceived professionalism when estimating the effect of perceived blackness. One might even go so far as to post a comment suggesting that factor might have been overlooked or conflated with the phenomenon being estimated.
Anecdote: I'm a white guy who grew up in the inner city, and one of the most important things I ever did for myself was ridding my ghetto accent. The difference in the way people perceived me over the years is very different.
The simple fact is that humans use short-cuts all the time. I may not like the short-cuts, but I can't blame people that heard my inner-city ("black") accent and assumed that I went to schools with lower education standards and that I am culturally different than they are. Bot assumptions are pretty spot-on, to be honest.
Did I? Well, I suppose taking a skeptical view towards new research could be described as a "human-nature attitude." I really don't know what exactly you're reading into readme's and my posts.
Even when speaking a second language I did the same. There was what people spoke and what one was taught (in Chinese).
Even today I do this. When talking to friends I speak one way, when talking in a professional setting I speak differently --tend to enunciate better and drop the slang, drop contractions and shorthand and the uhms and ahhs, etc.
I've seen guys with 'blue collar' speech let go before guys with more educated speech --the blue collar-speech guy was probably better at what he did than the other, but the blue collar guy could be insensitive, as it were, less refined in dealing with others.
With regard to names. When I was in the East, I adopted a local first and last name. It's what people kind of expected of me. Some people just Sinolized my North American name, on the other hand.
The conclusion one might draw from your comment and the research is that to most Standard American English speakers, AAVE sounds unprofessional.
I suppose I don't see how there is any distortion going on.
Often some rap song becomes wildly popular, and it makes use of a novel word combination, or even invents a new word, which then quickly finds its way into AAVE.
Alternatively, many regional words or phrases in AAVE get used by a rapper who gives the word or phrase a wider audience, which then propagates throughout the larger community.
This is a bit of an oversimplification (one could do a linguistics PhD on this topic alone) , but, to conclude, I believe it goes both ways.
Either...? Typically, cultural immersion with a lack of "code-switching." That is, if you hang around black people, you begin to sound black. This is true for all cultures.
You raise a good point, though, that Americans stereotype "sounding black" with "hanging around black people", and "hanging around black people" with lower averages for maximum level of received education, and transparently correlating that with (10% lower) income.
There is much to learn about how much the brain does behind our backs.