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Private Accommodation
In The New York Times, Kristen Clarke writes about her experience as an African-American user of AirBNB:
Though August marks the off-season for tourism in Buenos Aires, I was rejected by the first three hosts I contacted. One host listed the days in question as available but nonetheless claimed my request overlapped with another reservation; another declined without explanation; and a third got back to me after a long delay, claiming to have missed my request. While my fourth request was accepted, the overall experience was a sour one. I am African-American, and because Airbnb strongly recommends display of a profile picture (which I provided) and requires its users to display an actual name, it was hard to believe that race didn’t come into play.
And, she says, it’s not just her:
My experience is hardly unique. This year, the issue of Airbnb discrimination has received considerable attention, especially after African-American users of the service began sharing stories similar to mine on social media using the hashtag AirbnbWhileBlack. A recent study by Harvard Business School researchers found that requests from Airbnb guests with distinctively African-American names were 16 percent less likely to be accepted than those with white-sounding names.
Let us give Clarke the benefit of the doubt and assume that her casual accusation is correct and that four Argentinian Airbnb hosts (or, at least, some of them; details, details) turned her down because she is black. Then, let us further grant that her experience is corroborated by a study that finds state-side discrimination based not on race, but on names that correlate with race (which, I can’t help but note, wouldn’t have affected Clarke). Let’s even go the extra mile and assume that her subsequent suggestions that AirBNB should actively police its hosts for discrimination is actually a good idea and will lead to less racial strife. If we do all that, what do we make of her final recommendation?
Third, Airbnb should stop having users display an actual name or profile picture before booking; that information should be withheld until a reservation has been confirmed. (Airbnb has a feature called Instant Book, which does not give hosts the discretion to reject guests for available dates; by making that feature mandatory, the company could limit the influence of names and pictures.)
Yes, let’s force those racists admit us to their homes, rather than let them hide behind shallow lies and forgo our money. Because that’s what freedom looks like and, of course, it won’t ever be used in ways that Clarke finds objectionable.
Published in General
One definition of “discrimination” is “the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people or things, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.”
Another definition is “recognition and understanding of the difference between one thing and another.” That is morally neutral.
There are gray areas between the two, and many of them are forms of discrimination that we accept. For example, a Leonardo DiCaprio is never going to date a Linda Hunt. You can call it “ageism” or “lookism” (the latter is an even greater affront to the English language than the former), but no one gets upset about it.
Consider an Airbnb landlord who is weighing whether to rent her apartment to a family who appears to be Indian. The landlord remembers that the last time she rented to Indians, her apartment smelled strongly of curry for weeks. She refuses the Indian family on that basis.
Is that kind of discrimination OK or not?
Forget Europe. Go to an Asian country. Especially East Asians. Japanese may be the most racist people on Earth, but the Koreans and Chinese aren’t far behind. When I was in Hong Kong in my wayward youth they called us Honkys “Gwailo”… roughly translated as “White Devil”.
Know what? I don’t have a problem with that. You don’t see Japan being flooded by Somali ISIS wannabes. Maybe Asians ARE smarter than us, after all.
I’m stealing this.
Kinda rich for a wealthy NYC journalist to be lecturing the people of Argentina about race relation.
Ms. Clarke should get together a bunch of investors including lots of minorities and open a competitor that upholds all the wonderful virtues she professes. Perhaps the investors and Ms. Clarke should lead by example and each post their primary residence or second home up on such a service and have an all comers policy. Even better, enact price controls so as to include the maximum diversity of renters. Think of all the money she will make. She’ll be Oprah-rich in no time.
As with many agenda-driven (NYT) articles, there’s a more obvious truth. Without knowing how familiar the author is with Argentinian cultural norms (the country itself certainly leans left), it’s interesting that she refuses to take the facially-neutral reasons that she received at face value. Is it in fact more likely than not that racism is in play here? Does this say as much about the author and her biases than it does a few random Argentinians? See post #1 above for a more poetic approach to this.
I don’t have a problem with that either. The Japanese are really adept at handling this and seemingly use many non-verbal communication techniques to do it. And I guess they are smarter, at least smarter than Americans. I think of this when we get into those harangues about free trade issues. The Japanese say their markets are open just like the USA but then strange things happen when American companies try to sell in Japan in the same manner as Japanese companies operating in America. Maybe this has a lot to do with Trump’s idea regarding the disadvantages we have in dealing with East Asian nations on trade issues.
The tricks are endless. Agriculture exports? Japanese will require “safety inspections”, which means they let the produce rot on the docks for two weeks, then show and find that it’s “unfit for consumption” and have it tossed.
Hey, if that’s the way they want to do things, fine by me. We should do similar things though (or just be more honest about it and slap a big tariff on their product). I can no longer abide being the sucker and the chump in trade relationships with others.
What a great way to disincentivize anyone from being an Airbnb host. Then they will complain that there are not enough Airbnb hosts and mandate people in the trendiest neighborhoods in big cities have to be Airbnb hosts so many weekends a year.
Why do leftists always want to force private businesses to change their policies because they don’t like the result. Go out and start up Black Airbnb or ethnically diverse Airbnb, instead of complaining about it in the NYT.
Also shouldn’t this make it obvious that she should be happy to live in the US, we are the least racist country in the world.
But he is a lovely person, and good with children who volunteers at the soup kitchen every other Saturday.
That is, unfortunately, how it works in America.
Maybe they can force them to bake her a cake while they are at it.
What’s the logical difference between a preference and a prejudice? Nothing.
Pushed to the limit (and pushing things to the limit is what activists and lawyers love to do), you cannot have any preference without prejudice, or vice versa, because they’re logically the same thing.
It’s annoying that we rush to absolutize everything (except common sense). That’s how legalism – as opposed to the sensible practice of law – makes the rest of us want to kill all the lawyers.
“Equal protection” became “disparate impact” because lawyers absolutized the virtue of equality, turning it into a vice. The lawyers and activists now congratulate themselves for their cleverness, but that cleverness comes at the cost of a sane society.
It would be hard for a user to gather that kind of information from looking at aggregate ratings and a handful of reviews. Do the people who are being discriminated against even have the opportunity to write a review? And if so, how would those individuals be able to identify racist patterns in their single events?
Follow-up question. Should AirBnB identify customers who exhibit a racial bias in who they rent from on AirBnB and kick them out of the system?
This.
@MSJL
‘It seems that the fundamental issue at play here is a person’s right to be a jerk. We’ve made various decisions as a society that we don’t like jerks who:’
And we have allowed our lawyers and activists-turned legislators and judges-to turn much of our ‘society’ into either jerks or slaves. Almost all the things in MSJL’s list of what makes people jerks when they do them should only be applied to government acts.
I don’t know the details, but this seems like an opportunity to unleash more transparency and accountability from AirBnB in regards to its clientele.
He serves children in his soup.
Also his piercings get caught on the bedsheets and leave tears.
I imagine being a private company they could do whatever they wanted. Though if Airbnb denies users the freedom to choose to whom they rent their property those users will find another platform which acknowledges their freedoms. Airbnb users would also be wise to not give reasons for rejecting prospective renters if Airbnb did start collecting this data.
If Airbnb tried to remove racists, real or perceived, from their systems it would just turn into a witch hunt.
Not that is matters, but I wonder how many of those AirBNB hosts were also black.
Perhaps, but they have every incentive to cover it up.
Not to fork-tail the original post, but it always amazes me when American People of Color (I prefer the term Technicolor-American) are surprised at the rampant racism in Mexico, Central, and South America. Those are perhaps some of the most racist countries in the world. Additionally, the treatment of indigenous populations is BRUTAL in South America, continuing the hierarchical legacy of Peninsulares, Criollos, and Mestizos. Thrown in the horrific history of the Brazilian slave trade, along with the fact that Brazilian police kill Black citizens at almost twice the rate (and that is what is recorded in a country infamous for leaving out details), it isn’t news that South Americans are in fact the most racist Americans.
In the USA for whites, it’s prejudice (or racism) and for non-whites it’s preference. In fact, we may be the least racist nation in the world and we have many people here whose livelihood depends on making it bigger than it is and the bad guys are always the whites (white privilege?). Trump has been saying a few things this week regarding the more than half-century of unfulfilled promises Democrats have made about helping blacks with jobs, housing, education, and crime-free neighborhoods. He points out who, in fact, has been at the helm politically in these cities (Democrats) for all that time period that no improvement has happened. See how the media and the political spokesmen handle this.
Considering how much the BLM and rioting has been in the news, if you lived in a foreign country, would you want to rent to an american black?
AirBnB and Uber are both tremendous services that I use all the time. I have yet to have a negative experience with either one. Because they allow people to freely transact business with one another the dark forces of Progressiveness cannot allow them to exist. It is only a matter of time before government regulates them out of existence, because people simply cannot be trusted to live their lives “properly” without the heavy hand of government ensuring they do so.
Freedom in the USA is largely an illusion.
I am a huge AirBnB fan – a “superuser”. The system has reviews built-in, so anyone who is a good renter acquires the reputation to match.
If I were a host, I would never rent to a first-time renter of any kind. I want people who have already demonstrated that they behave themselves.
Legally, it should be any reason at all; morally, there are exceptions. But, I reject the popular expression, “discriminate against“. Discrimination is observing differences and basing decisions on the observations. This is crucial to living as a human being.
FWIW, I was really asking if the author would recommend such a thing, since she argued in the article of AirBnB should take action against landlords who discriminate based on her anecdotal evidence of discrimination.
It only seems logical that if business owners and service providers are required by law to not discriminate against customers on the basis of race, then customers should be required by the same law to not discriminate against businesses on the basis of race. A few years ago, we would have had a difficult time proving discrimination by customers, but in the modern era where virtually every economic transaction we engage in is analyzable, we can now prove that certain customers direct their business in ways that reflect racial preferences.
The flip side to that is, if you think it is OK for customers to direct their patronage to certain businesses based on the race of the owner, then you should be OK with businesses doing the same thing.
I’m come down on the freedom side. I think everyone has the right to not engage in business with anyone for any reason.
I know what you mean, but that’s not true. The rights still exist; they aren’t observed or protected. Discriminating between the two is very important.
It was probably shortened over time from racial/sexual/etc. discrimination. We sloppily dropped the modifiers, muddying our discourse and our thinking, and automatically maligning the second definition of “discrimination”. Stupid move. Almost as if it were another Orwellian change by Leftists to intellectually cripple us. Other words we used to use more were bigotry and prejudice, which better described the vice. I try not to even use the above definition (as if I believed I could singlehandedly bring us to our senses).