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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
Ha! I read that as “tears”, not “tears”.
Laws should be in place to handle what people do.
In some very limited circumstances, we have to limit what people say.
There is no place in a free society for regulating what people think. And if one needs to guess what someone has been thinking in order to prove that an otherwise-lawful act was in fact wrong, then we are in the land of tyranny. Thought-crimes are necessarily arbitrarily prosecuted.
The confusion might well be deliberate. There’s no excuse for the similar equivalence between stereotyping and prejudice in the popular lexicon.
Stereotyping is a sign of basic intelligence. It’s simply pattern recognition with people as the objects of consideration.
Prejudice is an assumption that a person can choose to make or not based on a stereotype. Even the choice to pre-judge someone can be benign if you are simply making an uncertain estimate because of restrictions like time which prevent you from learning more about an individual. For example, if I’m walking through an unfamiliar high-crime neighborhood and some guy dressed like a gangbanger is watching me with an angry expression, then I will assume he is a gangbanger and keep an eye on him until I’m past.
Profiling is prudent.
Hadn’t thought of the part in bold. Good points.
No one’s laughing. Was my joke too subtle, too ethereal, too diaphanous?
I thought the same thing. making tears in the sheets might just cause him to leave tears on them too.
Even NYC rent regulations generally exempt most small buildings and all three-family homes from their inept overlordship.
Now we are supposed to police bedrooms?
Being race realistic is not race realism (in its full-blown genetic pathology). I wonder if Ms. Clarke was booking for two? You get my unpleasant but realistic drift, right?
Same problem with the CCNY student returning from a late night in the library to a pat down on Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. Who do you blame? The cops or the males in the hood committed grievous crimes at 700% the national average?
It’s a genuine shame, but I’ve worked with many homeowners in Queens who simply won’t rent to accomplished, financially secure black women for fear of the fathers, brothers and boyfriends such a rental may involve.
I’m an Avenue Q racist whose youngest son was born in Cap Hatien and who accepts that exaggerated fears often have a foundation of facts.
Interesting that Ms. Clarke encountered difficulty in Argentina, formerly a nation of faux color. Now they are white Hispanics I guess.
Personally, I’ve been avoiding the campus hotel scams while visiting my kids over the past few years by using Airbnb. When I made my first reservation, I had to grab a cover photo from a local magazine I published a few years ago while fighting (successfully) a megacampus school bond issue:
Never had a problem requiring me to change the photo.
Ms. Clarke’s complaint is legit. Her blameplacing and remedies aren’t.
The problem is that we do not know anything about Clarke. As I understand it AirBnB rates both parties. The rentee and the renter. Might Ms Clarke be turned down because of her rating? Or maybe she was turned down because she was foreign? Or because she was American?
while I never used AirBnB I have rented houses out. Sometimes when I turned away somebody, a minority would sue me because it was a black thing, or Hispanic thing, or woman thing. It never was, it was usually a credit thing or a reputation thing. If you pay me in a bad check. If your credit / background checks show you are broke and got kicked out of your last three rentals, I do not want you trashing my property. If you give as your history an address that does not exist, I do not want you trashing my property. If when I google your name it shows police dispatched to your past address multiple times in the last few months, I do not want you trashing my property. Most landlord can care less about race, sex, gender, sexual preference, etc. All we care about is if you will pay on time, will you honor the agreement and will you not trash our place.
It would be funny watching people try to game the metric on that one–the metric for how many ethnic friends you need per total rentals.
Too thin?
Th airport taxi situation is a bit different. They usually have to buy access so there’s a contract with a government authority. Even if the taxis are independent contractors they are acting under the authority of the airport. Once the government grants a monopoly it has a duty to enforce access standards.
Whether they should be granting monopoly access is another matter entirely.
It is interesting on a number of levels. Only blacks making the accusation? Asians? Indians? Arabs? And against whom?
I think this says a lot more about a particular culture that breeds things like #[younameit]whileblack. Just like with feminists. When every one of your problems is caused by sexism, it is likely that none of them are…
I laughed. But probably because I also misread it as “tears.”
Um….forgive me Ms. Clarke but the first episode is very plausible, happens all the time to white people, black people, racially-ambiguous people.
I’ll grant the second is more suspicious but also not uncommon and the 3rd is extremely typical, happens all the time. How does the saying go “never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence (or lazy or stupid or indifferent).
It’s entirely plausible that what she experience was the usual shoddy service and the real difference here is that she sees racism around every slight.
exactly.
<sarc>Whenever I receive inferior customer service, I remind the establishment that I am white. This usually clears thing up immediately.</sarc>
Clarke did offer me a non-response on twitter:
This is an important point. Law-abiding people find themselves treated differently because of the actions of others of the same color. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.
I had a eureka moment like that at Denny’s a while back. For a couple years Denny’s restaurants kept getting accused of racist treatment of black customers.
I’m sitting in the restaurant wondering how much effort they had to put into making the service so bad and it hit me. If I was {pick your favorite victim group} I would think that was the reason, too. It’s hard to believe they would treat all their customers that way.
So isn’t she agreeing with you? She should write a bad review on that person’s AirBnB account and let them respond. She should explain “This person said he didn’t have room, and I’m black, so he’s a racist.” People can find that persuasive or unpersuasive. As Jamie said, isn’t that sort of the point of the service? Crowdsourcing for product, but also for quality control?
Of course, then she runs the risk of people writing on her profile “don’t host this lady; regardless of what you do, she’ll accuse you of being a racist.”
That’s exactly it. We have disagreements with people every day. We have bad experiences. Think about it, yourself… what do you attribute it to? You might say “this person is a lefty,” or maybe “this guy is a stoner,” or “they don’t like that I’ve got my kids with me,” or “they must think I’m some sort of redneck,” and the list goes on. Heck, you might say “this person’s having a bad day,” or “this person’s a jerk.” Think of the number of times any one of those types of thoughts run through your head. Then imagine that literally every single time something like that happens, for a person like Kristen Clarke, her only thought is “this is because I’m black.”
It’s not terribly surprising that people think everyone’s racist. But that’s because it’s engrained – by our media, our president, our culture. A false narrative that creates a destructive interpretive lens…
She’s president of something called “Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law”. That should be one hell of a red flag right there.
Thank you Tom. I’ve been having a rough day and this actually had me laughing aloud for quite a while.
Well there’s the issue. Never rent to a lawyer. It does not cost them anything to sue you and suing is their first answer to every problem.
That is absolutely untrue. That is a scurrilous defamation of the character of the legal profession and the conduct of lawyers.
Everyone knows that we will send a demand or cease and desist letter as our first answer, and then follow with suing.
I stand corrected.
True story. Right out of college I worked on a credit card scoring model. A schmancy mathematical model into which one would feed a credit application and out would come a recommendation as to whether or not the customer should be issued a card. The model was an early example of a machine learning algorithm wherein payment histories of customers and their attributes were the primary data into the model. As it happens, being an attorney was sufficient information for a decline.
I couldn’t believe it, when I asked why, the answer came back “because they don’t pay their bills, I guess they figure they can always get out of it if necessary”.
Haha! We sold our house in Michigan to a lawyer. He put chemicals in the pond (after we told him not to) to try to kill some duckweed or something, and all the fish died. He tried to sue us. Ha. I forget what reason he gave, but it didn’t go anywhere.
Agree that is what I thought as I read, I also thought welcome to Latin America sweetie they see black people as the lowest of the hierarchy. Dominicans & Puerto Ricans (who have high rates of black admixture) dominate the “Hispanics” in NYC and the East Coast who readily mix with American blacks. Thus I think that American blacks think that Hispanics are more accepting than is the reality.
I have my own IT consulting business. Learned long time ago not to take doctors and lawyers on as clients. 90% or better chance they will not pay the bill.