Jim Crow might creep past tough Airbnb policies

“Jim Crow might creep past tough Airbnb policies” By Joel Jacobsen
(Airbnb is an online marketplace that enables people to list, find, and rent vacation homes for a processing fee. It has over 1,500,000 listings in 34,000 cities and 191 countries)

During the years of Jim Crow, an entrepreneur named Victor H. Green published an annually updated directory called “The Negro Travelers’ Green Book” (or variations on that title). Organized by state and town, it listed places where black motorists could spend the night or grab a bite to eat. The 1953 edition, now available online, offered black visitors to Albuquerque their choice of two rooming houses and one restaurant, Aunt Brenda’s on Arno Street.

Most of us react to such stories with deep dismay mixed with relief that it’s not that way any more. But not everyone feels that way. In June, USA Today reported that Airbnb had terminated a North Carolina host who used the N-word on the company’s messaging system to explain to a black businesswoman why he wouldn’t rent to her. That now-ex-host was doing his single-handed best to bring Jim Crow back.

... a team of Harvard Business School researchers found that the (Airbnb) system of offer and acceptance also provides an opportunity for racial discrimination. They prepared twenty user profiles, identical but for the names assigned to them. Some names were distinctively African-American while others were distinctively white. Using the profile, they made preliminary inquiries into the availability of 6,400 listings in four cities. They found that “African-American guests received a positive response roughly 42 percent of the time, compared to roughly 50 percent for white guests.” And that was without photographs.

Airbnb itself claims to have more than 2 million hosts worldwide. The website AirDNA estimates a quarter of those are in the United States. The difference between 50 percent and 42 percent when multiplied by half a million makes for a lot of hosts ...

Airbnb itself has a strong policy against discrimination ...
But the essence of its business model is that it doesn’t own the units whose rental it facilitates. It doesn’t tell its hosts how to run their businesses. That leaves a lot of room for less outspoken bigotry.

Read the full article at:
http://www.abqjournal.com/821778/jim-crow-might-creep-past-tough-airbnb-policies.html