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Self-stated black racist Eric Holder is now sucking money from
Airbnb.

That's "diversity".

By Brian Solomon and Shelby Carpenter

When the #AirbnbWhileBlack controversy exploded earlier this
year, Eric Holder was hardly shocked to hear that Airbnb hosts
sometimes discriminate against their minority guests.

“I wasn’t necessarily surprised because implicit bias is
something that this country has been grappling with for hundreds
of years,” the former attorney general and current Airbnb
advisor told FORBES in an interview at his law office in
Washington D.C. “It will take an entity or individual to come up
with something that is paradigm challenging and gutsy to help
solve it.”

Airbnb may hope that its new anti-discrimination policy, along
with changes to hiring and booking practices, all unveiled on
Thursday morning, will have that effect–but right now it will
settle for slowing the outpouring of complaints from minority
customers. 2016 has been a year of growth for the San Francisco-
based home-sharing service, which hit 100 million total guest
arrivals and a $30 billion valuation in recent months. But
Airbnb’s triumphant arrival as a major competitor to the likes
of Priceline and Hilton has been marred by a racial profiling
controversy. Many black customers say they were denied
accommodations that were later made available to potential white
guests.


On Thursday, Airbnb released the results of a 90-day study
conducted by company advisor Laura Murphy, former director of
the ACLU Legislative Office in D.C., with help from Holder and
other prominent civil rights leaders. The report acknowledges
discrimination on the Airbnb platform, and proposes a series of
internal and product changes to combat it.

“We wanted to not focus on a single remedy, but to surround the
issue with a variety of solutions so that nondiscrimination
becomes self-reinforcing behavior,” Murphy told FORBES. “A set
of policies and practices that reflect all the aspects of
discrimination, to put a blanket over the fire so it doesn’t
have the oxygen to thrive.”

Those changes do not, for now, include removing guest profile
photos from the Airbnb website or app. They do include a
streamlined process for reporting and resolving violations, with
an “Open Doors” 24/7 customer support team to help users find
another accomodation. Starting in 2017, if a host informs a
potential guest that he or she cannot book because the home is
unavailable, the host will no longer be able to rent out their
home to another guest for the same time period. Airbnb will
automatically block the calendar for subsequent reservations on
those dates, preventing hosts from accepting white customers
after they rejected black ones.

Diversity Numbers

Fighting racism starts internally, where Airbnb, like many
technology companies, has struggled to promote diversity. This
summer, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky admitted that he and his
cofounders–in his words, “three white guys”–never considered how
their startup might encourage biases. Airbnb now says that it
“may have been slow to address concerns about discrimination
because the company’s employees are not sufficiently diverse.”

To change that, the company has assembled a new 12-person team
of ”engineers, data scientists, researchers, and designers”
whose only job is to root out bias on the platform. Airbnb also
pledges to increase the number of U.S.-based employees that come
from “underrepresented populations” from 9.64% currently to 11%
by the end of 2017. Going forward, hiring managers and team
leaders will be assessed, in part, on their efforts to diversify
their teams, and all candidate pools for senior-level positions
must include women and candidates from minority backgrounds.

“We call it diversity now but a generation ago we used to call
it integration,” Holder says. “There are all kinds of positives
that flow from that integration/diversity. The institutions
become stronger.”

Profile Photos

Removing profile photos from the booking process has been by far
the most common suggestion from victims and activists alike. In
fields like mortgage applications, removing photos and other
racial identifiers has succeeded in promoting fairness for
applicants of all backgrounds. Yet executives at Airbnb believe
photos are an essential part of the social side of the network,
creating trust between strangers who may share a living space
before ever meeting in person.

Instead of removing them, Airbnb says it will “experiment with
reducing the prominence of guest photos in the booking process.”
Other reputation data like reviews may be featured more
prominently.

“We shouldn’t have to hide that there’s a black guy who wants to
stay at your residence,” Holder says. “It would have been easier
to just say we’re going to take out pictures, but this is more
consistent for hosts and guests to know who they are interacting
with.”

Murphy believes that bias can be confronted without resorting to
anonymized profiles. Airbnb will remind users of its new
nondiscrimination policy during the booking process. It will
extend an anti-bias training course (now mandatory for Airbnb
employees) to hosts, and feature hosts who complete the course
more prominently in search results. The company also hopes that
its ongoing push to add more “Instant Book” listings, in which
guests can reserve rooms immediately without a 24-hour host
review period, will limit opportunities to discriminate. With
over 500,000 instant book listings currently, Airbnb expects to
reach 1 million by January 2017.

Wade Henderson, CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and
Human Rights, consulted with Airbnb on behalf of civil rights
organizations. Henderson says he was in favor of doing away with
profile photos but still believes these changes are “a great
first step” for the company.

Congressman Emanuel Cleaver, II echoed those sentiments in a
statement. “This is a commendable step in the right direction
and I am confident that Airbnb will continue to take the correct
actions to ensure that all consumers are treated as equals when
using Airbnb’s services,” he wrote.

In The Spotlight

While incidents of discrimination have likely happened on Airbnb
since the company’s early days, the issue came under increased
public scrutiny in the last several months. In May, a man named
Gregory Selden filed a lawsuit against Airbnb, saying he was
discriminated against on the platform because he is black.
Selden tried to find an accommodation through Airbnb while
traveling to Philadelphia for vacation. His profile included a
photo of his face as well as an array of other standard stats
Airbnb asks of prospective guests.

Selden found a listing he liked and was denied twice by the
host. Soon after, he saw that the host had re-listed the space
as available for the same dates he had requested. He then
created two fake Airbnb accounts with similar stats to his own
but with profile pictures of white people. The host accepted
requests from both of the fake accounts.

Selden contacted both Airbnb and the host individually to say he
believed he had been discriminated against and neither
responded, according to documents filed by his lawyer.
Frustrated by Airbnb’s lack of response, Selden discussed his
experience on Twitter and helped spawn the hashtag
#AirbnbWhileBlack.

Selden’s experience set off a huge public discussion, and cases
of Airbnb guests saying they experienced discrimination kept
growing. On May 25, Rohan Gilkes, the founder of razor-delivery
company Wet Shave Club, published an account on Medium
discussing how he was rejected for housing on Airbnb (Gilkes is
also black). He also believes he was rejected because of his
race. And in June, Shadi Petosky, a transgender woman, went
public with her story of getting the runaround on Airbnb.

Some former Airbnb guests have moved to take matters into their
own hands, like Stefan Grant and Ronnia Cherry. They were guests
at an Airbnb in North Carolina when they were suddenly met by
police officers at the door with their guns drawn–neighbors
apparently called 911 saying they must be burgulars who had
broken into the home. In response, they founded Noirbnb, a small
online alternative to Airbnb that aims to create “a welcoming a
safe platform for people from all walks of life,” according to
the company’s website.

Airbnb has removed some hosts, such as the host Selden is suing
and the host Petosky accused of discrimination based on her
transgender status, from the site permanently. But civil rights
activists pushed for broader changes, prompting Airbnb to begin
its 90-day review of how it handles incidents of possible
discrimination. The company hired Murphy to lead the review, and
added Holder, fair housing lawyer John Relman, and diversity
researcher Dr. Robert Livingston to assist.

Widespread Problems

While a handful of cases first brought national attention to the
issue of discrimination on Airbnb, it’s difficult to gauge how
common these cases are. Research indicates that they could be
widespread.

A study in January from Harvard Business School suggested there
may be extensive discrimination on the platform against African-
American guests. The researchers looked at 6,400 different
listings in five cities in the U.S. They would create two
profiles that were more or less identical, except one account
would have a distinctively African-American-sounding name and
the other white. They found that guests perceived to be black
were 16% less likely to be accepted for a spot on Airbnb than
their white counterparts. The difference is “particularly
noteworthy when compared to discrimination-free setting of
competing short-term accommodation platforms such as Expedia,”
the authors Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca and San Svirsky say.
The rates of discrimination were the same across varying types
of Airbnb rentals, from people renting a room in their house to
those renting entire dwellings, among hosts with just one Airbnb
property and hosts who owned many.

The authors also pointed out how design choices on Airbnb
facilitated discrimination against black guests. The more
anonymous transactions are, the less room there is for
discrimination. But names and pictures on Airbnb make it all too
easy to discern and make decisions based on a person’s race,
which is why profile photos have been so hotly debated over the
last few months.

And, it turns out, discrimination on the Airbnb platform can go
both ways. Two of the authors from the 2016 study–Benjamin
Edelman and Michael Luca–also completed research two years ago
on how much black Airbnb hosts make on their listings compared
to non-black hosts. By surveying all New York City Airbnb
listings and comparing the quality of listings and their prices,
they found that non-black hosts could charge about 12% more than
black hosts for similar rentals.

“These findings highlight the prevalence of discrimination in
online marketplaces,” Edelman and Luca wrote. “Suggesting an
important unintended consequence of a seemingly-routine
mechanism for building trust.”

Legal Tangle

Airbnb has given rise to a legal debate over how its business
model fits into existing anti-discrimination protections. On the
federal level, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) protects people from
discrimination in housing rentals on the basis of race, and the
1964 Civil Rights Act protects those looking to stay in a hotel
or motel. Under the so-called “Mrs. Murphy” exemption, however,
some hosts may be exempt from the FHA if they’re renting a room
in the home that they live in. Most states also have a state
fair housing act, and some municipalities do as well.

Some legal experts argue that while the company is part of the
newly-minted sharing economy, in many ways it functions
similarly to a hotel and should be treated as such. “I think
that the intent of the law was to prohibit discrimination in
public accommodations and housing as broadly as possible,” says
David Oppenheimer, a professor at the University of California,
Berkeley School of Law and an expert in discrimination law. “So
I don’t think that a new business model gives rise to immunity.”

In cases of possible discrimination, it is possible that
liability could rest with the individual host, Airbnb, or both.
Oppenheimer says that companies are subject to a “non-delegable
duty not to discriminate.” Even if a host is exempt under the
Mrs. Murphy exemption, that doesn’t mean that Airbnb is
automatically exempt too. “If Airbnb is in the business of
making accommodations available or facilitating making
accommodations available, they can’t absolve themselves by
saying that the responsibility lies with the hosts,” Oppenheimer
says. “That’s where it turns into the kind of legal issue that
law professors love and the rest of the world hates.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2016/09/08/airbnb- racism-discrimination-plan/#448690604b35
 

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