#AirBnBWhileBlack: Renters Claim Hosts Discriminate Based On Names and Pictures [PHOTOS]
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In case you don’t know what the #AirBnBWhileBlack hashtag is about, here is a break down.
The hashtag is birthed out of frustrations from mostly African-Americans saying that hosts on the house-sharing platform are turning them away based off of their names and profile pictures.
23-year old Quirtina Crittenden started the hashtag in July 2015 after a she noticed that multiple requests to rent were turned down.
https://twitter.com/TinaLaBang/status/621699389044584448
In an interview with NPR, Crittenden says, “The hosts would always come up with excuses like, ‘oh, someone actually just booked it’ or ‘oh, some of my regulars are coming in town, and they’re going to stay there. But I got suspicious when I would check back like days later and see that those dates were still available.”
When she created the hashtag, she saw others use it sharing similar stories. As a test, Crittenden shortened her name to “Tina” and changed her profile picture into a city skyline. After that she says that she had no problem renting places.
As word spread of this trend, a couple of Harvard Business School students created an experiment to test it and they found it to be very common.
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NPR reports:
They sent out 6,400 requests to real AirBnb hosts in five major American cities—Baltimore, Dallas, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Washington.
All the requests were exactly the same except for the names they gave their make-believe travelers. Some had African American-sounding names like Jamal or Tanisha and others had stereotypically white-sounding names like Meredith or Todd.
Luca and his colleagues found requests with African American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts. They found discrimination across the board: among cheap listings and expensive listings, in diverse neighborhoods and homogenous neighborhoods, and with novice hosts as well as experienced hosts. They also found that black hosts were also less likely to accept requests from guests with African American-sounding names than with white-sounding ones.
The research goes on to say that African-American sounding names were around 16 percent less likely to be accepted than white-sounding names. In a twist, the research also found that Black folks didn’t like renting to Black folks either.
To cut down on the discrimination, it has been suggested that names and photos either be omitted, or not be featured so prominently. To that, AirBnB says that both are needed to ensure that people are renting their homes to the people they are actually communicating with.
Some renters however have come up with their own solutions, one of them being let their “white friend” do the renting for them.
Click over to see more screenshots of “Tina” getting turned away.
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racism