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Airbnb Unveils Changes To Address Racial Discrimination (npr.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Acknowledging that his company has "been slow on this issue," Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky is rolling out changes aimed at addressing discrimination complaints against the home rental service. Among the changes: de-emphasizing the role of user photos in arranging stays. Here are some of the other changes Airbnb announced Thursday: Providing assistance to people who feel they've experienced discrimination; Anti-bias training for all staff; Setting public diversity goals for staff; Partnering with historically black colleges and universities to strengthen their recruitment pipeline. The move comes after longstanding complaints from African-American Airbnb customers who said their booking requests were turned down at a high rate. Black Airbnb users vented their frustration with the phenomenon of being rejected for a booking date -- only to see the same place get listed once again -- spawning the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack on Twitter. And those frustrations were borne out in a study that sent 6,400 requests to AirBnb hosts in five large U.S. cities; the requests were identical except for the customer's name. As the Hidden Brain podcast reported, "requests with African-American sounding names were roughly 16 percent less likely to be accepted than their white-sounding counterparts."
the company is telling its employees what policies to implement, instructing their employees on how to behave, and overall exercising control over its employees. Just like a hotel does.
Except that training staff and setting diversity goals for recruitment is not going to do anything when it is the *hosts* that are discriminating. In most cases, if the host also lives there, it is not even illegal to discriminate. Most places have rules that let you discriminate on gender and other random requirements when dealing with roommates or in some cases even sharing a close dwelling like a duplex.
Anonymity will not help — there are very few obviously Black names. They need to disable photos — which were denounced as a major instrument of racism for almost a century already. But that would mean removal of an important feature of the system by making it impersonal...
My personal opinion is that while racism is regrettable, its impact is overrated and far less damaging than any heavy-handed (and freedom-trampling) efforts to fight it. Jews, for example, were targets of racism in Europe for centuries. And I mean real racism — the pogroms were far more tangible, than anything Blacks suffer from in the US today. Similarly to Blacks, Asians were victims of racism in the US since building the railroads (I just watched the Bruce Lee movie).
Yet, neither the Jews nor the Asians today need to explain their under-performance in our "White society" by the racism — because they perform better than the supposed tormentors. So much better, Asian college-applicants are advised to not answer the "Race" question on their applications — to avoid the penalty college boards impose on Asians in the name of "equality". Being presumed White instead of Asian is estimated to be an equivalent to extra 50 SAT-points...
50 years ago we surrendered certain freedoms to the promise of racial harmony. The harmony remains as elusive as ever, but the freedoms continue withering away...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
That's effectively what "Ban the Box" legislation is doing. Since it's getting increasingly unacceptable to ask about and disqualify candidates who have criminal records up front, and since black Americans are statistically more likely to have a criminal record, employers have responded by hiring fewer blacks at all.
The next step is a quota system.
The vast majority of Airbnb (and VRBO) listings are not owner-occupied homes. They're second, third, etc. homes owned by someone who rents them out full-time as a business.
It's kinda like how most eBay listings used to be people getting rid of unused crap in their homes, but now it's mostly people running businesses with eBay as a storefront. Or Uber and Lyft, which started out as "these people want to go to the same place you are, why not give them a ride and make a few bucks?" But now the drivers are all doing it as a full-time business.
That paper and many others like it have been debunked extensively. Apart from the correlation being weak, they don't account for historical disadvantages like poverty, broken homes and oppression. They also use flawed measurement methods like the IQ test, which favours certain cultures and those with educational resources.
http://thealternativehypothesi...
It's just white supremacy dressed up as science.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Oh for God's sake. You're citing Philippe Rushton, a textbook definition of a racist, past president of the Pioneer Fund and frequent contributor to American Renaissance, both organizations classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups, and you want us to give equal weight to his arguments that blacks have smaller brains and unrestrained libido? He's been thoroughly debunked by many, but Joseph Grave's debunking of Rushton is one of the most thorough.
It's a sad day for slashdot when works by a noted racist thinker gets modded +5 and conspiracy theories on a presidential candidate's health make the front page.
I should have been more clear. That's the "Official SJW" definition of Racism and why they feel as though minorities can get away with whatever racist or bigoted shit they want.
The left, in general, seems to think they can win the culture war by simply redefining their way through the English language until the definitions favor them exclusively. My favorite is "White Supremacy", which to most folks means Neo-Nazis, the KKK, or anyone else who advocates for white people being superior in various ways. Not so, the regressive left! A White Supremacist, in SJW parlance, is any member of the majority White population who isn't an SJW. That is, anyone who isn't helping "fix" the problem is a White Supremacist. The beauty comes from the fact that they've redefined a word with an almost exclusively negative connotation, made it somewhat neutral (i.e, being a white supremacist doesn't necessarily mean you want to kill all minorities, just that you're a bigoted racist who hates minorities), and then casually call anyone they disagree with "White Supremacist", knowing full well that they're using a fairly serious insult but also that they can fall back and hide behind their bullshit definition when called on it.