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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."
18% of the population commits 40% of the crime. Of course no one wants that in their home and they're not to blame. It's not racism it's fact.
Decide you wanna protect your own property and suddenly you're racist
Come on, can't we get some happy, nerdy news on Slashdot anymore? I don't give one single fuck about this article. Or almost any other article on Slashdot today. And yesterday was basically an Apple circle-jerk. Please, for the love of gOD, give me some ultra-nerdy stuff that makes me doubt my ability to do the math. This site can genuinely challenge you but, not when you constantly post bullshit.
Whatever policies the company staff are subjected to, unless the renters are somehow compelled to rent to people against their will — however misguided, hateful, or bigoted that will might be — the complaints will not go away.
The government may compel a business-owner by threatening fines and withdrawal of license. Fortunately, AirBnB does not have the government's power and monopoly. Whatever they do is doomed to failure.
They know this and are going through the motions only to deflect criticism (and the government's wrath) against themselves.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I am willing to bet most won't rent to a group of teenagers, and it isn't because of ageism.
I don't think they will have any luck with cajoling people into abandoning basic risk management when it comes to renting their property.
Amazing that a population associated with 2500% more murders per capita has a 16% less acceptance rate.
And black police officers also show bias against black people while policing.
Being a member of an ethnicity doesn't mean you can't have inaccurate stereotypes about it.
I stole this Sig
First off, I would never rent my house for a week or two. I just don't trust people that much.
Second, if I was going to rent my house out for a week or two I would look at age first. That 50 year old black couple is going to beat the 20 year old single white dude. Every. Single. Time.
Young men are charged more for car insurance because they are a higher risk. When there was a free market in healthcare women were charged more because they use it more. Smokers were charged more as well.
If they really wanted to show that discrimination was unfounded they would post the data proving that African American Airbnb users are no more likely to commit crime or cause damage than other renters.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Uhh no. Humans live, learn, grow, and develop based on personal experience. Your incredible arrogance in dismissing the experience of others is disgusting. Black cops do not fear other Blacks more because of inaccurate stereotypes.
They fear them because of the very real and demonstrably accurate statistical fact of black violence. Blacks kill other Blacks at astronomically high levels. Cops would be suicidal to pretend otherwise.
>"...that black hosts were also less likely to accept requests from guests with African American-sounding names than with white-sounding ones."
[European-American sounding ones, but yep, probably so.] It is also likely that there is discrimination against Muslim sounding names, and many other types of names, it is certainly not just one category. And if people had access to know what kind of money a prospect has, what type of employment, their credit score, their age, sexual orientation, how they speak, what clothes they typically wear, how fat they are, if they drink, if they smoke, political leanings, legal history, how much schooling was completed, if married, what music they listen to, how many kids, the renters will likely discriminate based on all that, too (and much more).
Welcome to basic human nature. It might suck, but ALL people judge each other all the time, automatically, and most of the time without even knowing. And the scary part is that companies are constantly collecting, aggregating, selling, and using all that kind of information I listed above (and much, much more).... they think they know you.
Being a member of an ethnicity doesn't mean you can't have inaccurate stereotypes about it.
Nonsense. Discrimination is wrong whether the stereotypes are accurate or not. Blacks are far more likely to be criminals than whites. That is a fact. But it is still wrong to presume that an individual black person is a criminal. Everyone should be treated and respected as an individual.
The hosts are discriminating against niggers, not Blacks. If you would reject tattoo covered skinhead, are you racist against White peoples? Yeah, I thought so. Nobody want violent niggers that vandalize the neighborhood, assault peoples and fight the police when you call for help.
Airbnb is only trying to appeasing the social justice thugs. Hiring incompetent Affrican will not be enough. They will be meet with new demands until they are irrelevant. Then the social justice warrior will move to their next target; they are only here to fuck shit up and ruin what others have.
Black cops do not fear other Blacks more because of inaccurate stereotypes.
It depends on what you mean by "accurate." Are blacks more likely to be offenders than whites? That's what the stats say. But that doesn't exactly equate to a logical argument for "We should be suspicious of every black person we see."
They fear them because of the very real and demonstrably accurate statistical fact of black violence. Blacks kill other Blacks at astronomically high levels. Cops would be suicidal to pretend otherwise.
Hmm... "astronomically high levels"?? Yes, the black-on-black murder rate is much higher than the white-on-white murder rate. But, that doesn't imply that MOST black people are murderers, or even a significant number.
Roughly speaking, black murderers constitute around 0.03% of the black population. Meanwhile, white murderers constitute around 0.005% of the white population.
Here's the thing -- for ALL races, >99.9% of people are NOT murderers. Walking around acting like EVERY black person could potentially be a murderer is nonsensical. Making the assumption that every encounter with a black person will likely escalate to violence is unwarranted, based on your "demonstrably accurate statistical facts."
>95% of priests are NOT child molesters. >99% of Muslims are NOT terrorists. >99.9% of blacks are NOT murderers.
What you're talking about is irrational fear based on stereotypes. Just because the percentage of X crime is higher among population A than B doesn't mean it's reasonable to walk around assuming all of population A are likely criminals.
If you really want to have fun, err... I mean take this to the next logical level, then forbid owners from running criminal background checks on the renters. After all, not wanting to rent your expensive home to criminals is racist, since a black person if far more likely to have a criminal record than a white person. Airbnb should make renters agree to rent to any criminal that applies.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm good friends with Mike Brown, owner of Minnie Joe's in Richton Park IL. Look him up on facebook and you'll catch a couple of glimpses of me.
If I go on vacation I'd hand him the keys to my house and ask him to take care of my dog while I was gone.
If someone over the web asked to do the same and her name (and this is an actual name of a person working as a cashier at the local walmart) was Cashamonet I'd not think twice about rejecting her because any parent that did that to a child was most likely on the dole, illiterate, and just plain stupid. How much of a chance is there that she fell far enough from the tree to be trusted?
Blame the parent that set them up for failure.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
After all, if black people want to only rent to black people that'll be OK as long as we call it a safe space. I suspect that other protected classes could get away with this too. As long as it's not ever a white male because then it would be bad. Logic is definitely a weak point among the PC crowd. It's either wrong to discriminate or it isn't. Anything along the lines of you can do this but he can't are just a new flavor of discrimination.
Since it's getting increasingly unacceptable to ask about and disqualify candidates who have criminal records ...
One reason is that having a criminal record is not correlated with poor performance for most jobs. It may be sensible to run a criminal background check if you are hiring a cashier, but not if you are hiring a carpenter or a programmer.
16% are racist is another way of saying 84% aren't. Compare to attitudes 50 years I'd take that as a win.
To compare, 22% would've still voted for Bush even after starting 2 unwinnable wars that cost over a Trillion dollars and will take decades to resolve, and plunging most of the western world into economic meltdown. If even the most useless leader in history still has 22% support, then 16% is nothing.
Not as closely as it should be....
And this is why it's ok to be racist against white people but not ok to be racist against black people?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Unlike Asian dating sites? Seeing that I see ads for those quite a lot. Also, "find your Russian bride" ads.
Ezekiel 23:20
No, being poor is also only a correlation. It's mostly about a specific culture. Compare the behaviour of on-lookers during WTC vs hurricane Catrina: in the former ordinary people (not just firefighters) did a lot to help victims, in the latter you had mass looting often to the point of killing victims.
An anti-intellectual anti-work culture makes people poor. A culture that glorifies aggressive violence (rather than just violence to defend yourself or your neighbours) will also have a lot of crime. In this case, it is the same culture.
Compare gypsies with indic people -- they share the same race, their genetic makeup hasn't changed noticeably during several hundred years since they migrated. Yet the former have a vicious xenophobic culture that strongly forbids any cooperation with outsiders, encouraging crime rather than work; they have unemployment rates "only" around 90% only because statistics go by ethnicity rather than culture and thus include those who shed Romanipen and chose to conform to civilization. On the other hand, a regular indic person is kind and honest, and their superior genetical intelligence means that when exposed to the Western culture they tend to displace whites as top scientists/etc.
It's not persecution that's the cause, either. Let's take at another outsider group that lived in Europe and were even more persecuted than gypsies: the Jews. They have taken 22% of Nobel prizes despite being only 0.2% of world population. And other middle-eastern peoples, of almost identical genetic makeup? I see no stats on those, so let's take all of Islam; besides middle east this includes lots of indic peoples who are also genetically smarter than whites. And what we get? Only _four_ Nobel prizes (counting scientific fields only), out of a population of a couple billions. But wait, are even those four muslims? I've found data on two: one is lapsed, the other one belongs to a group that's declared non-muslim by the constitution of the country that guy comes from, for preferring peaceful means over murdering infidels.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Rushton is a racist - this is both well known and extensively documented by comments he's made publicly and white supremacy publications he's contributed to. His science is beyond junk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The man has been repeatedly and thoroughly discredited scientifically as ignoring evidence that doesn't fit his prejudices, his testing methods as biased against black people, and using non-equivalent groups.
He was president of an institute classified as a hate group. He speaks routinely at eugenics conferences and has published articles in white supremacy magazines and online websites.
Please help metamoderate.
How do you solve the "black crime problem"? And how exactly does crime cause poverty?
No one wants to establish businesses that bring jobs to areas that have high amounts of crime. Few want to work hard and amass wealth when it is likely to get stolen. When the blacks rioted in Milwaukee a couple of months back they looted the hair weave store. All that effort to establish a store to serve their community down the toilet.
Law and order comes first. Then comes the ability to create wealth. Not the other way around.
For every racial/ethnic/religious group that has achieved success in America, which came first: stable and predictable communities, or wealth?
As for fixing the problems that's got to come from the black community. White liberals do them no favors by making excuses for poor behavior. There are black voices trying to whip their communities into shape, but white liberals saying "no, no, you're victims, it's somebody else's fault!" is a far more appealing, but ultimately fruitless message. Counterproductive. I think it makes them feel good, though.
Prime example here. Blacks commit more crime, AirBnB renters notice and the solution isn't to weed out criminal blacks, or to offer support to efforts to end black crime, but to admonish the renters for noticing the crime. This doesn't do anything to solve the underlying problems. Black crime will continue, black poverty will continue, race relations will continue to deteriorate.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.