How Airbnb is Getting it Right With Its Antidiscrimination Policy
America has an undeniable race problem. We can debate it endlessly on cable news and Facebook or we can choose to do something about it.
Visionaries and visionary companies choose to act.
That’s why I was very happy to see an email in my inbox yesterday from Airbnb discussing how they are tackling housing discrimination and implicit bias.
In the post Brian Chesky is honest, transparent, humble and takes full ownership of the the company’s inaction to date on this extremely important issue. He acknowleges the feedback the company has recieved from its community and he then lays out the steps that the company has taken and will be taking in the future to address the problem including hiring former attorney general, Eric Holder to work on this issue (which is like hiring Wolfgang Puck to be your company chef).
While we should not give Airbnb a pass for failing to act sooner, I applaud the effort they are taking now and hope it inspires other companies follow suit.
From a personal standpoint I am intimately aware of some of the issues the company is trying to solve.
For the past two years my wife and I have been hosts on Airbnb. From the beginning we knew we wanted to have our own antidiscrimination policy to help keep in check our own implicit biases.
We had one rule. It was crude and inelegant but for the most part it worked. We simply wouldn’t rent to anyone unless they had at least one positive review on their profile. If they did meet our criteria we would rent to them without any regard to race, nationality, age, etc. The beauty of the system is that it was rules based and thus eliminated any subjective and potentially biased decison making on our part.
We’ve rented our place out almost two dozen times and never once had any issues with people damaging or taking our things. The Airbnb system works and I like to believe that people are fundamentally good.
The one time we broke our rule we rented to a middle aged white woman from Florida. She was an accountant married with three kids. I looked her up on Facebook. She was white picket fences and apple pie.
White lady. Accountant. Mom. What could go wrong?
When we got back from our weekend our kitchen knives were missing.
I racially profiled the shit out of this woman. I let my implicit biases take over. I should have stuck to our system.
Racial biases are real. We all have them whether we choose to acknowledge them or not. I’m glad that Airbnb is choosing to acknowledge theirs. I hope others follow. It’s the first step to a more just and equal society.
