Airbnb’s racism problem isn’t going away any time soon
Some users have found ways around biased hosts on Airbnb. Two years ago, Khadijah, a New Jersey professor, was traveling to Sausalito, Calif. for a friend’s wedding. There were plenty of homes in the area that showed up as available for the weekend of the wedding, but every time she tried to book, she was ignored or told the home was not available.
“I started tailoring my messages to drop as much respectability into the narrative as I could, emphasizing that I was a professor,” Khadijah told Fusion. “I thought if I sounded more respectable, it would help me book a room, but it wasn’t effective.”
So Khadijah asked her Facebook friends if anyone who was white would be willing to let her use their face.
“A friend in her 60s, a white woman in Philadelphia, lent me her photo,” Khadijah told us. “I got a room pretty quickly after that.”
▻http://fusion.net/story/308759/airbnbs-racism-problem-isnt-going-away-any-time-soon