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Economy Technology Diversity & Inclusion

Noirbnb, Innclusive and others want sharing economy without racial bias

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By Kyle O'Brien, Creative Works Editor

October 6, 2016 | 4 min read

Having guns drawn on you can certainly change your perspective on life. Such was the case for Stefan Grant, Ronnia Cherry and friends, who booked an Airbnb for the A3C Music Festival in Georgia last year.

The friends, who have backgrounds in design, tech, music, film, marketing and branding, rented the house for a weekend last fall and thought they were in for a fun time. While they prepared for the show, two police officers came to the house, guns drawn, looking for robbery suspects. They neighbors had seen the group of African-Americans at the house and assumed they were robbing it, so they called the police. Luckily, the police quickly realized that Grant and friends were not criminals and even took a selfie with them.

But that didn’t take away from the sting of the event. The selfie went viral and Airbnb found Grant and Cherry and brought them to their headquarters to talk about how they could better serve the black community. After months of talks with Airbnb, Grant and Cherry realized that the company wouldn’t be putting efforts into starting what they called Noirbnb, so they took matters into their own hands and created the company themselves.

On June 3, 2016 Noirbnb was created to “serve the community and be The Future of Black Travel,” according to the company website, which was especially fitting after many complaints about racism from some Airbnb hosts and a Harvard study on discrimination on the company, which found that African-American guests were 16 per cent less likely to have their requests approved compared to white guests.

“We’re creating safe and welcoming lodging for people of color all across the world,” says the company’s site.

Noirbnb isn’t the only company looking to change perceptions in the sharing economy.

According to a story on Motherboard, Rohan Gilkes also had an idea for homesharing, first called Noirebnb but changed to Innclusive to avoid confusion. The two, however, have different views on how to combat racism. Gilkes thinks guests should be able to hide their names and pictures from the booking process while Grant thinks people don’t need to be anonymous.

“If you’re a company that claims to be inclusive, then you shouldn’t have to hide yourself,” he told Motherboard. “It doesn’t really make sense to me.”

This problem will not easily solve itself, even with black-friendly companies like these two.

Sociology Professor Jessie Daniels, at Hunter College, studies online racism and said that hiding photos and names from the booking process isn’t going to solve what started as a colorblind process.

“People do not take race into account as they’re designing these platforms,” Daniels said. “Racism ends up finding them in a way in the platform that results from that supposedly color-blind design.”

Airbnb is certainly taking steps to address racism and bias with its hosts, but there are ways to go for all travelers to feel like they are protected. Noirbnb and Innclusive are helping some, and others, like France’s Misterbandb, which caters to the gay community, and Sweden’s Handiscover, which finds lodging for disabled travelers, are chipping away at bias. But the only way to truly fight bias within the sharing economy is for each company to have anti-bias contracts in place and enforce those rules vigilantly.

Economy Technology Diversity & Inclusion

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