{"id":21268,"date":"2016-05-24T07:00:26","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=21268"},"modified":"2016-05-23T17:07:31","modified_gmt":"2016-05-23T21:07:31","slug":"capitalism-still-serves-white-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2016\/05\/24\/capitalism-still-serves-white-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Capitalism (still) Serves White People"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Redlining\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Redlining\u00a0refers to the racist policy and\/or practice of denying services to people of color. The term was coined in the 1960s by sociologist John McKnight and referred to literal red\u00a0lines\u00a0overlaid on city maps that designated \u201csecure\u201d versus \u201cinsecure\u201d investment regions, distributed largely along racial faults\u00a0such that banks became disproportionately unwilling to invest in minority communities. In turn, realtors showed\u00a0different, more desirable properties to White clients than those they showed to\u00a0clients of color, thereby reinforcing segregation and doing so in a way that perpetuated White advantage. Redlining was outlawed in the 1970s but its direct effects were intergenerational and versions of redlining continue to persist.<\/p>\n

Versions of it like this:<\/p>\n

\"Redline2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the last few weeks, the story of Gregory Selden went viral. Selden attempted to book an Airbnb and was rejected. Noticing that the space was still available, he created two fake profiles using images of White men. Both fake guests were accepted. He confronted the host and the company, to little actionable effect.<\/p>\n

Selden\u2019s case, though compelling, is not exceptional. The hashtag \u00a0#AirbnbWhileBlack<\/a>\u00a0emerged\u00a0in response to Selden\u2019s viral experience, validating\u00a0the patterned nature of discrimination through the home-sharing site. The stories shared on Twitter fall directly in line with the academic research,which shows\u00a0that Black guests are\u00a016% less likely to be accepted than their White counterparts, even at a financial cost to Airbnb hosts<\/a>. In short, many Airbnb hosts do not want Black people to stay in their homes, just as White homeowners and White bankers wanted to keep Black people in separate neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

To be sure, the stakes for\u00a0Airbnb customers who struggle to find vacation accommodation are not so high as families of color who could not purchase homes and were relegated to poorly funded regions and ghettoized into poverty. In this way, discriminatory patterns on Airbnb are more fairly categorized in the hospitality sector than the housing sector and are more akin to the Whites Only lunch counters and hotel policies than mortgage lending practices.<\/p>\n

But even the lunch counters and hotels of Jim Crow don\u2019t quite capture what is going on here. Those were explicit forms of discrimination, announced and therefore debatable only in their righteousness, not their existence. People disagreed about whether or not people of color should be<\/em> admitted to the same establishments as Whites, but all were clear about the fact that people of color were not admitted to these establishments. On Airbnb, the racism itself is an unsettled reality. Indeed, Airbnb tried to explain away Selden\u2019s experience of racism, claiming that the initial rejection was not due to race, but due to Selden booking different dates. They claim that he booked only one night with his real\u00a0account but booked 2 nights with the fake accounts, and that lots of Airbnb hosts will not rent their space for just 1 night \u00a0(Selden says Airbnb’s assessment is erroneous, and that he booked the exact same dates and number of nights).<\/p>\n

So Maybe it\u2019s more like trying to hail a cab while Black, in which one\u2019s skin becomes conspicuous making services difficult to obtain, but also difficult to prove a racially motivated reason on the part of the service provider. Only with Airbnb, the judgment isn\u2019t so snap. Hosts have time to think about why they elect one customer over another, meaning that hosts have to confront their own racial bias in a way cab drivers may be able to effectively suppress.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the\u00a0model of Airbnb, and of the share economy in general, is qualitatively different from a hotel or restaurant or even taxi service. In a share economy, financial transactions have a distinctly personal bent.\u00a0 The challenge of regulation is in monitoring lots of individual contractors, who hold little connection to the companies under which they operate, and who have an interest not just in profit, but in maintaining interactional comfort. How does one regulate who people will allow to sleep in their homes?<\/p>\n

Racial discrimination on Airbnb is therefore not so much a parallel to historical patterns of racism, but a continuation. This is how racism manifests in today\u2019s version of capitalism. The system looks different, but does the same thing. This is the racism of Google\u2019s photo identification software that identified Black people as \u201cgorillas\u201d<\/a> and Apple\u2019s racially diverse emojis<\/a> that not only came after years of White-only options, but appeared as aliens on phones that did not have the latest software running. This is the racial bias of online dating<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As long as race organizes interaction, and does so in a hierarchical way, the goods and services of market capitalism will have racism built in. A sharing economy sounds warmer than the cold tradition of corporate capitalism, but sharing implies a choice on the part of the \u201csharer,\u201d one that, apparently if unsurprisingly, excludes and marginalizes the \u201csharees\u201d who have long been pushed out of public and civic life.<\/p>\n

Jenny Davis is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Redlining\u00a0refers to the racist policy and\/or practice of denying services to people of color. The term was coined in the 1960s by sociologist John McKnight and referred to literal red\u00a0lines\u00a0overlaid on city maps that designated \u201csecure\u201d versus \u201cinsecure\u201d investment regions, distributed largely along racial faults\u00a0such that banks became disproportionately unwilling to invest in minority communities. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1753,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[12755,98,14,36488],"class_list":["post-21268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-airbnb","tag-capitalism","tag-race","tag-share-economy"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1753"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21268"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21294,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21268\/revisions\/21294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}