A recent working paper from Harvard found that hosts of the room/house renting service Airbnb discriminate against renters with Black-sounding names. The study revealed that “requests from guests with distinctly African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names.”

Unfortunately, racial discrimination based on names is nothing new.

• Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” The American Economic Review 94(4): 991-1013.

Racialized housing discrimination also has a long history. Once overt, such as in the outright denial of mortgages, housing discrimination has shifted toward micro-aggressions that are harder to spot, such as the private decision not to offer an Airbnb to people of color.

• Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd. 2008. “The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets,” Annual Review of Sociology 34: 181–209.
• Vincent J. Roscigno, Diana L. Karafin, and Griff Tester. 2009.“The Complexities and Processes of Racial Housing Discrimination,” Social Problems 56(1): 49-69.
• Douglas S. Massey. 2015. “ The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act,” Sociological Forum 30(1): 571-588.