In case you don’t know what the #AirBnBWhileBlack hashtag is about, here is a break down.
The hashtag is birthed out of frustrations from mostly African-Americans saying that hosts on the house-sharing platform are turning them away based off of their names and profile pictures.
23-year old Quirtina Crittenden started the hashtag in July 2015 after a she noticed that multiple requests to rent were turned down.
https://twitter.com/TinaLaBang/status/621699389044584448
In an interview with NPR, Crittenden says, “The hosts would always come up with excuses like, ‘oh, someone actually just booked it’ or ‘oh, some of my regulars are coming in town, and they’re going to stay there. But I got suspicious when I would check back like days later and see that those dates were still available.”
When she created the hashtag, she saw others use it sharing similar stories. As a test, Crittenden shortened her name to “Tina” and changed her profile picture into a city skyline. After that she says that she had no problem renting places.
As word spread of this trend, a couple of Harvard Business School students created an experiment to test it and they found it to be very common.
