Airbnb is a essentially "middle man" - a company that facilitates private individuals who wish to rent out their homes to strangers. This is a wonderful and much appreciated way of connecting strangers and building civil society bonds. But dictating to its members exactly on what terms and to whom they should be renting out their own bedrooms and homes seems to be, no matter how well-intentioned, to be self-defeating: it fosters an atmosphere of distrust and removes renters' freedom to exercise discretion about who stays in their home.
It is inevitable that some renters will bring racist or xenophobic or other prejudices to the table when they decide who to rent their homes to. But there will be a whole range of positive and negative preferences about the type of person one wants to stay in one's home, many of which many not be motivated by racism or xenophobia, but by personal judgments about who one is prepared to open one's home to.
Airbnb is trying to micro-manage how people exercise their judgment about who is a good fit for their home. They are trying to force people to trust everyone equally or to feel equally well-disposed toward all potential renters, as a condition for using their service. They may have the LEGAL right to do this, but it will be impossible in many cases to enforce with any reliability.
Besides the notorious difficulty of enforcing this sort of discrimination edict without high levels of inteference and second-guessing of complex judgments, in my view, the new policy is likely to undermine, not promote, greater trust and respect betweeen renters and landlords, by fostering a more adversarial culture in Airbnb homes, where any refusal to rent is met with an air of suspicion and resentment and exclusion, as though opening your home to someone (even for money) was not a delicate matter.
Cultural change and reform comes through education and experience. Airbnb permits people to be exposed to different cultures and values by opening up their home to strangers (and receiving payment in return).
But I see no reason why Airbnd should appoint itself a sort of "moral policeman" to ensure that all renters are equally open to different cultures and communities. That kind of openness can be encouraged but it is quite absurd to think that it can be truly fostered in a positive way by getting people to tick a "community commitment" box before renting out their homes.
In fact, I would argue that this new "community commitment" could be considered ethically dubious at best, since it will provide a strong reason to people who rely on Airbnb but wish to exercise their own judgment about who stays in their home to lie on the website. Furthermore, the effort to get people to formally "commit" to what is essentially an ethical attitude in a quasi-contractual way, as a condition for using this type of renting "middle man" is an extraordinary act of over-reach, it seems to me, insofar as it essentially means that Airbnb feel they can appoint themselves the arbiter and judge of people's private motives and prejudices, whether through some formal declaration on their part, or through a statistical analysis of their behaviour.
Which raises the question, if Airbnb is worried about unjust discrimination in society at large, why does it think that setting itself up as a sort of "thought police" for its customers is a wise move? How can they not anticipat the inevitable resistance and backlash that will unleash, and its almost certain failure in practice to reform people's behaviour and attitudes (tick the box and move on)? And what does this sort of policy tell us about the type of authority that a middle man THINKS he has over his clients and their values, preferences, and lifestyles choices?
Is there some sort of "saviour" complex going on here, where a company thinks they must engage in an aggressive campaign to control their users' mindsets and micromanage their own decisions about who to rent their homes to? Or is the new Airbnb policy, as some have suggested, just a response to some legal or social pressures to "look good and inclusive"?
Whatever the answer to these questions, it strikes me that setting aside the legality of this new policy, the level of micromanagement and control it extends into clients' USE of the service and indeed into their values and attitudes regarding hosting people in their home, suggests a lack of trust in people's goodness and an unwillingness to take risks on people's goodness, to give them reasonable discretion to exercise their own judgments in the sphere of their own home (even if it is being rented out for profit).
Indeed, this sort of campaign, which comes close to being a sort of indirect "mind control," seems to bespeak an impatience with the messiness of human life and human relationships, and of course impatience with idiosyncratic and unstructured nature of the motives of people who rent out their own homes. Sometimes, in order to foster or preserve an atmosphere of trust and respect in general, you have to allow within a system for the possibility that some people will exercise bad or unfair judgments, or treat some people without the full respect they deserve. Making a rule to compel everyone to be respectful is not always the best way to foster a culture of respect.
Turning a modest facilitating service into a crusade for full inclusion and a change in cultural mindsets completely changes the nature of the Airbnb service, bringing it into the zone of a sort of "mind police" whose edicts will frequently be impossible to enforce.
It is an excellent example of the trend in our society to attempt to control from on high, with relatively crude regulations, the delicate flow of human relationships and attitudes between different groups, ethnicities, value identifications, religions, etc.
To be clear, I am not advocating racisms or invidious discrimination, but I am suggesting that (a) some degree of discrimination and profiling is a fact of life especially in the business of renting out one's own home, and it is not necessarily invidious, especially in situations of sparse information; and (b) to the extent that people do engage in invidious forms of discrimination when they rent out their homes, Airbnb is certainly not the appropriate entity to be rooting this out systematically - education and cultural reform must be carried out by winning over people's hearts and minds, and this work is already being done by the mere fact of cultural exchange permitted by the Airbnb network. Why spoil that work by implementing a policy that is likely to foster distrust, suspicion, and resentment among renters and proprietors?