Eric Holder joins Airbnb to help company fight discrimination

The former US attorney general has signed on to help Airbnb address wide-spread claims of racism that sparked the viral #AirbnbWhileBlack hashtag, Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky announced in a company blog post Wednesday. In an effort led by Laura Murphy, former head of the ACLU Washington, D.C. legislative office, the company is meeting with civil rights leaders and getting input from Airbnb employees.

In a post on Wednesday, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said Airbnb has “an obligation to be honest about our own shortcomings, and do more to get our house in order”.

Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, has spoken openly about racism he experienced – including being racially profiled by police while serving as a federal prosecutor. “I want us to be smart and innovative and to create new tools to prevent discrimination and bias that can be shared across the industry”. LGBT renters have also faced discrimination on Airbnb, and some have called for an ‘LGBT-friendly’ option on the site so that renters can feel more safe.

Airbnb has previously been criticized for instances of discrimination on the service.

“It’s not enough to just offer our sympathies”, Chesky wrote.

At the company’s annual OpenAir conference in June, Chesky and other Airbnb execs publicly committed themselves to completely reexamining Airbnb’s anti-discrimination policies.

In his new role, Holder will work alongside John Relman, a civil rights attorney who specializes in fair housing issues, to craft the company’s anti-discrimination policy.

The company said Holder, who stepped down a year ago, would be responsible for creating the company’s new policy.

A Harvard Business School paper published in January found “requests from guests with distinctively African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively white names”. “And we will require everyone who uses our platform to read and certify that they will follow this policy”. In May, an Airbnb user sued the company for allegedly ignoring racial discrimination on its website. Last year, he returned to the Washington law firm Covington and Burling, where he was a partner from 2001 to 2009.

Airbnb is also facing scrutiny from U.S. Sens.