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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

Am I missing something? Why is the post titled "AirBnB racism"?

Sorry for the confusion, after verification with a Syrian Passport, they decided to completely close the account.

This is not a new thing, we get this when we deal with banks, embassies, and other online services like hosting, ecommerce etc ..

I would happily accept the usual answer "Syrian is sanctioned by the US law, and we cant accept syrian customers" but what pisses me off is that they only decided to completely ignore it.

I think you can induce it from the name. Sorry to hear, had it happen to me on a few occasions too, but I just decided it's not worth the fight.

So anytime there is unexplained bad service to someone with a minority sounding name it is safe to assume that its racism at play?

There is nowhere near enough information to deduce the real cause of the account cancellation and attributing it to racism while providing no justification is below the standard of quality that we expect on HN.`

hmm. i wouldn't jump to conclusions. I am a Serbian national. On multiple occasions I have been called Yugo, a "gypsy", Slav because of my name, and also have given attitude due to my accent. Don't talk about other people unless you know how it feels.

Not jumping to conclusions was exactly what I was saying. I'm not saying that anyone should have to accept overt racial or discriminatory comments as you described. I'm saying that the referenced blog post does not contain any evidence at all besides the name of the poster that this was a racially motivated act. The problem with accepting the name alone as evidence is that doing so implies that any inconvenience faced by any member of any racial minority is automatically an act of racism. Something that is clearly not the case and is counter productive.

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