11/25/2025
Throwback to 2016, when the sharing economy was still in its wild teenage years—Uber, Lyft, Airbnb exploding onto the scene and nobody was really talking about discrimination on these platforms yet.
That changed on May 17, 2016, when Selden v. Airbnb, Inc. was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. emejuru and I were behind that novel class-action lawsuit alleging racial discrimination against Black guests and people of color on Airbnb.
Back then we were young, hungry, and laser-focused. Major news outlets kept calling for interviews—CNN, Bloomberg, Washington post, the whole crew—but we turned them all down. We saw the bigger picture: this wasn’t about getting on TV. It was about forcing real change. And it worked. That case (and the firestorm around it) pushed Airbnb and the entire sharing economy to adopt serious anti-discrimination policies, training, and standards that are still in place today.
Later that same year we hit them again with Hobzek v. HomeAway/VRBO — exposing how forcing full names, trip details, and social-media “background checks” let hosts openly refuse Black renters and people of color. Those two cases together forced Silicon Valley to rewrite the rules , standards and make these apps and the industry more diversely aligned.
Sometimes the loudest moves are the quiet ones. When you know the contract you signed with Uber, Airbnb, or any of these platforms can actually be challenged and improved… you don’t always need the spotlight. You just need to move.
Grateful for those early battles . The sharing economy became more diversely conscious because we refused to stay silent and we were deliberate to push the change on Silicon Valley knowing that in the future technology would need a lot of responsibility and humanity.
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