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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

If you have personal preferences about whom you conduct business with, you shouldn't be allowed to conduct business with anyone.

This isn't about your home; this is about your use of your home as a capital asset. You can allow into your home anyone you choose to and bar anyone you choose to. But as a society we have agreed that we--through our government--most certainly have a stake in making sure that you treat others equitably in your business transactions, and that that use of your home as a capital asset in a business transaction means you forego other rights in the process.

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[If you have personal preferences about whom you conduct business with, you shouldn't be allowed to conduct business with anyone.]

Why? If someone chooses to discriminate, why not let them suffer the consequences of lost potential revenue naturally?

It gives people who don't discriminate a chance to step in and gain market share.

It reminds me of the story of the bakery who wouldn't make a wedding cake for a gay couple. If I owned a bakery, I would put up a sign the next day saying "we will happily make cakes for gay couples".

Because we tried that and it didn't work. It wasn't a single decision that resulted in redlining that forced all the black people in cities to under-served slums. It was an aggregation of millions of personal decisions, many of them by otherwise reasonable people who were simply responding to the very powerful human cognitive bias of loss aversion. So, as a society, we decided to do what can to foreclose on that pathology.

Why loss aversion? People don't want a black person in their home because they believe that black people are more likely to mess up their home than white people. They would rather not rent out their home at all.

Yes, that is what loss aversion means.

Are you saying that if black people live in one society and white people live in one society, then the black one will necessarily be hundreds times worse than the white one?

Because that's what it sounds like you are saying.

That's not at all what he's saying. He's saying that, when you segment off the institutionally subjugated part of your population--the part of the population who has historically been denied economic opportunities, educational opportunities, and legal rights--you are going to have two populations that have very different growth curves.

And, historically and into the present, there are cultural incentives (racist-ass racism) and economic incentives (risk aversion) to make that happen.

You're assuming a lot here. You're assuming there are multiple bakers. You're assuming the bakers aren't colluding. You're assuming that the homophobic baker isn't being rewarded through additional patronage or via other methods, i.e., the GoFundMes etc. for their nonexistent plights. And you're assuming that a normal-person baker who doesn't hate gay people would not be shunned for their support.

The market will and does fail in the face of bigotry and discrimination; we've seen it from redlining to, well, now. Addressing market failures is the government's job.

I see your point. I guess for something like this to work, bigotry/racism/whatever would have to decrease in popularity to the point where you would be shunned harder if you were a bigot than if you were a person who openly objected to bigotry. We may not be there yet, but I do feel optimistic that we will eventually get there. Things were much worse only a short time ago. One thing that makes this ("this" being the idea of the market “handling” the problem) harder to accomplish is the fact that many people who may not be discriminatory themselves tend to have a passive attitude towards discrimination as long as it’s not happening to them. For example, many white people aren’t racist, but would they all agree to boycott a store that was openly racist towards black people? Probably not.

I think much of the problem is that these toxic effects aren't being created by overt bigotry, but rather by cognitive biases. The people rescinding reservations are doing so out of loss aversion, which is a very powerful human impulse. We're also powerfully geared to think differently about outgroups than we do about ingroups, which makes it easy for us to believe that there's a higher degree of risk in allowing a black family to stay in our house than a white one.

Social stigma might blunt these effects but it's unlikely to eliminate them any time soon. I bet a lot of the people who (effectively) refuse to rent to black people don't think they're the slightest bit biased against black people. They're not keeping track of their individual decisions about rental applicants, and they can easily let their brains fill in the blanks to tell them there were all sorts of negative signals they picked up on when declining reservations.

One of the reasons things are much better now are because laws against discrimination change what is socially acceptable. As regards the market handling it, we needn't speculate, just look at the actual history of racial discrimination in the US, from white-only diners to schools, that was only overcome by direct government intervention.

You can be optimistic all you like that we'll "eventually get there" (I'm not) but optimism doesn't do much for people whose rights are being infringed today.

The argument that the market will fix discrimination and bigotry is refuted by history.

> It gives people who don't discriminate a chance to step in and gain market share.

The next step is that the discriminating companies are out-competed and go out of business, leaving only non-discriminating companies. Conclusion: that's why there are no discriminating companies left!

This is a nice thought, but it barely works in theory and I've never seen it work in practice. That the consequent isn't observed regularly should tell you something about the assumptions we started with.

because it also effects those being discriminated against. At the very least that couple had to put up with another fresh dose of hatred and bigotry against them, and spend their time looking for another baker.

Depending on how bad the problem is you could end up with ghettos and other nasty things because of people who aren't able to get any sort of service.

This seems naive. The market will not automatically reward the non-discriminatory actor.

Now what happens when (not if) people decide to encourage businesses to discriminate by withholding business from the ones that don't, or worse? This actually happened in the US and because defectors were punished it's not something that was going away nicely on its own.

>If you have personal preferences about whom you conduct business with, you shouldn't be allowed to conduct business with anyone.

Let's go for the obvious example; Jewish business owners should be forced to do business with neo-nazis?

Nazism isn't a protected class.

But Jewish business owners routinely do business with them anyways.

What determines if something is a protected class?

Federal law.

Being denoted as such in federal law. The original Civil Rights Act, in 1964, specified race, color, sex, religion, and national origin; since then a few classes (pregnancy/marital status, age, citizenship, etc.) have been added over time.

I see. I honestly didn't know much about the specifics of protected classes before today.

So, currently, political affiliation is not a protected class, but it is considered a gray area by many.

Many may feel that political affiliation should be considered a protected class, however, if it becomes one, would that mean that Nazism is now protected?

Or coming at it from the other angle, as it stands, a religious extremist who believes that all members of a particular race/religion/orientation/etc should be put to death is currently protected. Why is that protected but Nazism not? Or does the protection become void as soon as you use it negatively towards another protected class? I'm genuinely asking.

Even though Nazism isn’t technically a religion, it seems very similar to religious extremism in many ways.

Nazism is in many ways protected. Cities cannot deny permits to neo-Nazi groups to assemble, for instance.

The comparison between Nazism and discrimination against black people is pretty creepy, though.

The experience of black people on Airbnb is: "Here is an amazing looking listing. I'm psyched to see if it's available for my trip. Click. Oh! It is available! How excellent. I'll plan accordingly." Then, a few hours later, when the owner has noticed the applicant's African American sounding name, the reservation is rescinded. It happens repeatedly, and there's nothing the renter can do about it.

The experience of the neo-Nazi is roughly the same, except the first time it happens they take the swastika out of their profile picture and from then on everything works peachy for them.

> Nazism is in many ways protected. Cities cannot deny permits to neo-Nazi groups to assemble, for instance.

That's not being a protected class (which is a statutory issue), or even being a Con-law suspect or quasi-suspect class, that's simply application of the 1st Amendment (incorporated by the 14th). Its a whole different, unrelated area of protection.

> The experience of the neo-Nazi is roughly the same, except the first time it happens they take the swastika out of their profile picture and from then on everything works peachy for them.

Which pretty much also works for many victims of religious discrimination, but even so religion is (and political affiliation, Nazi or otherwise, is not) a protected class under fair housing law. So, insofar as its a difference between "Nazis" and "blacks", its a difference largely orthogonal to the issue of protected class status under fair housing laws.

> Nazism is in many ways protected. Cities cannot deny permits to neo-Nazi groups to assemble, for instance.

That's a straightforward First Amendment issue.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

You can't prohibit neo-Nazis from peaceably assembling. You can't prohibit people wearing purple shirts from peaceably assembling. In neither case does that make neo-Nazis nor purple-shirt-wearers a protected class.

> Many may feel that political affiliation should be considered a protected class, however, if it becomes one, would that mean that Nazism is now protected?

As tptacek notes, in many ways Nazism is protected through other means. But to directly answer your question, I think the answer is a firm maybe. Because it depends on whether Nazism is recognized as a political affiliation. Which means that that question, too, needs to be settled. (Maybe it is. I don't know.)

That said, I don't think political affiliation should be a protected class (it's something that isn't intrinsic in the way that race or gender identity is and, as tptacek mentioned, can be "taken off" at will) and I don't think it ever practically could be one so I don't think about it that often. Similarly, I also don't really think religious affiliation should be, except that in a practical sense it serves as a shield to protect minority groups as it currently stands so I don't mind the kluge.

> Or does the protection become void as soon as you use it negatively towards another protected class?

I am unclear on the interrelations that you posit, though I just asked a con-law friend for his take and (according to him) it depends on whether or not it is a place of "public accommodation"--retail stores, service businesses, educational institutions. In such a case, yes, it is not lawful to refuse to serve that customer.

Note also that while "protected class" is often treated in discussion as if it was a consistent list across all of the law (at least, within, e.g., federal law), this is not the case: protected classes for particular anti-discrimination laws can be different, and may be different from the Constitutional-law set of suspect and quasi-suspect classes (a concept often conflated with that of "protected classes") that are relevant to equal protection analysis under the 14th Amendment (and, though the list of classes within those categories may be different, under similar state constitutional provisions.)

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