Gone are the days when only individual people could be racist.
The ACLU on Tuesday issued a travel warning to African American passengers seeking to book tickets on American Airlines because of a series of random “disturbing incidents.”
Here’s what the civil rights group said in a statement posted on its website:
The NAACP for several months now has been monitoring a pattern of disturbing incidents reported by African-American passengers, specific to American Airlines. In light of these confrontations, we have today taken the action of issuing national advisory alerting travelers—especially African Americans—to exercise caution, in that booking and boarding flights on American Airlines could subject them disrespectful, discriminatory or unsafe conditions. This travel advisory is in effect beginning today, October 24, 2017, until further notice.
The group went on to list out four — yes, FOUR — instances in which it claims black passengers were discriminated against:
1) An African-American man was required to relinquish his purchased seats aboard a flight from Washington, D.C. to Raleigh-Durham, merely because he responded to disrespectful and discriminatory comments directed toward him by two unruly white passengers;
2) Despite having previously booked first-class tickets for herself and a traveling companion, an African-American woman’s seating assignment was switched to the coach section at the ticket counter, while her white companion remained assigned to a first-class seat;
3) On a flight bound for New York from Miami, the pilot directed that an African-American woman be removed from the flight when she complained to the gate agent about having her seating assignment changed without her consent; and
4) An African-American woman and her infant child were removed from a flight from Atlanta to New York City when the woman (incidentally a Harvard Law School student) asked that her stroller be retrieved from checked baggage before she would disembark.
So, over the course of “several” months, the ACLU got wind of FOUR “incidents” in which passengers who happened to be black fully experienced the crappy airline industry in all of its misery? Over the course of “several” months, FOUR American Airlines passengers of the millions of people who flew on the airline during those months faced “discrimination”?
What. A. Racist. Conspiracy.
As we saw with the (Asian) man who was literally dragged off a United Airlines flight earlier this year, airlines, including American Airlines, don’t care if you’re white, black, Hispanic, or Asian. You can bet that if you do anything other than tiptoe to your seat, sit in your assigned seat quietly until the flight attendants tell you otherwise, and tiptoe back out of the cabin and into the airport, you have a decent chance of getting kicked off a plane.
I’d imagine that if you went around and asked a mix of white, black, Hispanic and Asian people whether they have ever had a bad experience with an airline, 99.5 percent of them would say yes.
All of this is not to say that passengers absolutely cannot experience racial discrimination while flying. Of course they can. And they have. But to effectively label an entire airline as racist based on four isolated “incidents” over the course of several months is just laughable.
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