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Black passengers sue American Airlines after being ordered to leave plane [1]

['Rob Beschizza']

Date: 2024-05-30  

Black passengers made to leave an American Airlines flight are suing the airline, claiming racial discrimination. Flight crew allegedly removed eight black men, all sitting in different parts of the plane and unknown to one another, to satisfy another passenger's complaint.

An airline employee told them they were removed because a flight attendant had complained about a passenger's body odor. The men said they responded that it appeared they were targeted for removal solely because of their race. American offered to rebook them, but when it became clear after about an hour that there were no other available flights to New York that evening, they were allowed to reboard the plane, according to the lawsuit filed by Public Citizen, a consumer-advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader. "If American Airlines received a complaint about a Black male passenger with offensive body odor but could not verify the complaint, the solution should not have been to eject eight separate Black men from the plane," Susan Huhta, an employment law attorney in Washington, D.C., who is representing the three men, said.

Eight years ago the NAACP warned black travelers that American Airlines was racially discriminatory and unsafe. It lifted the advisory after the airline promised to do better, but here we are. You have to wonder at how that kind of internal culture can thrive now, but I'm always reminded of that line from Richard Rorty twenty years ago or so:

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/30/black-passengers-sue-american-airlines-after-being-ordered-to-leave-plane.html

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