3 Black passengers sue American Airlines over alleged racial profiling after they and five other black men were kicked off over body odor in racial discrimination lawsuit.
What if they were white…?
Three Black passengers are suing American Airlines after alleging employees removed a total of eight Black men from a flight due to a complaint about a passenger with body odor.
The lawsuit filed in Federal court alleges the petitioners suffering ‘blatant and egregious race discrimination’.
A new lawsuit claims American Airlines employees pulled three Black male passengers off a plane after a complaint about body odor. They did not know each other and were not seated next to each other.
First on CBS Mornings, the men tell their story to @krisvancleave. pic.twitter.com/fWX8ZCuy3e
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Imagine a flight attendant ordering every white person off a plane because of a complaint
The suit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, claims that as American Airlines Flight 832 from Phoenix to New York was boarding in January, American Airlines employees removed eight Black men from the plane allegedly over a complaint about ‘offensive body odor.’
Submitted video in the suit displayed a group of Black men who were not traveling together and did not know each other being removed from the flight. According to the suit, they were the only Black passengers on the flight.
Emmanuel Jean Joseph, Alvin Jackson and Xavier Veal — the three plaintiffs— were on a connecting flight from Los Angeles. The three allege that at no point throughout the other flight did any employee from American Airlines say anything to them about an offensive odor.
‘What happened to us was wrong. Imagine a flight attendant ordering every white person off a plane because of a complaint about one white person. That would never happen. But that is what happened to us. There is no explanation other than the color of our skin. American Airlines singled us out for being Black, embarrassed us, and humiliated us. Clearly, this was discrimination,’ said the three plaintiffs, according to Public Citizen.
Alleged racial profiling
Jean Joseph speaking to CBS News said that he noticed that only Black men were being removed from the flight.
‘I started freaking out,’ Xavier Veal told the outlet. He decided to record the incident on his phone.
The lawsuit claims that the men were held in the jetway for about an hour and then moved to the gate area where they were told they would be rebooked on another flight to New York later that day. The lawsuit alleges that an American Airlines employee indicated that the complaint about body odor came from a ‘white male flight attendant.’
A gate agent seen in the video at one point seemed to agree that race was a factor in the decision to remove the men from the flight.
When another flight to New York could not be found, the men were put back on the same plane. Jackson described the experience as uncomfortable, saying, ‘Everybody staring at me, me and all the other Black people on the plane were just taken off.’
‘I knew that as soon as I got on that plane, a sea of White faces were going to be looking at me and blaming me for their late flight of an hour,’ Jean Joseph told CBS.
The lawyer representing the three men, Sue Huhta, said that American Airlines declined to provide her clients any answers about the incident and said it seems ‘fairly apparent that race was part of this dynamic.’
‘It’s almost inconceivable to come up with an explanation for that other than the color of their skin, particularly since they didn’t know each other and weren’t sitting near each other,’ said Huhta.
Adding, ‘What happened to the plaintiffs strongly suggests that American Airlines racially profiled them. 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.’
Plight of being black in America
The lawsuit follows that of a the NAACP warning black travelers to avoid the airline in 2017, citing multiple instances of alleged discrimination, the lawsuit explained.
The episode raises questions about American Airlines’ protocols and the administering of such protocols by airline workers. While others wondered if the removed individuals had been white, whether they would been taken off the plane following complaints of alleged body odor.
‘We were discriminated against. The entire situation was racist,’ one of the plaintiffs stressed.
Adding, ‘Unfortunately, I’m a black man and I live in America. It wakes you back up to the reality that I can’t just go to the store; I can’t just do regular things like take a plane home.’
‘None of the White passengers were taken off the plane and humiliated and embarrassed,’ Michael Kirkpatrick, the lead lawyer working on the case for the Public Citizen law group, told the Washington Post.
‘Somebody should have stepped up and said, ‘Wait a minute. We can’t do this. This is wrong,’’ he said. ‘But instead, nobody stepped up and intervened to stop it from happening.’
In a statement to CBS News, American Airlines said, ‘We take all claims of discrimination very seriously and want our customers to have a positive experience when they choose to fly with us. Our teams are currently investigating the matter, as the claims do not reflect our core values or our purpose of caring for people.’
