As the US observes Martin Luther King Jr.'s Day (January 17), we look with sadness at America's regression into barbarity under Donald Trump and his Christian right-wingers and billionnaire buddies.
American Airlines is building itself a reputation of discrimination against African Americans and, by implication, appears to be a hotbed of Trumpian right-wing republican racism. There was the removal of African passengers on the basis of the racist trope that Africans have body odor. (see: https://www.npr.org/2024/05/29/nx-s1-4984840/american-airlines-8-black-men-body-odor-discrimination-lawsuit). Then the accusation of trafficking against a Black African passenger accompanying his own biracial children (See: https://www.yahoo.com/news/american-airlines-apologizes-accusing-david-185835571.html)
And now this. A mixed-raced couple going on their honeymoon get arrested because of “suspicion that the black African husband is sex-trafficking his white European wife”. All these instances of discrimination based on skin color were the actions of American Airlines employees and flight attendants who, it seems, are trained to profile people based on their skin color, i.e. to be racists.
If America hasn’t yet been insanely ignorant and racist ugly for most of its history, a second vengeful Trump administration is poised to turn back the clock and make things much worse by “normalizing” and institutionalizing racism. Yup, Trump wants to make America great again, which in his stupid mind conjures up images of 1800s America or at best images of 1950s America, in which case he is stirring in his dumb and illiterate white pesasant base a nostalgia for those days when a white man would rape a white girl, blame an innocent black man, then rally his Christian white buddies to lynch the black man extrajudicially. That is the America that Trump wants to take us back to, and American Arilines seems to be helping him.
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Black Passenger’s Suit Says Flight Crew Reported He Was Allegedly Trafficking His White Wife
Pocharapon Neammanee
Thu, January 16, 2025 at 11:47 PM GMT+2·2 min read
A Black passenger who flew with American Airlines in 2022 claims in a lawsuit that he and his white wife were wrongly imprisoned after crew members reported to local authorities that they suspected him of trafficking his wife.
On Sept. 13, 2022, retired police officer Anthony Williams boarded a flight from Phoenix to Miami for his honeymoon with Katsiaryna Shasholka. A fellow passenger told American Airlines employees that he believed Shasholka was being trafficked, according to the lawsuit filed last week in the Southern District of Florida.
The airline employees who took the passenger’s report did not question Williams or his wife but instead reported him to law enforcement, the lawsuit says. When they landed in Miami, Williams and Shasholka were escorted off the plane by American Airlines employees.
Katsiaryna Shasholka and Anthony Williams in a photo provided by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, where their lawsuit was filed. U.S. District Court; Southern District of Florida
Williams and his wife say they were humiliated and confused as other passengers walked past them as they were made to wait at the airport, according to the lawsuit. The two were then questioned together by police.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to a HuffPost request for comment.
Now Williams and Shasholka are seeking damages in excess of $75,000 from American Airlines, the passenger who accused him and the employees who reported him to police. The couple is being represented by civil rights attorney Jasmine Rand, who had represented the families of Trayvon Martin, a black teen killed by a white vigilante in Florida in 2012, and George Floyd, a black man murdered by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
“My client is a retired police officer. He spent his life fighting crime, and now to be accused of a crime so heinous as trafficking his own wife is unfathomable,” Rand told HuffPost in an email. “He is committed to fighting for justice for himself and for others that have suffered racial discrimination at the hands of American Airlines.”
According to Rand, “acts of racial discrimination are widespread throughout American Airlines.” She alleged that there is “a clear failure to train its employees and to hold them accountable when they engage in discriminatory misconduct.”
The lawsuit mentioned other incidents of alleged racial profiling by American Airline employees, including in 2023, when Black musician David Ryan Harris was accused of trafficking his own biracial children.
American Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment from HuffPost.