Mary MacCarthy and her 10-year-old daughter, Moira, had just left Denver International Airport when two Denver police officers met them at the gate, called them by name and notified them that they had been reported for disorderly conduct. suspicious behavior.
The mother and daughter took a Southwest Airlines flight to Denver for a funeral. Ms.’s brother died suddenly. MacCarthy the night before.
Unbeknownst to Ms. MacCarthy, a flight attendant suspected Ms. MacCarthy, who is white, of human trafficking, Ms. MacCarthy in an interview Monday. Moira, his daughter, is Black.
The officials asked them, said Ms. MacCarthy, adding that his daughter cried in his arms throughout the engagement. Ms. showed MacCarthy his driver’s license to the officers; They did not ask for identification for Moira, proving that they are related.
The incident occurred in October 2021, but Ms. MacCarthy filed a lawsuit last week in Federal District Court in Colorado against Southwest, alleging the airline intentionally racially discriminated against her family.
“I raised a biracial daughter for 10 years,” said Ms. MacCarthy, who is 44 and a single parent. “I know about racial profiling and I know that ‘suspicious’ is a code word for a minority.”
Southwest Airlines declined to comment on the litigation. In a police report filed on the day of the incident, a flight attendant made several statements to substantiate his belief that Ms. MacCarthy is a human trafficker. The flight attendant said that Ms. MacCarthy told her to sit with her son and she told her son not to talk to anyone. This is not true, said Ms. McCarthy on Monday.
Federal laws prohibit airlines from discriminating against passengers on the basis of disability, race, color, national origin, sex, religion or ancestry. In February of this year, the month with the most recent publicly available data, 20 consumer complaint domestic airlines filed discrimination with the Department of Transportation’s Office of Aviation Consumer Protection. In 2022118 discrimination complaints were filed, 7 percent more than last yearcomplaints of
In recent years, reports of passengers claiming they experienced racial discrimination while flying have made headlines. In 2016, an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania was doing math equations on an American Airlines flight when a seatmate thought he might be a terrorist and alerted flight attendants. That same year, a University of California Berkeley student was removed from a Southwest flight after speaking Arabic during a phone call.
In 2017, the NAACP issued an advisory against American Airlines citing a “corporate culture of racial insensitivity and possible racial bias” and citing three incidents where Black passengers were removed from their flights, including one involving a passenger who asked why his seat assignment changed. The advisory was lifted nine months later, after the airline made several changes, including starting up implicit bias training.
Several major domestic carriers, including Southwest, they said they give willingly non-discrimination training to new employees. Airlines are not legally required to offer such training.
Airlines are used less than other modes of transportation for labor trafficking operations, according to a 2018 study of 127 human-trafficking victims by Polaris, a nonprofit anti-trafficking organization based in the United States. It found that 38 percent of study respondents said they had traveled by plane at the time they were exploited. Airlines are in a “prime position” to identify possible trafficking situations, Polaris said in the study.
The report emphasized the importance of considering potential signs of human trafficking and not just relying on “superficial indicators” such as the race or ethnicity of the traveler.
Indicators of human trafficking on airlines can include clothing inappropriate for the climate, adults not holding their own identification and travel documents, and flights booked on the same day using cash, according to the Polaris report.
A spokeswoman for Southwest said the airline offers an optional course on detecting potential signs of human trafficking.
said Ms. MacCarthy said her goal in the lawsuit is to stop the airline from continuing the racial profiling, which she says mixed-race people and people of color face all too often.
“Racial differences are a physical reality, but there’s a big difference between that and a flight attendant not even asking if we have the same last name, let alone making any effort to recognize us,” said Mrs. McCarthy. “We have a lot in common.”
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