By A lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York alleges that American Airlines staff removed all eight black passengers from Flight 832 at Phoenix Airport in January, claiming they had an ‘offensive body odor.’ The men, who did not know each other and were seated in different parts of the plane, were reportedly singled out by a ‘white male flight attendant’ and forced to disembark the five-hour flight to New York JFK.
According to the lawsuit, the airline spent an hour searching for an alternative flight but ultimately asked the men to reboard the aircraft and retake their seats. Passenger Emmanuel Jean Joseph, who had taken a connecting flight from Los Angeles, expressed his discomfort, stating, “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.”
Fellow passenger Xavier Veal recorded the incident on his phone, noticing that only black passengers were being removed. Video footage shows staff struggling to find alternative flights, with one man calling the situation “un-f***ing-professional” and another remarking, “This ain’t no random pick.” A black American Airlines attendant at the desk appeared to agree that the removal was racially motivated.
The eight men began discussing their removal, and three of them filed the lawsuit on Wednesday. The suit claims that the men “suffered during the entire flight home, and the entire incident was traumatic, upsetting, scary, humiliating, and degrading.”
American Airlines has yet to provide an explanation for the incident but stated that they “take all claims of discrimination very seriously” and are currently investigating the matter. Attorney Sue Huhta, representing the men, questioned the airline’s actions, stating, “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.”
The lawsuit references other recent allegations of discrimination by the carrier and a 2017 travel advisory from the NAACP that advised against flying with American Airlines for eight months due to ‘multiple instances’ of alleged discrimination.
Michael Kirkpatrick of the Public Citizen law group criticized the lack of intervention, saying, “Somebody should have stepped up and said, ‘Wait a minute. We can’t do this. This is wrong.’ But instead, nobody stepped up and intervened to stop it from happening.”
Passenger Xavier Veal described the experience as “horrible” and “really traumatic,” adding, “Unfortunately, I’m a black man, and I live in America.”
