Three Black men have sued American Airlines on allegations of racial discrimination, after they, and five other black passengers were deboarded from a plane due to body odour. The lawsuit follows a flight the men took on January 5 from Phoenix, Arizona, to New York. The lawsuit says that the three Black men did not know each other before the incident and were seated separately, quite far from each other on the flight. But before the flight took off, American Airlines representatives approached them one by one and asked them to deboard the plane for no apparent reason.
When the men sought for an explanation, they were told that a Caucasian flight attendant had complained about body odour from an unidentified passenger. Five other Black men were also asked to deboard, implying that the Airlines believed that only Black people were capable of having body odour. The lawsuit said, “It was as if every Black man was being shown the door and was a clear case of racial discrimination.”
The eight Black men were told that they would have to repurchase tickets and fly on a different flight.The men were eventually allowed to reboard the flight after an American representative told them that there were no longer any flights that evening to rebook them on. The flight was delayed by over an hour, according to a press statement.
The men felt humiliated and decided to file a federal lawsuit against the airlines for racial discrimination. Three of them filed a lawsuit and said they were mentally harassed and there was no evidence to prove that the body odour was coming from any of the Black men. Their lawyer Susan Huhta said that if American Airlines got a complaint that there is a man in the plane whose body smells bad, then this complaint should be investigated. The complaint was not investigated and the solution was deboarding Black passengers out of suspicion, which is wrong.
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