Racism is being blamed again. This time Spirit Airlines is the culprit.
I am so tired of hearing people scream “racism” every time there is an incident involving an African-American person, and I’m even more tired of all these grainy, cell phone videos uploaded to YouTube that only reflect an incident’s aftermath and not the moments leading up to the altercation.
No matter how many videos I see, none seem to actually get the beginning of the incident. The cell phones only come out after the incident has escalated.
Bull pucks.
The latest flap has a black passenger on Spirit Airline being escorted off the plane after the attendant asked the man to move his seat and he refused. Maybe race didn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe the airlines do not tolerate any type of disruption. Maybe the airlines have a strict policy to kick off any passenger who is creating a disruptive atmosphere and thereby inconveniencing the rest of the passengers. Maybe the current policy is “Just say no to disruption.”
The airline asked a total seven people to leave, and many people interviewed afterward stated all seven were being disruptive. So was racism behind it? The man refused to get up and move his seat. According to Spirit representatives, the flight attendant asked him to move because the airline had overbooked the seat. The others were escorted off only after they created an additional disturbance.
Was the flight attendant rude when she asked him? Did she use any derogatory racial epithets when she asked him to move? But no one knows, because the tape wasn’t rolling. Those handy cell phones didn’t come out and start recording until after he refused and was escorted off the plane.
Thank god for YouTube.
Flying is no longer what it used to be. Airlines do not tolerate any type of disturbance. If you create a disturbance, off you go. Nothing racial there. You ain’t gonna fly no matter what color you are.
Not for Nuthin™ but these questions beg to be asked:
• Would it have been more politically correct to have black attendant ask this passenger to move?
• Under the current atmosphere of absurd political correctness, do airline companies need to have white attendants and black attendants on board each flight so that, when an altercation occurs and a passenger has to move, the flight attendant’s race will correspond to the passenger’s?
• And do we now need to install cameras in plane cabins to record each and every moment on each and every flight — or have each flight attendant wear a body camera?
Follow me on Twitter @JDelBuono.
