American is on a roll. And not in a good way.
The airline is being sued for kicking off 8 unrelated Black men who were not traveling together, because of a flight attendant complaining that a passenger had body odor.
In the end, the airline was unable to find space on another flight and let them back on the original flight.
Until now, the airline has refused to comment or apologize for the abhorrent incident.
It took the NAACP demanding that the airline respond to the incident and pattern of discrimination to finally get a response, which @xJonNYC shared in this internal memo from the CEO to employees:
https://twitter.com/xJonNYC/status/1803123644672909815
In it, CEO Robert Isom calls the incident unacceptable and acknowledges that the airline failed its customers. He pledges to establish an advisory group with improving the travel experience for Black customers, to improve oversight and reporting for the handling of future incidents, to review the procedures for the removal of passengers, and to provide additional training for employees.
That sounds like a good start, but the airline still refuses to issue any statement or response to an incident last month when they kicked off an unrelated visibly Jewish passenger after another visibly Jewish passenger was ejected from a flight. Unlike the Black passengers, the Jewish passengers were not allowed back onto the flight, despite there being no more flights that day.
Unfortunately, without video evidence and due to the lack of eyewitnesses as the yeshiva boys went off the plane without causing a scene, that story hasn’t received much mainstream press coverage, though the story was picked up by several travel blogs and The Forward. Nor have any Jewish organizations stood up, as they did in the case of the Lufthansa incident, which luckily had video evidence of airline employee wrongdoings. In that case, Lufthansa apologized for the incident and compensated passengers.
Our original X/Twitter thread was viewed nearly 250K times. You can like, repost, and quote these posts to continue to spread awareness of the story:
On Sunday, May 5th, @AmericanAir Kicked an orthodox Jewish passenger off a flight due to the actions of an unrelated orthodox Jew.
This story was so outrageous I had to investigate, and after talking to the two passengers involved, the story seems even worse than I thought!
— DansDeals (@DansDeals) May 7, 2024
How long can @AmericanAir stay silent? #AntiSemitismInTheAir https://t.co/0kZWyFtADm
— DansDeals (@DansDeals) May 8, 2024
If American is actually looking to address incidents of discrimination, they should investigate and respond to Jewish passengers and community for what happened.
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17 Comments On "After NAACP Action And Lawsuit, American Responds To Kicking All Black Men Off Flight; Still No Response To Kicking All Visible Jews Off Flights"
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This kicking people off a flight thing is outta control.
I canceled my credit card with them after Dan broke this story
I’m sure Mastercard will miss you. AA itself wont notice that you cancelled.
If there is insufficient evidence to prosecute, apologizing or acknowledging the incident would likely have major legal consequences for AA.
American has smart (probably Jewish) lawyers. I’m sure they can find just the right language that would not expose them to legal consequences.
Can’t they say we’re not acknowledging that it happened, but if it did, we’re sorry and we’ll do better.
lawsuit talks
Why isn’t the ADL making an issue of what happened to at least one of the two Jewish passengers wrongfully denied transport for no reason other than being perceived to be Jewish of the same denomination? Will it take 7 more such people on a single flight to be wrongfully denied transport for being perceived to be of the same Jewish denomination before the ADL makes a public issue of what happened and decides to pony up resources for litigation against AA? I hope that the ADL moves ahead against AA before AA denies transport to a bunch of Jewish passengers just because a flight attendant found one Jewish passenger to supposedly stink on a plane.
The ADL doesn’t care about Orthodox Jews to begin with, when UA has cancelled a Jew’s trip and rebooked on AA, and delayed it’s flight, the writer blamed it strictly on AA without mentioning UA at all. AA will no longer respond to this Jew.
@dan by the way the Jerusalem post picked up your story as well of the yeshiva guys.
Nothing is more racist, narcissist and really small as to compare and compete on suffering. One doesn’t create their own case by paralleling to another group’s mistreatment to say we are ignored, but the ‘other’ gets reparations?
Give you an analogy – Present day Namibia suffered horrific genocide and extinction which was mostly ignored over in history of the 20th century via common evil regime. I’m doubtful any rational person would make a similar post of comparing on suffering.
Mistreatment of any group is unfortunate and if the affected groups choose to join as a collective it might have more force instead of envious public ” ME ME ME!!” attention as shown here. Almost childlike behavior.
This comment is idiotic. The post’s intention was pretty obviously not to “compare and compete” but to show that AA’s abuse of Jewish passengers last month now seems to be part of a pattern that they need to fix. It also happens to be that one complaint is in fact being addressed, while the other is not, which is very troubling, and fair to point out.
I will add that AA’s response to the anti-Black discrimination should further offend people, especially Blacks of good conscience. Why is AA’s response to create a task force to deal with “travel experience for Black customers” as if Blacks were some special group that needed extra white-glove service? How about you just treat ALL customers with basic decency, regardless of race, religion or skin color? That’s the root of the problem, it’s not a Black issue or Jewish issue at all, it’s a basic decency and fairness issue. AA’s response is nothing more than pandering phoniness because that’s what they think the NAACP wants to hear.
You sound very hurt, meybe you should see a therapist to unburden yourself
Looks like they are resuming flights to Israel by October 29?
To be fair, didn’t it take Lufthansa a while to issue a statement versus this lighting speed by American taken here?
This is the same CEO that was at congress and when asked an obvious question about Jetblue that everyone knows, he said he didn’t follow anything his competitors do? AA has some company culture over there.
I reached out to American when the incident occurred on May 5th with no response. Inspired by this post, I reached out to American again yesterday and got this response
Thank you for reaching out to American Airlines Customer Relations.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the experience you’ve described. We value every interaction with our customers, and it is always our goal to put you at the heart of everything we do. The details you’ve provided have shed light on the importance of consistently striving to meet this goal. Your feedback will be made available to our leadership team so that we can make the necessary improvements to ensure we provide the world-class customer experience you’ve come to know and expect.
Thanks again for providing me with the opportunity to review your feedback. From all of us at American Airlines, thank you for choosing to fly with us. We look forward to welcoming you on board again soon.
I don’t believe the men were thrown off because they’re black.