A woman says that American Airlines called the police on her for flying while “fat and black.”
On Thursday, Amber Phillips, host of the podcast, “The Black Joy Mixtape,” was flying from Durham, N.C., to her hometown of Washington, D.C., in a window seat of a 65-person plane. Space was so tight that when she placed her arm on the seat divider, it touched that of her fellow passenger.
“The passenger next to me, a white woman, made it clear with her body language that I was bothering her — she was aggressive when flipping her hair with her hand and fastening her seatbelt — and she was bullying me,” Phillips, 28, tells Yahoo Lifestyle.
The woman asked Phillips to move over. “I explained that I couldn’t move because I was in a window seat, and I said, ‘You are being mean to me. The world does not revolve around you.’” The woman responded by propping her left right on her leg so that the sole of her shoe was nearly touching Phillips.
“I told her, ‘Don’t let the bottom of your shoe touch me.’”
The women spent most of the 60-minute flight in silence. Phillips accidentally dropped her headphones on the floor but fearful of making further contact, she didn’t reach for them.
However, as the plane began its descent, Phillips began recording herself and her seatmate.
“When people practice discrimination, they do so because they believe people won’t tell on them,” says Phillips.
“Shame keeps people like me from turning a light on it. But I deserve to exist. I deserve to fly. I didn’t deserve how I was treated.”
When the plane landed at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, Phillips says the woman informed the flight attendant that she had been harassed by Phillips. Determined to get home without further incident, Phillips deplaned and boarded an airport shuttle on the tarmac, when suddenly an attendant instructed her to step off the bus.
.yahoo
