"Unlock the keys to your financial future and legacy –
Get it now -- https://shorturl.at/nvCU5 "
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Musician David Ryan Harris Accuses American Airlines of Racial Profiling.
After flying from Atlanta to Los Angeles on Sept. 15, musician David Ryan Harris says he was accused of trafficking his own children.
In a series of Instagram videos, Harris — a singer-songwriter who has played guitar in John Mayer's band for 20 years and collaborated with Dave Matthews — explained that he and two of his sons, Truman and Hendrix, were met at the top of the jetway by an American Airlines employee and four police officers after disembarking the plane.
“Apparently, a flight attendant had called ahead with some sort of concern that perhaps my mixed children weren’t my children, because they were unresponsive during an interaction with her,” Harris, 55, said in one video.
According to Harris, the flight attendant had asked both children their names, but one of them is “pretty shy.”
“I wanted to go through the roof, but I did not want my kids to see me handle the situation with anything other than grace and class,” Harris explained. After a discussion with the staff and officers, Harris was cleared to leave.
Afterwards, he called the airline’s customer service line and was told to fill out an online form, but had received no response eight days after the incident. That's when he took to social media to share the ordeal.
“My kids are like ‘We don’t want to fly that airline again,'” he said, adding that his son Hendrix asked, “Did I do something wrong?” and felt like “maybe he endangered the family.”
In the caption of his first post detailing the confrontation, Harris noted that American had been his airline of choice since 2004 and that he felt their actions were racially motivated.
“I don’t care what you say, if this had been a white dad/mom with 2 little black kids, they would probably been offered an upgrade, not an interrogation,” he wrote.
In another series of videos posted later, Harris gave more context to the morning of the flight, sharing that his kids were groggy from waking up at 4:15 a.m. to make the 7:17 a.m. departure time.
He added that the child whose brief interaction with the flight attendant prompted her to raise concern is only 7 years old.
“It seems to me that you should have to have a bit more to go on before you’re able to call the police on someone,” he said.
“It’s my word against her word, and she’s not even there," he recounted, referring to the flight attendant. "She didn’t even come to the top of the jetway to get her hero award, so I’m left to defend myself, based on something that at the time I was like, ‘I don’t even know what you’re talking about. My child doesn’t speak to anybody.’”
“At American, the safety and security of our customers and team members
