A Georgia father took to social media to blast American Airlines after he was met at the beginning of the jetway by four police officers and an airline employee who questioned whether his biracial children actually belonged to him during a recent trip from Atlanta to Los Angeles.
David Ryan Harris said the embarrassing incident happened on Sept. 15. It was prompted because his two mixed-race boys, one 7-year-old with big curly blondish-brown hair and bright blue eyes, would not speak to a flight attendant who tried to engage them during the approximately six-hour flight.
“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,” he stated in a video on his Instagram.
He explained that the flight was scheduled for around 7:17 a.m., and to ensure they would be on time for the trip, he had to wake the kids up at 4:15 a.m.
The woman briefly asked the children for their names in what he described as a 30-second interaction. However, they did not respond as she might have expected. One of the children, the father mentioned, is “pretty shy.” Nevertheless, even with the boy’s reserved nature, “he doesn’t owe” a conversation, handshake, or any engagement to anyone.
Watch David Ryan Harris explain what happened in his own words here.
Despite the tickets being legitimate, the flight attendant called ahead and alerted authorities about this dark, brown-skinned Black man traveling with his lighter-skinned children.
Upon arrival at LAX, the police and other airline employees stopped him and the children. They publicly questioned the children but were eventually satisfied that he was not involved in any wrongdoing. He attempted to file a complaint with the company’s customer service telephone line, but when that didn’t work, he turned to online channels for a digital complaint. After about a week without a…
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