Mary MacCarthy, a white woman, was accused by a Southwest Airlines flight attendant of trafficking her own biracial daughter and they were confronted by police officers after disembarking the plane, and subsequently contacted by a human trafficking unit investigator. MacCarthy is now suing the airline over the incident, claiming that the airline flagged her as suspicious "based on a racist assumption about a mixed‐race family."
"The officers began questioning Ms. MacCarthy and made it clear that they were given the racially charged information that Ms. MacCarthy's daughter was possibly being trafficked by her simply because Ms. MacCarthy is White and her daughter is Black," the lawsuit said.
David Lane, the attorney representing MacCarthy, said that the suit is designed to bring accountability and to have the airline re-examine its own training. He said that the use of racial profiling in this case has attempted to address a serious crime with a "stereotypical, easy formula."
"Just as the police are constitutionally not permitted to stop-and-frisk young men of color based upon their race, corporate America is similarly not permitted to resort to such profiling in using law enforcement to stop and question racially diverse families simply based upon their divergent races, which is what Southwest did," Lane said in a statement.
Southwest Airlines in 2021: "we are conducting a review of the incident." Southwest Airlines when asked now about the outcome of that review: "No comment."
