Nazia and Faisal Ali were flying home from a vacation in Paris, when…I think from their names you can guess what happened. They didn’t make it home that day.

A flight crew member had complained to the pilot that she was uncomfortable with the Muslim couple in the second row of economy class. The woman was wearing a head scarf and using a phone, and the man was sweating, she allegedly told the pilot.

The pilot contacted the ground crew. He would not take off until couple was removed.

The flight attendant also heard her use the word “Allah”. Very suspicious. Of course they were kicked off the flight…they were prolly terrissssts. Because they were brown.

Or maybe this is who they are.

Faisal and Nazia Ali, both of whom emigrated to the United States with their respective families from Pakistan, became U.S. citizens 16 years ago. They are parents of three sons, ages 5, 4 and 2. He is 36 and works as director of operations for Healing Touch, a home health care company that he owns with his father and brother. He has a degree from the University of Cincinnati. She attended Wright State University. They worship at the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati in West Chester Township.

Delta Airlines has their own spin.

The Delta statement reads: “Delta condemns discrimination toward our customers in regards to age, race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation or gender. As a global airline that brings hundreds of thousands of people together every day, Delta is deeply committed to treating all of our customers with respect. Delta continues its investigation into this matter and will issue a full refund of these customers’ airfare.”

No. This was bigotry, plain and simple, and the flight crew, the ground crew, and the French police colluded happily to discriminate against someone on the basis of nothing but bias and air.

Imagine if, in the spirit of “If you see something, say something”, I were on a plane, and I waved over a flight attendant, and whispered, “That 20-something white guy in 9C makes me uncomfortable. I heard him say ‘Jesus’ on his cell phone, and he looks nervous and sweaty.” Would they kick him off the plane?

I don’t think so. White people in America are assumed innocent, while brown ones are always suspect.

I hope, at least, the cost of an overnight hotel stay and a flight from Paris to Cincinnati were deducted from the pay of the falsely suspicious flight crew member.

This is a factually true statement from Clint Eastwood.

Everybody’s walking on eggshells, said Eastwood, 86. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist.

He’s right. When I was growing up, too, these things weren’t called racist. They were blatantly, unashamedly, disgustingly racist as fuck, but no one called them racist. If only we could go back to the Good Old Days, when we were all complacently complicit in horrific discrimination and denial.

Clint Eastwood has made some really good movies, and we all obligingly bought our theater tickets and happily gave them positive reviews and all kinds of awards. We acted as if being an excellent film-maker would excuse all of his failings as a human being. I appreciate that he’s made it quite clear that good artists can be terrible people, as he joins that ugly pantheon of crappy artists who have respectable skills: Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and now Clint Eastwood.

I won’t be watching his new movie, Sully. There’s a gaping hole in his soul that makes him an untrustworthy observer of the human condition.

Michelle Obama has reduced the right wing to spluttering excuses with one simple fact: slaves built the White House. But it’s true! The White House is located in the South, between Maryland, a slave state which didn’t ban slavery until 1864, and Virginia, which fought on the other side in the Civil War. Of course slaves were heavily used in the construction.

But now we’re seeing standard neo-Confederate apologetics on Fox News. But the slaves were treated kindly by their masters, suggests Bill O’Reilly.

After Michelle Obama’s speech mentioned “a house built by slaves” as part of a beautiful rhetorical arc putting the lie to the idea of some fabled perfect America of some unspecified past, the usual suspects have been performing their gymnastics, trying to reclaim the myth of the perfect Founding Fathers. Bill O’Reilly is just one of them, but yup, he uses the phrase “Slaves that worked there were well-fed and had decent lodgings provided by the government.” He needs to watch Roots again, but the thing that gets me on these usual suspects is, they so often seem to be the same ones bleating “give me liberty or give me death” when confronted with what seem to me to be constraints that are… a little bit less than actual enslavement.

Exactly. People who wax wroth about losing their twitter privileges or having to leave their assault rifle at home are now protesting that slavery wasn’t so bad for the slaves.

O’Reilly needs to be fired. It won’t be so bad…he’s rich, he can count on steady revenue from speaking engagements with the KKK and the League of the South. He’ll continue to be well fed and have decent lodgings. As long as he’s got that, we can do anything we want to him.

This is a thread dedicated to discussion of race issues in the US. Tony and rq are the curators, and they will be posting news and links here. Please feel free to add to the conversation, but this is not the place for argument; increase the information, not the conflict.

Previous thread

Poor Milo. The Breitbart crank, hero to the worst elements of the internet, was very bitter about the fact that Twitter removed the blue verification checkmark from his profile, about as petty a slight as can be imagined. I have no idea how he’ll react to the latest news: Twitter has finally, permanently banned Milo Yiannopoulos from the service.

Yiannopoulos, who currently serves as Breitbart.com’s tech editor, has been hailed as a standout voice of the new “alt-right” movement. As such, he has made a living as a provocateur, continually inflaming tensions between progressive branches of the internet focused on identity politics and the fervently anti-PC segment that constantly trolls it. For years, Yiannopoulous has used Twitter not only to voice his controversial opinions but to direct his legion of followers (388,042 at the time of this writing) toward his opponents. As a result, he’s been temporarily banned from Twitter a number of times for violating terms of service and stripped of his verification.

It’s about time that he was permanently kicked off for his incessant abuse. What did it at last? Milo was one of the people who led the racist, sexist online assault against Leslie Jones, whose sole crime was being one of the stars of the new Ghostbusters movie. The social injustice warriors were already irate that somehow, a remake of an old movie with women cast in major roles was an unforgivable slight against their masculinity, so they tried to pump themselves up by sending a tsunami of vile, filthy, bigoted imagery against a black woman.

It’s nice that something finally drove Twitter to do something about it — their responses to online harassment have been infuriatingly forgiving to some incredibly nasty stuff — but it’s a shame that it takes something as savage as the attacks on Jones to get them to finally do what needed to be done about one person.

Steve King doesn’t like it when you point out the the Republican convention seems to consist of a lot of angry white people.

“This whole ‘white people’ business, though, does get a little tired, Charlie [Pierce]. I mean, I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you’re talking about? Where did any other sub-group of people contribute to civilization?”

If you, like me, found it hard to believe anyone would say something so stupid and wrong, it’s on video.

Hey, at least King is being open and honest in confirming that the GOP is the party of cranky white bigots.

The internet, social media, the passage of time…none of that matters. When you read Martin Luther King’s hate mail, it all sounds exactly the same. White people complaining about black people disrupting their comfortable lives by getting demanding, and using their discomfort to justify slapping them down.

What is this Black Power business? If it is a threat to Whites– why should Whites not retaliate? Why should Whites hire Blacks?

And who is at fault? The people who are most oppressed.

You are responsible for all of these riots and havoc in this country today.

I want that person to get together with this person:

You don’t point out any FAULTS at all of your own people, just the whites.

I’m sure they’d then agree that it’s unfair to single out one group. Or perhaps a third person would chime in with an accusation of black criminality.

The hatred between the race is now at an all time peak and will get worse as the niggers continue to beat, rape and murder white women and girls.

No round of complaints is complete without someone chiming in with a ‘Dear Muslima’ — it’s much worse elsewhere, so shut up and accept a lesser inequality here.

It would be well if every American Negro compared his position and opportunity with that of his race in other countries. He would find that in none does the Negro have the advantages the United States gives him. As justified as may be many of the demands Negroes make, they are not the only matter of importance in the world.

And of course, the people telling a black civil rights leader to sit down and shut up are the true egalitarians.

It certainly must take unmititgated gall to ask the public, particularly “WHITEY” for funds to keep you and your ilk rolling along in the manner to which you have become to visibly accustomed.

Your false image is beginning to catch up with your as well as others.

I believe and contribute to any cause for advancing human dignity.

But this letter is my very favorite.

Do return that ‘Nobel-peace-prize’ that we bestowed upon you, (as a great honor) so we can give it to some one who really deserves it.

“We”? Don’t you just love the casual assumption that all the white people get together and decide who gets to have a Nobel prize?

But yeah, this person would sort of get their wish. The prize wasn’t retracted, but the Nobel committee did award one to a deserving white man: Henry Kissinger.

It’s a collection of old letters, ink on paper, that does provide some perspective on the electronic deluge of anonymous hatred we get now. It’s nothing new. Different medium, same old bigots.