We don’t know the book Gilbert was reading (though Amazon offers up a few possibilities), but if the flight attendant was stupid enough to mistake those books as terrorist wank material, I don’t think Gilbert’s skin color was the deciding factor.
My grandma could have been reading my little cousin “Timmy’s First Airplane Ride” and the flight attendant would have freaked.
Really?
It doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to think that we might just have a racist flight attendant on our hands. That’s not an outrageous suggestion.
For delaying his flight? And costing him some money? And emotional distress?
I have no problem with this guy getting a 5 figure payment for his troubles. But millions (which is what you seem to be suggesting)? Come on.
I didn’t say it was outrageous. I said that anyone who would freak out over an aviation history book (especially if it looks like the ones I found on Amazon) is likely so jumpy that his skin color was only a small part of the reasoning behind their freakout.
You’re assuming a priori that the flight attendant did freak out over an aviation history book, as opposed to her freaking out because the guy looked like he might be Arabic.
Right, like the explanation that god created the universe.
You are Þhe one with the critical thinking problem. You pick one possible explanation and believe that it can be the only explanation without any evidence that knocks out other possible explanations or makes the one you picked more likely. You have a faith-based position.
I have to assume this flight attendant doesn’t freak out over every Arab-looking guy she sees or else he/she would have been in the news for something like this before. Unless this was their first flight. At which point they definitely need to be fired for being a crazy person.
Goodness knows if this was truly racial profiling or not, but it sure can be construed that way. I don’t blame Mr. Gilbert for feeling the way he did and I hope he gets reimbursed for his losses at a bare minimum.
I’m a short white guy with a beard. Last winter, I took a flight to Vegas and bought a book on the Battle of Britain to read. No one said anything to me, but I did get pulled for the backscatter screen a couple days later while flying home. I think that had more to do with my Steelers shirt and the possibility that the TSA guy might’ve been a Jets fan (the Jets & Steelers were in a playoff game that night).
I totally agree that security has become a fear-filled circus that doesn’t actually keep us safer. My ticket to Vegas was bought in advance and was round-trip from where I live. Any competent agency concerned with actual security could’ve checked all that out beforehand to see that I am zero threat.
Bri2k
Right, but all it took was a book even vaguely related to something possibly terrorist that she freaked out. Sounds like she was looking for a reason to assume someone was a terrorist.
What does that prove? Maybe you’re a terrorist who’s heard the “one-way ticket story” over the last decade and decided to be smarter about it?
No, not like that at all. Dreaming up magic fairies as creators of the universe is a perfect example (really THE classic example) of multiplying entia beyond their necessity. “God” is not an adequate explanation for the universe. In fact, it’s not an explanation at all. The universe can be explained without magic, therefore it’s unnecessary to hypothesize magic.
Not that there’s actually any sensible analogous connection to this discussion, but I will reiterate that physical appearance is the only characteristic which it is reasonable to believe would cause a flight attendant to freak out over the other things. It is tendentious and disingenuous to pretend that the other factors, without his racial appearance would have incurred the same response.
Having said that, your tortured attempt to somehow compare this assumption on my part (even if I’m wrong) to believing in magic fairies without evidence is strained and lame and doesn’t parse logically. It isn’t clever, it just shows your lack of experience in trying to argue philosphically.
Right. His being Arab-ish looking maybe was enough to turn something innocuous if done by a really white guy into something sinister. This is how profiling usually works. It isn’t just “I’m going to investigate you for absolutely no reason.” It’s “I’m going to investigate you for doing X while I wouldn’t investigate another person for doing X because you look sinister because people who look like you just are.”
Middle-aged white woman gets the benefit of the doubt. Middle-aged bearded brown man doesn’t. That’s racial profiling.
First, I agree that there is a lack of symmetry as it relates to creation of magical beings or not. But the point you keep missing is that there is perfect symmetry as it relates to evaluating possibilities and deciding on likely causes. That is, the Christian decides that “goddidit” is the only reasonable explanation and rejects other possibilities despite the lack of evidence for their chosen explanation, and you do the same thing with “it was racial profiling.”
Second, you are getting too personal for this forum. Before you rag on my ability to make philosophical arguments, you ma want to remember which of us gets paid to exercise judgement in making and evaluating arguments and which of us gets paid to cook dinner for grandma.
This is why people shouldn’t junior moderate. It’s kind of obnoxious on its own, and when it’s coupled with an insulting comment, it looks even worse. You’re being a jerk. This is a formal warning: don’t do it again.
Diogenes, you’re assuming that the attendant would have reacted rationally (accepting the account provided) if the customer had been white. Why? Why isn’t it just as reasonable that the way she processed his reaction, and the book itself–however irrational that assessment was–was reason enough, as far as she was concerned?
That’s the point. How do we know she doesn’t react like a scared kid to anyone reading a book on planes who avoided having her touch his carry-on bag? She’s a model of logic, except when blacks are concerned? Why is that the only plausible explanation? Why can’t she just be a non-racist nut?
ETA (balcakberry style): on the first part of my post above, it doesn’t matter that you don’t believe magical beings exist and you don’t think they are necessary to explain the universe existing. The christian does believe that. The parallel comes in how you and the christian stick to your beliefs without evidence for them simply because you believe they are the only possible explanation.
Because nothing else was unusual or disturbing. Certainly not stuffing a fanny pack under a seat.
It’s not impossible, but I think the odds are so unlikely as to be easily dismissible.
It’s not really that he was black, but that he had a beard and looked vaguely middle eastern. That fact, in itself, made her paranoid and overattentive to other details that would have been innocuous coming from a white person (or for that matter a black person who didn’t look middle eastern).
If the Christian believes it is necessary, then the Christian is simply misinformed and factually in error.
And likewise, I have to assume that she doesn’t freak out every time she sees someone reading something that could vaguely at a stretch be slightly suspicious, or we’d have likewise heard about it. I mean, several folks in this thread have given examples of reading material they’ve had on planes that would be just as “interesting” as this case; it can’t be all that rare. The simplest explanation is that it was a combination of the book and his appearance: She saw someone who looked Arabic, and then due to her biases started looking extra-hard for things other than race she could pin her suspicion on. In previous cases she didn’t find anything, but in this case she did.
No matter how many times you repeat it, that’s a ridiculous comparison.
Except that the Christian does have a total lack of evidence. Diogenes on the other hand has the evidence of similar bigotry happening on a regular basis, and the fact that this fits the profile of a racist incident perfectly. Nor unlike the Christian does his explanation violate the laws of physics. They aren’t remotely comparable.
I do think that Diogenes to be exaggerating in considering it absolutely certain; but I do consider racism to be by far the most likely explanation. And I do agree that people are bending over backwards to find another explanation.
But we have no indication that she singles out black guys for no reason at all. To her, this was alarming.
Why? Why must irrational behavior have racism as the cause? I’m not saying it didn’t, but why must this instance be so?
That’s where your assessment comes off the rails. It’s one thing to assess a series of similar events and say, “It’s not plausible that race didn’t play a part in some material number of these events.” It’s another to say, “This instance must have been racism.”
I said at the start of this thread, the account was bizarre. It makes no sense. If some strange nut bursts into the room, shrieks, dances around on one foot, and then hits the only black guy there with a pie in the face, what do we conclude? Maybe the nut was racist. Maybe he was just a nut.