Flying While Black: Another Reason Why Black Men Nod At Each Other

When you travel the globe, you may notice that Black men have this way of acknowledging each other, of showing a clandestine solidarity, of kinship and even cross-tribalism. It’s hard to miss when you look for it.

In West Africa, brothers snap their fingers when shaking hands – a gesture that found its way to college campuses in the 90s. In the Caribbean, they may do a quick pat on their chests, uttering “respect” to each other. In the United States, it’ll be a quiet nod when making eye contact.

At risk of giving away something unspoken and confidential, the explanation behind it is because we want to acknowledge one another, announce there’s no static between us, and understand our undiscussed, but shared lived experiences that we all seem to go through. It's both code and concord. A quiet communication that exists outside of the five senses.

Why the Nod Is Necessary

So a lawsuit filed by three Black men against American Airlines charges the commercial carrier with, get this – removing a group of Black men from a flight because of a complaint about body odor.

I kid you not, man. Here’s how it happened.

On a January flight from Phoenix to New York, eight men who were waiting for the plane to take off were ordered off of the aircraft – all of them Black. The men, none of whom knew each other and were seated in different parts of the cabin, asked why they were being taken off and an airline employee told them someone complained that someone was funky.

They were offered a chance to rebook, but there were no more available flights to New York, so they were allowed to board the plane again. Problem solved, right? Not so fast, according to Public Citizen, a nonprofit that filed suit on behalf of three of the men, Alvin Jackson, Emmanuel Jean Joseph, and Xavier Veal. The complaint says that not only were the plaintiffs not pungent on the plane, but when they noticed that it was only Black men who were removed, an airline employee agreed.

So what the hell happened? Is it a classic Karen case in which someone on the plane randomly caught a whiff of someone’s undeodorized underarm and instantly said “it must be the Negroes?” Or is is something more sinister? Someone who was not used to the fact that Black people can afford to take flights and do it every day, and was threatened by it.

Did they expect that there should be a colored section on the back of the aircraft? Or maybe they saw the oft-maligned 2004 comedy Soul Plane and figured we now have our own “separate but equal” airline, so Black men shouldn’t show up on theirs.

No, it would be unsurprising if that were the case, but it was actually a white male flight attendant who just said someone was rank, which then sparked the whole incident.

Tread Darkly

But still, I personally know all too well what it means to be a Black man and trigger anxiety with my presence. I’ve experienced watching white women clutch their purses in elevators when I enter; I remember the ugly grimace of a white editor I worked under when I was an intern years ago; I even remember how I felt when I once got into a swimming pool, the only Black person in it, and turned around to find that every person there, each of them white, had exited and stood on the edge, staring at me like I was in a petri dish.

So before your wig starts tingling, I’ll say it: yes I know that issues of violent crime between Black men can’t be overlooked. In fact, I feel that it’s the single biggest issue in the Black community. I’ve argued repeatedly that gun crime between Black men is a public health crisis. And yes, Black boys and men represent six percent of the U.S. population but more than half of gun homicdes, the majority of which are committed by other Black males. Yes, I get it and so does every other Black man in the country because we’re the ones living it.

But when you have this issue along with the Mapping Police Violence  statistic that shows that Black people are the victims of 80 police killings per one million compared to 27 per one million whites, along with a Q1 Black male unemployment rate of 6.0, compared to 3.1 for white males, shouldn’t it be obvious why one of the brothers on the plane reacted like this?

And we can't discuss this topic regarding Black men without understanding the experiences of Black women when traveling as well. In April alone a Black woman filed suit against the same airline because a flight attendant confronted her about using the lavatory in first class – but she was flying in first class!

When you get experiences like this and you know that other human beings who look like you, are of the same gender as you, and more than likely come from a similar background, in my opinion it’s instinctive to form clandestine forms of communication between people. Something that just says, “I see you,” but at the same time is so low-key that others who are not you wouldn’t even notice that you’re doing it. It’s a way of circumventing the legacy of state slave codes, actual 19th century laws that among other things, banned more than five Black people from assembling at one time.

So whether it’s an incident like the one on American Airlines, or something as extreme as a police killing, or just someone with a bad attitude toward us because of some offense that another Black man that we don’t even know supposedly committed, it’s something that we experience so much that it forms a Black male nexus with an untranslatable dialect only understood by those who have similar experiences.