“Today was today.”
This was something Makenna and I heard, after waiting in line for food and lodging reimbursements for 4 hours. This was after 3 hours of flying out Paris, and the plane had turned back around due to technical issues. We made a friend, Mavis, who shared our frustrations trying to talk to Uber drivers and hotel receptionists in slow English and broken French. We didn’t know that it would take us knocking on 6 different hotels late at night, heckled by men, trying to find a room, when Air France gave us the option to either go back through security and sit in the long chair lounge or find a place to sleep ourselves.
I’d like to have a moment of silence for Senyo, who wasn’t able to leave the airport because of an expired visa. It was also his birthday.
Thank you.
But the most shocking thing was I thought that I would never have to witness was a black woman dragged out of the plane. Before that all went down, there was a man with who had been yelling at the top of his lungs, ramming his head back and forth against the seat, head padded with a cushioned helmet in shackles. Senyo told me that he was going to be deported for overstaying his visa once he reached Togo after our stop in Accra. But there on the plane, I asked the teen next to me about what the man was yelling about, and the teen told me he was just yelling about “people problems.” I made eye contact with the woman in a white dress sitting in my aisle, who said, “Oh my God” but then told me she didn’t know anything thing else in English. I experience race and identity from an American lens, where the color of your skin defines how you live under a settler colonial state. So how do I process an event like this when everyone around me only speaks French, where race is differently interpreted?
Tensions ran high with all these stimulants were running around. Later I learned that the women dragged off of the plane was defending the man who was about to get deported off the plane, her daughter yelling for her just to stay back in her seat. Reflecting on it, why did the police swarm on her with such force, when they were mostly jesting with the man yelling in the back row. Funny that the police here still tell folks to stop recording, like that’s going to happen when we live connected and our screens become a way to hold accountability. The teen next to me whipped his phone out, went on Snapchat, and said something along the lines of posting to Buzzfeed and posting to Youtube in French. I am reminded of the virality of black pain, when on Twitter we see videos of black children shot over again by police, and how does one get people to care, without exploitation? I saw a small black child cover his father’s mouth during the arrest. What does that say how we value black innocence?
I saw these two white people laugh about it five minutes later, and then when our flight got turned back and we had to go through customs later, say how “this story keeps on getting better and better.”
Personally, I’m not here for this story if it only gets you kudos with your friends, I’m horrified to think how the woman’s daughter is going to have to go to the police station, figure out the consequences her mother is going to face, and what other stress that is going to cause for them.
I’m mad at myself for not doing more, for not calling out the brutality of this whole situation, regardless of this woman has done. Was I hindered by my privilege? Was it the fear of being isolated in a country where I know no one?
The woman in the white dress gave me a pained smile and a thumbs up after the woman was dragged off the plane. We were both holding on to pained smiles. I wonder if that was a sign of comfort for all of us. I wonder if she saw herself reflected in that situation.
It’s personal for me. When it happened on a United flight a few months back and the video went viral, I just kept on thinking that the man dragged off looked like my father. Our bodies hold such burdens, and how do we navigate through these spaces?
I have a video of this whole experience, but I refuse to post it because I don’t want to exploit this point of vulnerability for this woman, I don’t want to sensationalize her pain. And I hope that when I’m in Ghana, and I see issues that give me the same reaction, I want to make sure that people to take spaces for themselves, as a visitor, don’t infringe upon their pain but act with empathy and build relationships. I want to make sure I don’t stand just shocked, and didn’t act enough like I did on that plane.
