Musician says America Airlines accused him of trafficking

Source: TIM SLOAN / Getty

Calling the police on Black folks is like a national pastime in this country.

David Ryan Harris has played in John Mayer’s band for 20 years. He is a successful working musician, Dave Matthews Band collaborator, and father. According to PEOPLE, he recently took to Instagram to outline a harrowing, embarrassing, and infuriating ordeal that he and his children suffered while traveling aboard an American Airlines flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles.

After an “unresponsive” interaction with a flight attendant, Harris and his kids were approached by an American employee and four police officers upon disembarking their flight.

The aforementioned flight attendant called for the police to meet Harris because she felt that he was human trafficking his biracial sons, Truman and Hendrix. The only thing this woman had to go on is that she asked the boys their names and got little response. Harris says both of the boys are “pretty shy.”

“I wanted to go through the roof, but I did not want my kids to see me handle the situation with anything other than grace and class,” Harris explained. After a discussion with the staff and officers, Harris was cleared to leave.

Despite being wronged and contacting the airline with his displeasure, Harris received no response or apology for their egregious “mistake”. So, he did what folks have to do these days in order to get a semblance of justice, he took to Instagram to air out his grievance and put American Airlines on blast.

Since his initial post, Harris has continually provided even more context about what happened and what he expects to be done about it so that these things don’t happen in the future.

According to CBSNews, American has responded to Harris’ social media posts but hopefully, they will get their s#!t together and address the situation appropriately.

We’ll provide an update when/if the information becomes available. Until then, if you want to help improve the process of ending human trafficking, sign David’s Change.org petition to mandate that all children show ID when traveling with parents.