Brittany Packnett & Symone Sanders Attacked By White Man Inside A Delta Airport Lounge
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March 30, 2019Brittany Packnett & Symone Sanders Attacked By White Man Inside A Delta Airport Lounge
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“I’ll be damned if I came all the way to Africa to be attacked[d] by a white man,” Brittany Packnett wrote in a tweet on Friday morning, detailing a terrifying encounter her and political strategist Symone Sanders experienced while waiting to board their flight in Nairobi, Kenya.
Sanders, along with Packnett, asserts that they were attacked by a white man in the Delta SkyClub Lounge at the airport. According to tweets from both, the man reportedly doused Packnett with water, pushed her and attempted to charge at them during the attack on Thursday evening.
Sanders said the trouble began when she respectfully asked the man to quiet down, according to an interview she gave with The Root.
“He was speaking loudly and cursing to someone on the phone,” Sanders said.
“The lounge attendant and two other people asked him to quiet down. I interjected after he was rude to the lounge attendant. I leaned over and said, ‘Pardon me. Will you please keep it down?’” she continued.
She said the man began speaking louder and continuously threw up his middle finger in her direction while they were sitting on the same bench. Sanders said that things escalated after a Black female lounge attendant tried to intervene on their behalf.
“So I get up and ask again, ‘Sir, please. This is ridiculous; no one is being rude to you, and you terrorizing the people in this lounge is not OK.’ He continues giving me the middle finger. … I sit down, and then the flight attendant gets back up. Next thing we know, he jumps up and throws his water at the nearest person (Brittany)—like, drenches her whole body, then pushes her down. He lunges at her, then I jump in to defend her. It was terrifying.”
Sanders identified the name of her attacker as a citizen of the United Kingdom via Twitter and gave an update that he was arrested before they boarded their flight.
According to Tweets from Packnett, men who witnessed the exchange finally intervened after their attacker attempted to lunge at them. Sanders and Packnett both say that it took 30 minutes for police to arrive on the scene. Delta has yet to make a statement regarding the issue, even as the women tagged the airline in their Tweets.
After their Tweets sparked a conversation on social media, Packnett wrote about the atrocities that Black women face in relation to their bodies, while experiencing both physical and psychological trauma. All of it compounded with the knee-jerk reaction of not being believed.
While the women undoubtedly had a live-altering trip in the motherland, we hope that Delta will do right by them on account of the racism and aggression that took place on Thursday night.