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A Black actress says she was humiliated and was on the receiving end of hateful racist slurs hurled at her by a United Airlines employee.
Cacilie Hughes, an actress and co-founder of the Big Sister Little Sister Mentoring Program, has now hired attorneys Benjamin Crump and Jasmine Rand after a troubling ordeal she said she endured at the hands of the airline employee who called her a “shining monkey” while traveling to Houston Feb. 26.
Hughes said she was traveling home after speaking at a women’s empowerment event at a university in Michigan when she came upon a United Airlines employee named Carmella Davano as she waited for her luggage to unload at United’s terminal inside George Bush Intercontinental Airport.
Hughes said she asked Davano for a “refund code,” which resulted in Davano tearing into a nasty verbal tirade, referring to her as a “monkey” and a “shining monkey,” Hughes told the New York Times.
“I walked up to the woman, Carmella, and said, ‘Hi, do you have a refund code available?’ and she started yelling at me, calling me a monkey,” Hughes said Monday. “I was humiliated, I was crying and I was the only black woman in the area.”
“Racial slurs like ‘shining monkey’ should be relics of history, not resurrected to fuel the fire of racism faced by so many African Americans in today’s society and condoned on United Airlines flights,” Crump and Rand’s joint statement read.
Hughes said the irate woman also told her to stop looking at her with her “monkey face.” Other witnesses tried to intervene to no avail. When another United Airlines employee refused to call the cops on Hughes behalf, she did so herself.
Davano was charged with disorderly conduct for using a racial slur, Crump and Rand said.
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United released a statement condemning Davano’s racist verbal attack.
“At United, we proudly hold ourselves to the highest standards of professionalism and have zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind,” the statement reads. “We have withheld the employee from service since the night of the incident pending an internal investigation. Upon conclusion of the investigation, we will take any and all appropriate corrective action up to and including termination.”
Crump and Rand however said the racist issues is tethered to a larger program within the ranks of the airlines and part of a “companywide pattern of racial discrimination”. The attorneys noted a Nigerian woman’s lawsuit last year for getting kicked off a flight reportedly because a white man said she smelled.
Hughes has reportedly worked in Hollywood along side Will Smith in 2015’s “Focus” movie.