Tamika Cross, a black doctor, has taken to Facebook to share her experience with racial discrimination on a recent Delta Airlines flight.
A man had become unresponsive, and his wife was screaming, signalling that there was an emergency. Initially, the flight attendants calmed everyone down, saying it was just a ‘night terror’, but a few minutes later, he was unresponsive again and they started calling for a doctor to help.
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Tamika, an OB-GYN from Detroit said she ‘went into Doctor mode’ and got up to help, but one of the flight attendants immediately dismissed her.
“I raised my hand to grab her attention,” Cross wrote on Facebook of the incident. “She said to me ‘oh no sweetie put ur hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don’t have time to talk to you’ I tried to inform her that I was a physician but I was continually cut off by condescending remarks.”
The flight attendant was taken aback that Tamika was a doctor, and asked to see her credentials. Meanwhile, a white male doctor got up to help, and she told Tamika not to worry, as he had already shown his credentials (turns out he had not).
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Later, that same flight attendant came back and asked Tamika for help, which she gave, although she was furious about her treatment. The flight attendant said sorry and offered her SkyMiles for her trouble.
“I kindly refused. This is going higher than her. I don’t want skymiles in exchange for blatant discrimination,” she wrote. “Whether this was race, age, gender discrimination, it’s not right. She will not get away with this….and I will still get my skymiles….”
Read Tamika’s full story here:
