Black Twitter was in shambles over the now-viral video of the Black man that was pissed because a white baby disturbed his peace for 45 minutes on a domestic flight grounded over inclement weather. The hashtag for “So Is The Baby” has scored tens of thousands of comments from the platform’s users. But while the bothered brother’s feelings may have seemed extra as hell, he was on to something.
The trending hashtag stemmed from a TikTok video shared by @mjgrabowski, who was on a Southwest Airlines (SWA) flight headed to Florida earlier this week. The almost four-minute video titled “Belligerent Passenger Causes Diversion” gave a bird’s eye view of how a crying baby could send an otherwise cool, calm, collected Black man into an expletive-filled frenzy.
“Stuck in a holding pattern for weather, and [an] SWA passenger loses his mind over a baby.”
Southwest Airlines flight attendants surrounded the annoyed man as he yelled, “I paid for a ticket to have a comfortable flight. That child (referencing the screaming baby in the background) has been crying for 40 minutes.”
The airline employees asked him to lower his voice.
“Lower that,” he responded, regarding the screaming baby, while also telling them not to put their fingers in his face.
As a Black male flight attendant made his plea to the man for calmness, the brother shot back for him to calm the baby down… because reciprocity.
“I had headphones on. I was sleeping–,” he explained in the TikTok video before being interrupted by the male flight attendant.
“Why are you yelling?
“Why is the baby yelling,” he asked, lobbing the asinine question back at the man.
The male employee continued patronizing the already hot passenger.
“I’m not screaming. Do you want me to scream? I’ll fucking scream.”
Instead of attempting to defuse the situation, more flight attendants came. The Black man’s embarrassed wife was just ready for the uncomfortable moment to be over.
Still telling the passenger to calm down, the savvy brother hit the Black flight attendant with the money shot.
“If that child was a Black baby, what the fuck would be happening right now?”
Of course, the Southwest Airlines employee deflected.
The back and forth proceeded with the workers asking him to be “rational.”
The Black man summed up why he was pissed in the first place.
“You wanna be rational? We are in a fucking tin can with a baby in a god-damned echo chamber. And you wanna talk to me about being fucking ok?”
And the clapback of all the clapbacks that ever existed was revealed.
“You are yelling,” the male flight attendant said flatly.
“SO IS THE BABY!”
“Well, you’re a man.”
“Did that muthafucka pay extra to yell?”
Got eem!
The rest of the video is irrelevant, except the staff threatened him with calling the police, to which he responded, “They can put cuffs on that kid; I’m good with going to jail.”
Although the Black man and his wife were eventually booted from the plane headed to Florida and not arrested, it was clear with Black Twitter that points had been made.
Users on the social media platform sided with the stressed-out passenger.
One Twitter user, who claimed to also be on the plane, wrote that the screaming banshee yelled for over an hour and could be heard through noise-cancellation headphones.
“I was on the flight…. It was over an hour!!! I could hear the baby screaming through my AirMax!! the baby said F noise cancellation… #SoIsTheBaby”
While the Black passenger’s anger over the baby’s incessant crying may have seemed excessive, he made a valid point. Travelers by plane have a right to a peaceful and quiet flight, according to the Department of Transportation. Unfortunately for him and everyone else who may sit next to screaming children, the right to peace and quiet is implied– meaning “Implied rights are those that are not explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, but are recognized by the Supreme Court.”
The other obvious point the brother drove home was the consideration given to a white baby who was not sick, in pain or impaired– as far as we know. And while the punk-ass flight attendant didn’t want to address the very valid point his skinfolk made, I’ma do it.
On April 19, a Nigerian woman with a 12-week-old infant accused British Columbia-based Flair Airlines of discrimination after she paid for a second-row seat, and a white woman plopped her ass right in it. Busayo Alle asked the ignorant traveler to move, and she refused.
Alle filmed the incident and asked a white flight attendant to assist her with getting the woman out of her seat. Instead of doing her job, the Flair Airlines employee “suggested” the passenger move, which the aggressive woman refused. The company’s policy implicitly states that a passenger ignoring a flight attendant is “strictly prohibited behavior.”
Instead of booting the belligerent broad off the plane, the flight attendant turned her ire to Alle and her infant, threatening to put her off the flight if she continued to “escalate” the situation.
A spokesperson for Flair Airlines expressed, “The resolution for the flight was to seat the passenger in the window seat on the other side of the aircraft – the same row and seat, just on the other side of the plane.”
Alle was given a full refund and a half-assed apology.
In December 2021, Kamia Hollett and Allan Ali were traveling with their newborn on American Airlines to Philadelphia. A white passenger seated in the same row as the couple became aggressive, and when Ali addressed the man, the white flight attendant demanded that Hollett sit down and put on her seatbelt.
After the new mom checked her ass, the American Airlines employee turned into a delicate flower, complained to the captain and the couple was subsequently booted off the flight.
Ali filed an ongoing lawsuit.
In summation and to the Southwest Airlines passenger’s point, all crying babies ain’t created equal.
