MSNBC is reporting that University of New Mexico football player Deshon Marman, 20, was kicked off of a U.S. Airways flight for refusing to pull up his sagging pants. Marman, who was returning from attending a friend's funeral in San Francisco, was asked by the flight attendant to pull up his pants, which exposed his underwear.
Marman refused the employee's request and failed to immediately comply when she asked him to get off the plane, Rodriguez said, adding that Marman injured a police officer when he was being arrested on suspicion of trespassing, battery of a police officer and obstruction of a police investigation, Rodriguez told the Associated Press.
All of this over a pair of sagging pants? Marman should have pulled up his pants and taken a seat, and the mess would have been avoided. However, if you can get arrested for dressing a certain way on an airline, then U.S. Airways needs to post a dress code. It sounds to us like the arbitrary enforcement of some unwritten rule. If it is a rule, we have never seen it posted anywhere.
Quite frankly, some of the clothing that folks wear on planes — including short skirts with no underwear, mesh clothing, even walking through the airplane with no shoes — is offensive, not to mention unhygienic, to us but is allowed on planes. Whether this a case of controlling black men's bodies or of one black man not complying with some unwritten rule, neither is acceptable.
Read more at MSNBC.
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