White Mom

White Mom
Published on November 6, 2021 09:06 PM

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A white mother who was traveling with her Black daughter is demanding an apology from Southwest Airlines after being suspected of human trafficking.

On Saturday, 42-year-old Mary MacCarthy spoke to PEOPLE about the Oct. 22 incident that left her and her 10-year-old daughter Moira "traumatized."

After learning that her brother Michael, who served as a father figure to her daughter, died unexpectedly at the age of 46 from a blood clot, the pair took a plane from Los Angeles to Denver with a layover in San Jose, Calif.

At first, the single mom explained they were unable to find seats together on the flight from San Jose to Denver.

She asked flight attendants if they could help her and her daughter find a pair of seats next to each other. "I said to the flight attendants, 'We're traveling for a funeral, my daughter's just 10.'"

MacCarthy, a former TV reporter, said the flight crew told her to "just find two open seats." She said she took it upon herself to see if anyone was willing to trade seats and the other passengers were accommodating.

After that minor hiccup, the flight seemed routine. However, upon touchdown in Denver, MacCarthy revealed she was caught off guard when a Southwest Airlines employee and two police officers were waiting for the pair on the jet bridge.

"I was confronted by two armed police officers. One started speaking to me, the other to my daughter. I was really confused because they seemed to know our names," she recalled.

At first, MacCarthy explained that she thought another member of her family had died, and that police were there to break the news.

Instead, they said: "'We're here to talk to you because you and your daughter were reported as having suspicious behavior.' At that point in my mind, it clicked that we had probably been profiled. I've been raising this girl for 10 years; she's my biological daughter, and I knew things like this could happen."

MacCarthy recorded the nearly three-minute interaction with police and the Southwest employee, in which she and her daughter sound noticeably shaken up. Moira can also be heard crying.

In the video, the employee told MacCarthy, "The flight attendants were just concerned about the behavior when you boarded the aircraft," and that it was company policy to follow up on the claims.

The employee explained a flight attendant had alerted police of suspicious activity between the mom and daughter because they were the last people to board the flight and asked other passengers to switch seats.

MacCarthy said if she and Moira had the same skin color, this never would have been an issue. "I was upset about it because I was certain we had been racially profiled," she recalled.

Southwest Airlines did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's request for comment.

MacCarthy told PEOPLE that 10 days after the incident, she got a call from the police saying that they were "following up on suspicions that I'm a human trafficker."

According to police reports, the employee suspected her of human trafficking because the pair boarded the flight last-minute, and MacCarthy demanded that they sit next to each other. The employee also claimed, "the mom and daughter did not talk during the flight" and the mother "did not allow the child to talk to flight crew."

MacCarthy said these claims were untrue and that the human trafficking suspicion completely blindsided her, as police at the time weren't transparent about the suspicious activity she was being accused of. Now, she said she's pursuing legal action.

"I want Southwest Airlines and the Denver police to be held accountable for what is undoubtedly a case of racial profiling involving a 10-year-old black girl who was already suffering the worst day in her life — a death in her family," MacCarthy stated.

"An incident like this can scar a child for life," said MacCarthy, who is currently looking into getting her daughter a therapist. She vows to "never set foot on a Southwest plane again."

In a statement issued to PEOPLE, attorney David Lane explained, "Had the child been white, there is absolutely no doubt that this would never have occurred. Thus far, my investigation reveals no misconduct by the police as they were merely making an inquiry based upon a Southwest Airline's complaint and they are allowed to investigate. It is the 'Corporate Karen' who is to blame for this. I have reached out to Southwest legal counsel and have heard nothing. This is a civil rights violation and absent some appropriate response by the airline, we will proceed to file in federal court."

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A white mom has gone viral on TikTok for preaching the gospel of black girl magic.
In a video liked more than 13 million times before disappearing from the platform, Justine Champion, dubbed @teenychamp on TikTok, drew both praise and criticism for her unorthodox dogma.
The footage, originally posted on Dec. 30, shows Champion with her four young sons on an outdoor play set. “Me teaching my white boys how to behave,” reads text on the clip.
“Black women are the reason Donald Trump is no longer gonna be our president,” she says, facing the camera while her sons bow amid giggles.
“They are marching around chanting ‘all hail black women,'” the mom from California says, adding that the production “took five takes” to get right.
This mom on TikTok is going viral for having her kids kneel and pray to black women pic.twitter.com/Hi94ZvMl7C
Not everyone found Champion’s sermon sincere.
“I’m a woman of color and agreed,” commented one TikTok user, according to Daily Mail. “But it’s annoying when people make these videos just for clout and not because they genuinely agreed.”
Champion then attempted an explanation in response: “I know the type you’re talking about, so I’m not upset or anything, but I just wanted to clarify that that’s not why I made this video.”
“If you want to go onto my page and see some of my content,” she continued, “you can see some of the things [I] regularly do, the actions that I take to help the communities that are marginalized in the United States.”
Demonstrating she already has clout, Champion added that she’s gone viral before for posting videos of “women and people of color and the history that’s left out of our textbooks.”
‘Is she right? Yes. Does she get to become famous for it? No.’
Champion has since written that she removed the video, replacing it with one that includes a snippet of the original followed by a black woman speaking straight to camera, explaining this kind of language is “putting a target on our back.”
But the comments continued on Twitter, where New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz shared the eyebrow-raising clip on Wednesday. There, followers called the mom “cringe” and the video “uncomfortable,” sharing embarrassment on her behalf.
“Is she right? Yes,” one tweeted. “Does she get to become famous for it? No.”
On Friday, Champion responded to Lorenz’s tweet to say that, on reflection, she should have asked herself “what would black women do?”
“I took it down after listening to some black women and their concerns,” she wrote. “Others want me to put it back up because they loved it. Either way I’m grateful they helped get rid of trump.”

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As A White Mom, Helping My Multiracial Kids Feel At Home In Their Skin : Code Switch As more families resemble my own, more parents are going to have to figure out how to talk to their kids about what it means to be mixed race. Here are a few things I've learned.

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As A White Mom, Helping My Multiracial Kids Feel At Home In Their Skin

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Last year, after months of watching — and re-watching — the movie Frozen , my daughter Selma, who is 6, announced she didn't want to be brown. "I wish my skin was white," she told me one day in our living room, where we were hanging out after school.
I knew she idolized the film's alabaster-skinned heroines, and it made my heart ache. Our daughters started picking up on the differences in our family's skin color at a very young age — I'm a white-skinned woman raised in the South, my husband, Jason, is part-white, part-American Indian, with medium-brown skin, and, depending on the season, both of our girls look more brown than white. There's research showing that children can recognize differences in race as early as infancy, and can develop racial biases as early as 3.
Knowing all this, we've tried to raise our daughters to be comfortable in their skin, making sure they're in schools with other black and brown children, searching out books and movies with black and brown main characters. I had even tried, unsuccessfully, to steer her away from the snowy princesses.
But our attempts clearly weren't foolproof. "You're beautiful the way you are," I told Selma, stroking her long hair and trying to mask my sadness. "I love your brown skin." She wasn't convinced. "I wish it was like yours," she told me.
As more families resemble my own, more parents will have to figure out how to talk to their kids about being mixed-race. The Pew Research Center found that in 2010, about 15 percent of new marriages in the U.S. were mixed, up from about 7 percent 30 years earlier. Multiracial children are the fastest-growing group of children in the country. Between 2000 and 2010, the population of children like mine — a mix of two or more races — increased almost 50 percent. By 2022, the number of multiracial students in American elementary schools is expected to have grown 44 percent.
As more families resemble my own, more parents will have to figure out how to talk to their kids about being mixed-race.
At the girls' schools, on the playground, at the swimming pool, I notice people scanning my multicolor family, and I don't think it's a stretch to assume they're trying to figure out what's going on: Who belongs to whom? How are these people related? From a young age, we want to help our daughters feel at home in a world that's still getting used to kids who look like them.
Jason and I met 15 years ago in San Francisco, where being an interracial couple felt to us like a total non-issue. Our young family moved to my home state of Virginia in 2010 to be closer to relatives, and, for the first time, I worried about how we would be received. Virginia is home to the landmark Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia , which overthrew laws prohibiting interracial marriage. The case was brought by a married couple — Mildred Loving, a part-American Indian, part-black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man — after they were awakened in the middle of the night in 1958 and arrested for violating an anti-miscegenation statute in place in Virginia at the time. That was decades ago, but I still worried how we would be welcomed in Richmond, where racial segregation remains severe and Confederate statues line the streets near our home.
One day, a white boy who attends school with my daughters ran laps with us during before-school running club. "Is that your daughter?" he asked. I said of course she was. "But she looks nothing like you," he replied. "That's the funny thing about genetics!" I said, trying to keep it light. "She looks just like her father."

A family portrait by the author's daughter, Selma.

Courtesy Kristen Green

hide caption

A family portrait by the author's daughter, Selma.
Selma was listening to every word, wide-eyed, keeping pace with us. In these conversations with strangers, I find I'm really talking to my daughters; what I say could end up being what they say in situations where they're on their own, and I want to equip them well. The boy needed a little more convincing, but he eventually seemed satisfied and left to run with other kids. Selma never mentioned it again, but I know these interactions stick in my daughters' minds.
The night Selma announced her Frozen wish, I shared it with my husband. I could see he was bothered by her words but also unsurprised. "She'll have to come to this on her own," he told me, but he promised to talk to her about it. Tucking her in that night, he told her that her brown skin was something to be proud of and that it made her special. She nodded and kissed him goodnight, but we've been trying to come up with everyday ways to give Selma more positive messages about her skin color. I started referring to her as Jason's "twinsie" to make her feel connected to him — and his dark skin color — and she embraced the nickname. Just last week, she requested a Barbie for her birthday, and we bought her a brown-skinned, brunette one, as well as a Doc McStuffins doll set, which features a black female doctor.
Lately, both girls seem to be developing a more complex vocabulary for skin color — their own, and everyone else's too. Just the other day, Selma informed me that I am a blend of peach and white, while she's a blend of brown and white, explaining that that's why she is "light brown." Amaya, who's 7, currently calls herself "tan," while labeling her sister "brown." Sometimes they want us all to put our arms next to each other poolside to see who is darkest and who is lightest. When the girls talk about this with each other, I typically listen without commenting. As much as our daughters need messages from Jason and me, they also need to consider this on their own.
As much as our daughters need messages from their parents, they also need to consider this on their own.
I'm sure this is just the beginning of their exploration of race. Some parts will be under their control. Whether their skin color becomes a key part of how they understand their own identities and personalities, that's their decision. How they refer to themselves — mixed, multiracial, American Indian, part-white, or some other term — is also their decision. But we also know people will put their own perceptions of identity on our girls, and we want them to have plenty of practice having these conversations without fear or embarrassment.
In the meantime, it's about small signs. I've noticed that Selma's obsession with the Frozen princesses seems to be on the way out, and I've decided to take that as a good omen.
Kristen Green is the author of Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County , published in June by Harper. The book, a hybrid of memoir and history, describes the decision by white leaders in her Virginia hometown to close public schools rather
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