DETROIT  — A passenger on a Delta plane leaving from Florida to Detroit harassed an Arab American family on board, and the airplane crew did not address the racial intimidation, according to the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC).

The victim, Darlene Hider who was traveling with her husband and four children children, wears a headscarf and says the harassment against her family was motivated by hate.

She said a woman sitting in front of her family kept looking back at them in a condescending manner. 

“Excuse me, can you please control your kids,” The passenger said before takeoff, according to Hider. 

After the mother of four tried to smile and explain to her fellow passenger that the children were not doing anything, the woman said, “This is America,” Hider told The Arab American News.

Hider added that she became emotional and many passengers came to her support after witnessing the incident.

“I am a friendly person,” Hider said. “I don’t look for trouble, but she was looking at my children with disgust. It was uncalled for.”

According to Hider’s account, after the woman’s statement, a Delta ticket agent who was already on the plane for a different matter, came and forced the Arab American family to change their seats, threatening to remove Hider’s husband from the airplane.

“I am about to kick you out of this airplane,’ the agent told my husband,” Hider said. “She scolded me and my family for no reason. It was a hurtful, unnecessary approach.”

Hider added that the agent’s behavior was more concerning to her than the “bigoted passenger.”

“I felt foreign in my own country,” Hider told The Arab American News. “I felt belittled. I felt as if I did not belong.”

Hider, a former teacher who was born and raised in Southeast Michigan, has no doubt that the harassment from the passenger was because of the family’s ethnicity and religion.

“I know bigotry when I see it,” she said. “We were told, this is America. When your children are looked at with disgust, your heart breaks. It was not an altercation. It was a verbal assault on us, same thing with the Delta agent.”

Hider is the sister of the legal director of ADC Abed Ayoub. She notified her brother about what happened, and he exposed the incident on Twitter while the airplane was on its way to Detroit.

“Everyday Muslims and Arabs are discriminated against in America. They are sisters, wives, mothers and don’t deserve this. #StopTheHate,” Ayoub said in a Twitter post.

The ADC legal director was especially distraught about the actions of the airline. 

“Airlines and travel industry have been harassing Arabs and Muslims for far too long. Enough!” he later tweeted.

After Ayoub tweeted about the incident, by the time the flight arrived to Detroit, two Delta representatives met the family at the gate and promised her to follow up on the issue, Hider said.

The mother of four said she is still dealing with the emotional aspect of the ordeal. As for the legal aspect, she said she trusts ADC to handle the case, adding that her main concern is to stop such harassment from happening in the future.

“This is not about me only,” she said. “It is more than about the passenger or Delta. As Muslim women, we are sick of having to alter our dress to prove that we are American.”

Ayoub told The Arab American News that the ADC takes the matter seriously because what happened to Hider is representative of the struggles of Arab Americans with the flight industry, not because she is his sister.

Fatina Abdrabboh, the executive director of ADC Michigan, said the organization is disturbed by the incident, calling for the prosecution of the passenger who scolded the family.

“Ethnic intimidation charges may need to be sought for the perpetrator to send a clear message,” she told The Arab American News. “We at ADC Michigan fight to ensure that any form of harassment or mistreatment along ethnic or religious lines is unacceptable now and in the future.”

Abdrabboh added that the incident was a boiling point to hundreds of similar cases where traveling Arab and Muslim women feel too unwilling or scared to report.

“Anti-Muslim sentiment is at a high level,” Abdrabboh added. “The increased number of reports that we get speaks to the level and severity of the racism we are facing.” 

She said spins on national news headlines have heightened intensity with which the Arabs and Muslims painted with one brush.

“Now the concern is not just with law enforcement and racial profiling,” Abdrabboh said. “Discrimination can happen at restaurants, schools and, as we saw Monday, on airplanes.”

The ADC Michigan director added that when it comes to Arab Americans facing racism, the burden is shifted towards the victims, and the focus moves to the details of incidents involving them from the real issues– xenophobia and discrimination.

“Our issues get lost in the noise,” she said. “Racism against us is often sugar-coated with possibilities and what-ifs, when sometimes it is cut and dry discrimination.”