Girl Pilots And Black Pilots
10/24/2010
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I was amused by this, from the November Reader's Digest:

“I am so tired of hearing ‘Oh my God, you’re a girl pilot.’ When you see a black pilot, do you say ‘Oh my God, you’re a black pilot’?” Pilot for a regional carrier

Well, we know that there's affirmative action for both black pilots and "girl pilots," and the concern is exactly the same, (Adversity.net has some worrying stories)but we've been much better trained not say it.

One world leader wrote in his autobiography that he was concerned the first time he flew with a black pilot:

"We put down briefly in Khartoum, where we changed to an Ethiopian Airways flight to Addis. Here I experienced a rather strange sensation. As I was boarding the plane I saw that the pilot was black. I had never seen a black pilot before, and the instant I did I had to quell my panic. How could a black man fly a plane?"

Who was the political figure who had this incorrect thought? Well, as you might have guessed, he was a President of South Africa, that notoriously racist country. His name was Nelson Mandela.

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