Comedian Eric André said Monday he was racially profiled at an airport in Australia over the weekend.
The Eric Andre Show star posted a video on Instagram saying he’d just finished a journey of more than 25 hours while traveling from New York City to Brisbane, with stops on the way in Los Angeles and Melbourne. In Melbourne, the 41-year-old said he was “put in a special line” in which he was “sniffed thoroughly by a dog.”
“It’s one of the many times I’ve been racially profiled at the airport,” André added. “So, this is a message for all Black, brown, and Indigenous people traveling through Melbourne today, especially if you’re traveling through Qantas International by Terminal 2: Please be careful.”
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He also asked viewers to connect him with discrimination lawyers in Australia and asked anyone hoping to hire him for work in the country in future to provide him with some kind of police or security escort.
“I do not want to be humiliated or racially discriminated against anymore at these airports,” André said. “I don’t want to cut my hair and wear a three-piece suit so that I’m treated like a first-class citizen. I shouldn’t be made to feel that I am unaccepted by entering a country. Shame on the people at the Melbourne Airport that have this cockamamie procedure.”
“It has nothing to do with safety,” he added. “It has everything to do with racial harassment.”
In a statement, the airport said it doesn’t tolerate racism in any form. “We welcome all passengers to Melbourne, and we expect everyone to be treated equally,” a spokesperson told The Guardian. They added that the airport “immediately” asked the “government agencies in charge of processing all international arrivals into Australia” to investigate André’s complaint.
“Those agencies have now provided a response to Mr André,” the spokesperson said.
It’s not clear if André will take further action over the incident, as he has in the past. In 2021, André was stopped by Clayton County Police Department officers at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and asked whether he was carrying drugs. He later filed a lawsuit arguing the police department’s drug interdiction airport program is unconstitutional and discriminatory.
“During those few minutes, the other (white) passengers were forced to shimmy around me,” André wrote in a Daily Beast op-ed about his experience in Atlanta. “They gawked while doing so—after all, I must have done something to deserve all the police attention. I boarded the plane utterly humiliated, and angry.”
He added that the officers “didn’t have any reason” to stop him. “It’s just part of Flying While Black.”
