(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Kyra Lynn Johnson, Delta Air Lines’s chief officer for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, & Social Impact, announced that the company was abandoning its use of the phrase “ladies and gentlemen” in gate announcements, according to Fox News Digital.
Johnson first pitched the gate announcement change during a February 2021 panel with other DEI insiders about gender inclusivity.
“So we’re beginning to take a hard look at things like our gatehouse announcements—you know, we welcome ‘ladies and gentlemen’—and we’ve asked ourselves, ‘Is that as gender inclusive as we want to be?’” Johnson said during the panel.
“You know, we’re looking at some legacy language that exists in some of our employee manuals and getting to the root of the way some things are described and saying, ‘Does that actually send a message of inclusivity?’” she added.
Delta started encouraging their employees to avoid language that “suggest[ed] a gender binary” in a 2020 inclusive language guide.
“Delta encourages our people to use language that is inclusive of everyone as our global customer base includes a broad range of diversity in cultural backgrounds, identity and experiences,” a spokesperson said.
The company also stressed the importance of being “antiracist,” encouraging employees to read Ibram X. Kendi’s infamous How to be an Antiracist. It even began altering hiring practices to track DEI metrics and reevaluating how it spent “PAC dollars” by only contributing to political groups that support “justice” and “equity.”
Both terms have been appropriated by woke leftists to euphemistically denote forms of reverse racism in many contexts.
Johnson freely admitted that she made the changes despite complaints from many of the employees.
“Perhaps the greatest challenge had been normalizing those conversations,” she said.
“So, notice I said the company has set an expectation that those conversations are to be normalized … That doesn’t mean everyone feels that way,” she continued. “It doesn’t mean that everyone’s comfortable having those conversations.”
Lufthansa also retired “ladies and gentlemen,” replacing the phrase with more woke-friendly alternatives.
