Originally Posted by
SEA_Tigger
It is far more likely that any discrimination would have been based on dress, not race, though discrimination is discrimination.
When I travel, it's usually in a dress shirt and slacks and I am sure a number of my "spontaneous" upgrades were helped by that fact.
I'm not sure I would say either motivation (race or attire) is "far more likely" than the other. Based on the facts the OP provided, either seem like perfectly reasonable inferences. We'd have to know a bit more about the FA to be able to reasonably say one is more likely than the other.
Moreover, a t-shirt and jeans is by no means unusual attire for the AS F cabin. Heck, the SFO-PDX continuation from Mexico flights are often half full of paid F travelers wearing shorts, tanktops, flip flops and filling the overhead bins with those ridiculous hats. Unless the jeans and t-shirt were unusually dirty, I would think that racial discrimination is just as likely as attire discrimination.
In any event, the FA's behavior was inappropriate, whether racially motivated or not.