Yet another cellphone video of a racist verbal attack has surfaced on social media. This time the victim is a U.S. man speaking Spanish to his Puerto Rican mother at an airport gate.
The victim points out to the aggressor, who is a white U.S. veteran in a wheelchair, that he also belongs to a U.S. military family, some of whom “lost limbs” fighting for the country.
None of that mattered to the McDonald’s cheeseburger-wrapper-tossing perpetrator, who would not be distracted from his mission of declaring the speaking of Spanish “a crime” in the United States.
“Learn how to fucking speak English. We live in America,” the man says in a video tweeted by New York Daily News senior justice writer Shaun King.
The victim heroically responds first with laughter, then by saying: “I feel sadness for you…Yeah, because I did the ‘crime’ of talking to my mother in Spanish, because that’s the language she speaks.”
“It is a crime,” responds the man.
A few things stand out in this video. The first is how the victim refuses to relinquish power over the situation to his racist attacker. The second is that when the man filming on his cellphone asks the aggressor for whom he voted, his response is, “It’s not of your goddamn fucking business, asshole.” (Yet, a stranger’s language in private conversation with his mother at an airport is somehow his business.)
The third noteworthy detail of this video is that many of the racist people who were emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, and who now express these sentiments openly in attacks on random strangers in public, appear to be growing increasingly frustrated that victims are actually fighting back with reason, intelligence, and fortitude.
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