
A video of a Caucasian woman hurling racial slurs towards a pair of international students from Korea at a Starbucks outlet in the US state of California has gone viral, enraging many online for its outrageous content.
An unnamed woman was shown asking the students to not speak their native language, saying she hated the language. Starbucks employees had to escort the woman out of the outlet, according to Newsweek.
Sean Lee, a South Korean native and UC Berkeley student was in a tutoring session with Annie An, an international student from South Korea when an unnamed woman sitting nearby with a laptop started telling them to stop using their language. KRON reported that An filmed the woman while she made those racist remarks.
This is what she had to say:
“I don’t want to hear your language.”
“This is America. Use English only.”
“I hate it.”
“If you can sit and be quiet, fine, but I don’t want to hear your language.”
“STOP SPEAKING ORIENTAL.”
Here’s the video in all its glory:
The Starbucks employees told the woman she was the one “causing an issue” while the students did not do anything wrong and were completely free to speak their own language. When told so, the woman threatened to cal the police and said “You’re gonna be in trouble when I get this letter out”.
AJ+ notes that while the white population is still the majority at the Bay Area where the Starbucks outlet was located in, they have declined as much as 10 percent in the last 27 years. The number of Asian-Americans, on the other hand, is increasing.
A woman went on a racist rant after hearing customers speaking Korean in Starbucks. pic.twitter.com/AIrvR3Fub1
— AJ+ (@ajplus) December 16, 2017
The video has since gone viral with over a million viewers and has been shared more than 500 times by Friday on Facebook.
Lee wrote in the Facebook post: “In our day-to-day pursuits and responsibilities, it’s all too easy to forget that racism and anti-immigrant sentiments are a real thing in this country, even in the Bay Area that so often touts ‘diversity.”
“Hopefully, this leads to even more conversations and initiatives.”