A Virginia woman’s xenophobic rant against a Latino man was caught on camera.
The video was shared by activist and New York Daily News writer Shaun King via Facebook on Monday. In the video, the unidentified woman is on the phone telling someone who is presumably a Sprint store representative that she is in Manassas, Virginia, which she describes as “the ghetto.”
“You have probably five stores in Manassas, and none of them wanted to do anything,” she says to the person on the phone. “I’ve already been to two of them.”
A Latino man who is in the store then interjects, saying, “They have one in Fairfax.”
The woman immediately snaps back, “I wasn’t talking to you. And don’t listen to my conversation. Well, you better watch who the f**k you’re talking to ’cause I’m not the one.”
The man responds saying his name is “Juan,” possibly in jest because the name sounds like “one.”
“I don’t give a f**k what your name is,” the woman responds, pointing to her husband and suggesting that he’d fight the man. Later, as she bites her nails, she adds that she’d fight him herself.
The camera cuts away for a moment and the woman is then heard saying: “I ain’t scared of no f**king sp*c. This is my f**king country.”
After the man leaves the store, she says under her breath that he “needs to take his f**king ass back to Mexico.”
The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2015 American Community Survey showed that 44.6 percent of the Manassas City population identified as non-Hispanic white. And 33.9 percent of the population identified as Hispanic, a label that refers to ethnicity and can include people from any race.
The video had over 4.5 million views on King’s Facebook as of Tuesday. Last week, a similar viral video showed a man at a Reno, Nevada, airport calling a Puerto Rican man a “sp*c” and a “piece of sh*t” after overhearing him talking to his mother on the phone in Spanish.
Sprint’s president and CEO Marcelo Claure addressed the incident in a blog on the company’s website on Tuesday. Claure, who is Latino, said he intends to invite the woman and her husband for an open dialogue to understand what “drives comments and behavior like this.” He also plans to invite the Latino man in the video to meet with him.
“This kind of behavior is not tolerated in any Sprint workplace,” he says in the blog. “We value our diverse customer base and thousands of minority employees. We will confront head-on those who violate the respect that our customers and employees deserve.”
This article has been updated with a response from Sprint’s president and CEO.
Clarification: This article initially cited statistics from a Manassas City demographic report that indicated 72 percent of the population of the city identified as white, and 33 percent as Latino, but did not indicate that some overlap exists between the two groups. The article has been updated with data from the U.S. Census that indicates the percentage of people in Manassas City who identify as non-Hispanic white.
