A recent racist incident in Fremont, California, has the Asian-American community outraged.
James Ahn, a Korean-American member of the Air Force Reserve, was driving earlier this month when an unidentified woman in another car was caught on video pulling her eyes back and saying, “This is not your fucking country.”
Ahn shared the video on Facebook this past Monday, and it’s since been widely shared.
In the video, the woman can also be heard saying, “This is my country, this is not a Chinese. Oh my god, Chinese ugly.”
The serviceman wrote in his Facebook post that he was driving at the 35 mph speed limit but the woman seemed to want him to move out of the way.
“As I changed the lane, she kept driving towards my car gesturing to crush me and cutting in front of me to slam on the break,” he wrote. “I later realized that this was more like a hate crime than a road rage.”
A friend in the back seat filmed the interaction.
In a statement Thursday, Ahn said he was in shock when the incident occurred and decided to stay silent. He felt he needed to share the video so the area’s residents would know to avoid her “for their safety.”
Ahn contacted the police following the incident, but Fremont Police Department spokeswoman Geneva Bosques told the New York Post that the woman spoke with law enforcement and claimed Ahn provoked her.
“She claims he started it by saying to go back to her country,” Bosques said.
However, Ahn denies that happened.
“We didn’t say anything to her,” he told HuffPost. “She wouldn’t listen even if I said anything.”
“We have zero tolerance in the military [regarding] discrimination on or off base,” he added.
The police are not taking any action against the woman, Bosques said.
“You could call this hate speech but as horrible as it is — and we clearly don’t condone any of it — it is protected by the First Amendment,” Bosques told the Post. “The other piece of this is that these two motorists were driving in traffic yelling at each other and the situation could’ve been worse for other drivers around them.”
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