The bystander who videoed a woman’s bigoted tirade at a New Jersey Sears store Sunday hoped the clip he posted would go viral, and now it has, receiving shares across numerous websites.
Simoni Lu Vanu is speaking out after he recorded a woman spewing xenophobic language at Latino customers and an Indian cashier at the department store in New Brunswick, N.J.
“The best description is that I was so angry I was almost shaking,” Lu Vanu told CBS New York of the clip.
“Send ’em back to their own f——,” country the unnamed woman says, her anger apparently stemming from a long wait in line June 4 as a family of three used coupons during checkout.
“You got an Indian waiting on an Indian, that’s what it is,” she says before a bystander corrects her and says the family is not Indian.
“I don’t know what the hell they are,” the woman shoots back.
“That has nothing to do with anything,” the bystander says.
Lu Vanu, who captured the incident on his phone and uploaded an edited version on YouTube, had hoped it would go viral so he could use it to raise money to donate to an immigration advocacy organization. He said the woman was basing her statements on the customers’ skin color.
“Really, she was just looking at the color of the skin,” he said. “They both have brown skin and it was very clear that the family was Latino, and they were also speaking Spanish. And the cashier was Indian. Just that fact in of itself shows how isolated she is in terms of reality.”
He admits he does have one thing he would change about the situation.
“My regret is that I didn’t speak up when it all happened,” he says. “Everyone tried to quiet down the situation, but nobody really addressed the issue and addressed the racism.”
Sears has not issued a statement on the issue, and Lu Vanu said he hopes the woman in the clip learns a lesson from the situation and possibly takes anger management courses.
