Video Surfaces of Woman Yelling Racist Insults at Puerto Rican Grocery Shopper
Written by SOURCE on July 16, 2019
A Puerto Rican woman was simply grocery shopping at a local store in Abington, Pennsylvania when a white woman starting yelling out racist insults.
Johanny Santana was checking out at the grocery store when a woman next to her started cursing after hearing a young boy and his grandfather speaking in Spanish. “The boy comes back and asks another question [to the cashier] and that’s when the woman, who was next to me, started cursing,” Santana recalls, which is when she pulled out her phone and started recording.
The video then shows the woman lodging racist remarks towards Santana. “You shouldn’t be in this country,” the woman tells her. “I hope Trump deports you,” she later says. The woman ultimately flashes a dollar bill in front of Santana’s face and accuses her of paying for her groceries with “drug money.”
“I was born here, you don’t belong here, go back to your own country,” the woman says to Santana in the video. “You don’t belong here, you came here illegally. You should be deported.” Puerto Ricans are legal U.S. citizens and can travel throughout the country as little or often as they wish.
Santana responds to the woman in the video, but she later told NBC Philadelphia that she regrets reacting and felt “powerless” due to the language barrier. “I regret it because I didn’t want to tell her that. I felt powerless because I didn’t speak English well enough to be able to properly respond to her,” she said.
Relatedly, Trump recently made racist remarks to four congresswomen of color on Twitter, telling them to “go back” to the “crime infested places from which they came.”
According to the latest figure by the Federal Bureau of Investigations, hate crimes increased by 17 percent between 2016 and 2017, with 59.6 percent of those motivated by race, ethnicity, or ancestry.
