Texas: Close on heels of a statue of Mahatma Gandhi vandalised and curse words scribbled across a Manhattan neighbourhood last week, the video of a woman hurling racial slurs towards a group of Indian-American women in Plano, Texas is now viral on social media.
The video shot in a parking lot outside “Sixty Vines” restaurant, on Wednesday, shows Esmeralda Upton yelling racist remarks at the four women. She also stands charged with physically assaulting one person from the group.
The incident was immediately reported. Officers rushed to the spot and took Upton into custody. The five-and-a-half-minute video posted by Meta user Rani Banerjee, one of the victims of the assault, showed Upton hitting one of the women in the face and swiping at the phones of two women who were filming the incident.
Esmeralda was charged with assault, bodily injury and terror threats. She was held with a $10,000 bond. The incident is being treated as a hate crime.
The video begins after the confrontation between Esmeralda and the four women began. The video starts with Upton shouting outside the parking lot and telling the women to “go back to India.”
Watch here:
Upton, in her expletive-laden racist rant, said that Indians are everywhere and asked them why they are here. “Everywhere I ****ing go you ****ing Indians are everywhere. If life was so great in India, why the f**k are y’all here?” Upton can be heard saying. The victims can be heard calling 911 and the police and describing the woman attacking them.
When one of the Indian-American women said a “white woman” was attacking her, Upton said she is a Mexican American. The woman then retorted by saying: “If you are Mexican, why don’t you go back to Mexico.”
Upton replied by saying that “she pays her taxes” and threatened to take out a gun and shoot at the four women. “Turn the goddamn phone off or I swear to god I’ll shoot your a**.” An officer arrived at the scene and was seen speaking to Rani and her friends.
Rani while speaking to local news outlets said she was shocked by the combative attitude of the woman.
Several people on social media condemned the incident of hate crime. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA) jointly censured the incident.
