Vietnamese Restaurant Owner Target of Racist Rant

No matter the circumstances–whether it’s targeting Muslims after 9/11 or blaming anyone of Asian descent for the coronavirus—white people can’t seem to stop white people-ing.

ABC 13 reports that a Vietnamese restaurant owner in Houston was the target of a white woman’s racist rant. After hearing a commotion outside of her restaurant Vietopia, Sammi (who apparently only gave her first name) went outside and found a woman yelling at her husband and employees.

From ABC 13:

Sammi recorded the woman, who then yelled out profanities at her. In the video, the woman, seen pushing a shopping cart, is heard yelling, “Get out of our country!”

She goes on to say, “You! Get out of the United States, you ugly [expletive]”

Vietopia has been open and taking takeout orders. Despite that, they’ve still seen an 80 percent downturn in business. “It’s already a tough time for us small business owners. We’re suffering. I think they need to be more educated,” Sammi told ABC 13. “There’s all kinds of people. You can’t be doing that, if you have any common sense, you can’t treat people that way. It’s just mean.”

As the pandemic spreads through the country, attacks like these have only increased in regularity. Earlier this week, a group of teenage girls attacked a 51-year-old woman on a bus in New York and yelled anti-Asian slurs. A recent study by researchers at the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) also shows anti-Asian sentiment has surged on online platforms. This is happening despite the fact that New York is the epicenter of the pandemic in the United States and most of the state’s new cases appear to have come from European countries.

“As a conjoined threat, outbreaks of hate and disinformation on social media comprise unparalleled dangers to society in the face of actual viral pandemics, such as Covid-19,” according to the NRCI study titled, “Weaponized Information Outbreak: A Case Study on Covid-19, Bioweapon Myths, and the Asian Conspiracy Meme,” CNN reports.

“Outbreaks of weaponized information serve to attack public trust and undermine democratic institutions at a key moment of global vulnerability,” the study says.