“Orange Motherf***er, go back to where you came from!”
by digby
No, not that other orange fellow. This nice lady was upset that her neighbor didn’t sweep up the leaves in his yard:
The local TV station caught up with the woman who said she was sorry:
She says she’s afraid of retaliation after the video went viral.
But she also was in tears as she sincerely apologized. She says she and Manawat have had issues as neighbors for years, and the rant came at a moment of frustration and weakness.
“I stooped to the lowest possible denominator to hurt someone because I was angry,” she says.
She says her anger wasn’t directed at the Filipino community but toward her neighbor.
Manawat admits he’s not the perfect neighbor either but says his neighbor crossed the line.
“I’ll miss certain things around my yard, but that doesn’t mean you have to go off on my culture and nationality,” he says.
The neighbor says many who see the video will assume she’s racist or a bad person, but she wants people to know that’s not who she is.
“I wasn’t raised that way,” she says.
They always say they didn’t mean it after they do it and insist they aren’t really racist.They even seem to truly be contrite although some of that may be from fear or embarrassment of the reaction to their behavior. She says she was angry and acted out of character.
It’s like that woman in Kentucky who went off on the Hispanic customer who brought up some items to her friend at the head of the line to pay for. After screaming insults about them being on welfare etc etc, says, “I hate to be that way …” But apparently she feels she just has to.
Note the common refrain from both ladies is that they are having to “pay for” these primitive people and they are “getting something” to which they are not entitled at the expense of the hardworking people who deserve it. In the case of the Filipino neighbor she reaches back to Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial war a century ago as some sort of favor bestowed upon the Filipino people.This is where that “economic anxiety” and “racism” merge. It’s not that economic anxiety justifies the racism. It’s that racism justifies the economic anxiety.
Here’s the thing. Racism comes in a lot of different forms. You don’t have to be waving a confederate flag and singing Dixie to be one. But if you hurl racist insults when you are angry, and attribute all the other person’s perceived flaws as being the result of his or her race or ethnicity, it’s the very definition of racism.
People who aren’t racist don’t do that. They get mad and they yell and lose their tempers just like all humans. But they don’t attribute other people’s flaws to their race. It’s not that complicated.
Update: The original video has been removed, so I replaced it with the news story. It was worse than what they showed which was bad enough.
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