A viral video shows a white woman in Southern California directing a racist and dehumanizing rant at a Latinx mother and son who had simply pulled over to have a cup of coffee.
The woman can be seen and heard shouting at the family to get out of her Spanish-named neighborhood as the mother and son were in their car parked on a public street.
The racist ranter yells:
What are you? He doesn’t even look human. Okay, get off our street. You do not belong in Playa Vista.
Belinda Panelo and her son were the target of the woman’s racist rage.
She told the local NBC affiliate that the worst of the verbal abuse wasn’t even caught on camera. And, beyond taking it all in stride, Panelo says she even reached out to the woman in a genuine attempt to assess if there was something actually wrong.
“Are you okay, ma’am?” Panelo can be heard asking the white woman off-camera.
“No, I’m not,” the woman replies. “We don’t want you here. This is our street. Leave us alone.”
“Are you alright?” Panelo quietly asks again.
The white woman is unfazed.
“We pay $10,000-per-month to keep you out,” she says.
According to Panelo, the white woman repeatedly asked her and her son what “mix” they are and called them ugly, poor and subhuman. Panelo stayed polite but firm, she says, in order to show her son how to handle such racist outbursts in the future.
“I bought coffee at Blue Bottle,” Panelo patiently explains later on.
The white woman responded with vengeful sarcasm.
“Oh my god!” she exclaimed. “You bought coffee and parked on our street?!”
“How do I do this in front of my child?” Panelo asked rhetorically when interviewed by the outlet. “Because inside you know you want to react a certain way, but you’re going to have to keep it together. You’re trying to model the [proper] behavior. You’d hope that in a situation that your child would react in a respectful way, maintaining their dignity but while still standing up for themselves.”
After the incident, Panelo said that her and her son went home to discuss history and race after the incident.
“I will not have one incident make me think that everybody who lives in that neighborhood is like that because it’s not fair to generalize,” Panelo affirmed. “And we don’t know if someone is suffering–if they have health issues.”
[image via screengrab/KTLA]
