On Wednesday, a video of a woman in Plano, Texas shouting racial slurs at a group of Indian-American women went viral on social media. The video was taken in the parking lot of the Sixty Vines restaurant in Texas. It shows the woman, Esmeralda Upton, making racist comments to the group and hitting one of them in the face.
Esmeralda Upton was arrested by officers from the Plano Police Department soon after the four Indian-American women told the police about what happened.
Texas Woman Arrested for Punching, Racially Assaulting
Rani Banerjee, who was attacked, posted a five-and-a-half-minute video of the attack on her Facebook page. In the video, Esmeralda Upton hits one of the women in the face and swipes at the phones of two other women who were filming the attack.
She also reached into her bag and told the four women she was going to shoot them. Esmeralda was charged with one count each of Assault Causing Bodily Harm and Threatening to Do Harm. A $10,000 bond was put on Upton. The police are treating it as a hate crime. The Plano Police Department said in a press release that Esmeralda could face more charges. The incident is still being looked into.
Rani Banerjee, who was attacked because of her race, put the video on Facebook late Wednesday night, and it quickly went viral on the site. It also went viral on Reddit, where it was posted.
The video starts after Esmeralda and the other four women got into a fight. At the beginning of the video, Upton is seen yelling at the women outside the parking lot and telling them to “go back to India.”
In her racist rant, which was full of bad words, Upton said that Indians were everywhere and asked them why they were there. “You ****ing Indians are everywhere I ****ing go. “If life was so great in India, why the f**k are you all here?” Upton can be heard asking. The people who were hurt can be heard calling 911 and the police and telling them about the woman who hurt them.
When one of the Indian-American women said she was being attacked by a “white woman,” Upton said the woman was actually Mexican-American. The woman then said, “Why don’t you go back to Mexico if you’re Mexican?”
Upton replied, “She pays her taxes,” and then she threatened to pull out a gun and shoot at the four women. “Turn off that goddamn phone, or I’ll shoot you in the**!” When the officer got there, Rani and her friends could be seen talking to him.
Rani told local news outlets that she was shocked by the woman’s aggressive behavior.
A number of people on social media spoke out against what happened. The Coalition of Hindus of North America (CoHNA) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) also said that the event was wrong.
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