Day after day, we get new reports of Indians and Indian origin persons being attacked in the US by racists asking them to leave the country. The attacks have put the focus on several issues in America, including gun violence.
But the underlying cause is racism, and a video from August 2016 that has now surfaced on social media shows exactly how it plays out.
On a hate website that pretends to be about ‘saving American jobs’ is a report titled “Ohio - A Journey to Indian Park”, and an accompanying video, uploaded to Youtube by a user called spushor. While the report does not name an author, BuzzFeed reported that the video was shot by Steve Pushor, a 66-year-old computer programmer from Virginia who runs Save American IT Jobs (SAITJ).
In the video, Pushor walks through a park in Ohio, apparently filled with Indians. His commentary on everything from the clothes the women are wearing, to the games being played, is creepy at best, and racist at worst. He states, “The number of people from foreign countries blows my mind here.”
“Indians have just RAVISHED the midwest, it’s crazy,” he says, as he captures children playing at the park and their parents standing around talking to each other.
The report on the website is worse. “OHIO RICH ASS SUBURBAN PARK IS OCCUPIED BY RICH ASS INDIANS WITH VARIOUS GREEN $$$ (H1-B L-1 H-4) VISAS. A $60,000 PORSCHE SUV AND A BIG ASS $$$ BMW WERE SITED (sic) AT THE INDIAN PARK CRICKET MATCH,” the report says.
“Indian Resident House is devoid of flowers and shrubs and brings the classy neighborhood down to a lower caste,” he writes.
Calling Indians greedy, he goes on about how Indians have failed to assimilate in the US since women still wear ‘Sara’ (sari) and how everyone is healthy here while Indians usually starve back home, Pushor does not even spare children in his diatribe.
“I glance left, nobody notices my existence, I click down Penny Lane, and those baby carts beat the beggar children back home,” he writes.
At a time when an Indian techie was murdered by a white American in a hate crime, and at least three other Indians and Indian origin men were shot at in just a week, the resurfacing of this video, and the apparent impunity with which the man who made it stalked Indian families is alarming.
But Pushor, unsurprisingly, has defended the racist video as ‘satire’. “What we’re trying to point out is people in Ohio, IT workers and other professional people, have lost their jobs to foreign guest workers. That’s what our point is,” Pushor told BuzzFeed News.