LOS ANGELES (Diya TV) — A horrific racial tirade against an Indian American family flared up on a United Airlines shuttle bus at Los Angeles International Airport yesterday after video of the verbal spat shot into cyberspace. Pervez Taufiq, who was getting much of the abuse from the unidentified white woman, captured the ugly exchange on his camera. The older lady hurled racist epithets against his family who were sitting with him on the airport shuttle.
The altercation reportedly began during the flight when the woman made inappropriate comments towards Taufiq’s 11-year-old son. A fight broke out once the two were on an airport shuttle bus, after the woman aggressively told Taufiq’s children to “shut up.” Taufiq confronted her, and that is when she responded with a tirade of racially charged remarks.
In the video, the lady is seen raising both her middle fingers while hurling slurs. “Your family is from India. You have no respect. You have no rules,” she shouted. She continued to insult him, making mockery of his ethnicity by saying, “I’m going to record your tandoori stinky.
When Taufiq calmly pointed out that he was born in the United States, the woman insisted otherwise, claiming, “You’re not American. Not originally. No, you’re from India,” and added, “That’s not on your passport.”
Other people in the shuttle stopped the woman and even requested her removal from the bus. One of the passengers addressed a United Airlines employee and said, “She is out of line, she’s drunk, and we need her off the bus.” Another passenger defended Taufiq’s family by saying, “She has been calling racist slurs at this nice family. They did not do anything.”
United Airlines employees reacted by forcing the woman off the shuttle. Taufiq later posted on Instagram, thanking people who supported his family after the incident. “Blown away these types of people still exist,” he wrote.
Taufiq, a professional wedding photographer from Boston, commented he was in awe of this experience as he travels most times with his family. He expressed in the video how angry he felt at that moment: “My blood is boiling right now,” he said in the video. “We were just having an altercation with this lady who was giving us a really hard time telling the kids to ‘shut up.’ I lost it and said, “You know, you don’t have a right to talk to my kids like that.”
Since then, the video has been widely spread and brought many demands for accountability and action against discriminatory behavior.
United Airlines has not made any statement about the incident.
