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OUR VIEW: Racism exposed and condemned

A vile racist rant captured on video and made public this week is indeed profoundly disturbing

A vile racist rant captured on video and made public this week is indeed profoundly disturbing.

In it, a Caucasian man unleashes a tirade of slurs, insults and vulgar expletives at a person holding a cell phone to record a confrontation over a parking ticket.

The man who took the video was Ravi Duhra, a lawyer who happened to notice the passenger of a large pickup truck become abusive toward a parking attendant in the downtown area.

Duhra stepped up to record the licence plate number of the truck, and the passenger proceeded to launch a shocking verbal assault against him.

It is deeply disconcerting that such mentality and behaviour still exists in this society – rarely seen at this level, perhaps, but reality nevertheless.

As Duhra told our sister newspaper in the Fraser Valley, being the target of racial slurs and name-calling is not uncommon for someone of his ethnic background, despite the fact that he was born in Quesnel, and is as Canadian as any other citizen of this nation.

It reveals the stunning ignorance and intolerance on the part of those who are fond of uttering the words “go back to where you came from.”

That would be Canada – a country comprising a rich, hugely diverse blend of ethnicities from around the world, joining its indigenous people over the past few hundred years.

There are also positives taken from this appalling incident.

One is the courage of a man to stand firm in the face of such an aggressive racist assault, video the tirade, and then make it public.

One of the solutions to racism is to expose it. Duhra did that.

The second step is to condemn it. And people did that – locally and globally – on social media. The foul-mouthed man in the black t-shirt is now a public pariah.

Just the way it should be.

-Black Press