In a voice message, a Trump supporter tells Indian American Ravin Gandhi to “get your f**king garbage and go back to India.”
Indian American Ravin Gandhi had to bear angry hate messages and insulting response after he expressed concerns over Trump’s reaction to Charlottesville in an article in CNBC on August 17. As soon as the article was published, angry comments against Gandhi started to pour-in identifying him by his ethnicity and fraught with expletives.
“During the 2016 presidential campaign, I was horrified as candidate Donald Trump made abhorrent and incendiary statements about African-Americans, Muslims, and immigrants,” Gandhi wrote. “As the son of immigrants from India, I was certain Americans would see through Trump’s hateful demagoguery and elect Hillary Clinton, who I had openly supported.”
Gandhi continued in his article that he tried to give Trump a chance but after Charlottesville incident, he will never support Trump. “I saw the president of the United States cowardly signal tacit support of white supremacists and Nazis,” Gandhi said. “The truth is, after Charlottesville and its aftermath, I will not defend Trump even if the Dow hits 50,000, unemployment goes to 1 percent, and GDP grows by 7 percent.”
Gandhi said, “Some issues transcend economics, and I will not in good conscience support a president who seems to hate Americans who don’t look like him.”
All this was enough to propel Trump supporters to unleash a hate tirade against Gandhi, who is the CEO and co-founder of GMM Nonstick Coatings.
The next day Gandhi shared a hateful message from a Trump supporter.
“You can stick your stickies up your sticky Indian (expletive) and you can take that other half-(expletive) Bangladesh creep with you, Nikki Haley,” the woman said. “She’s the one that started all this when she took down the Confederate flag. So don’t tell us that you gave him [Donald Trump] a chance. We don’t give a (expletive) who you gave a chance, OK? We’re going to start taking down Buddhist statues and see how you and Nikki Haley like that.”
During an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Gandhi said that he decided to share the message to show people that racism occurs irrespective of a person’s socioeconomic status.
“Even though my race is a complete non-issue in my day-to-day life, the sad reality is that there’s a group of racists in the USA that views me as a second-class citizen,” he said, Chicago Tribune reported. “I wanted my peers in the business community, the civic community, my friend community to see that this can happen to me. Because there’s this delusion that racism is dead because Obama was elected.”