Racist YouTube video carries alarming message
Alexandra Wallace is a UCLA student with something on to say. She’s got issue with Asians. The original video has been taken down, but multitudes of cloned videos have been re-posted.
The YouTube video “Asians in the Library” posted by a University of California Los Angeles student March 11, showed viewers that racism is still an issue in today’s society.
“I haven’t experienced [racism] personally,” said Amy Smith, 20, undecided. “You know it’s around. It’s everywhere you can’t hide it.”
Alexandra Wallace, a third year student at UCLA, posted the video days after a powerful tsunami rocked Japan leaving over 10,000 people dead, and according to the Huffington Post, the disaster will cost Japan over $310 billion in damage.
In the video, Wallace complained about “hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into [the] school every single year,” and how they come into the library and disrupt her study time.
Wallace even imitated an Asian person talking on the phone saying “Oh ching chong ling long ting tong.”
This video caused a huge backlash of negative comments, resulting in Wallace removing the video from her personal YouTube account.
Other YouTube users have re-posted the original video keeping it alive, and parodies of the video including “Ching Chong! Asians in the Library song,” posted by Jimmy Wong joined in as well.
After the incident, Wallace issued an apology letter to the UCLA newspaper “The Daily Bruin”, and has since withdrawn from UCLA after she said she received death threats in response to her video.
Some Saddleback College students have expressed their concern about the video and how racism is still prevalent in our society.
“My first response was how could someone like this be at UCLA?” Smith said. “They’re supposed to accept educated people into that school, and then I’m watching this girl and how racist she’s being, it was just disgusting and absurd.”
Carley Eissman, 20, child development, said that “It was really sad, she was pathetic for putting that on YouTube.”
Wallace’s comments on stereotypes concerned even UCLA Chancellor Gene Block, who emailed a video to UCLA students condemning Wallace’s video on March 14.
Adam Davis, 26, communications, was also concerned with Wallace’s stereotyping and said, “I had many reactions, none of them positive, but most strikingly was when she referenced tsunami victims flooding her apartment complex and it made me think ‘Are all Asian people Japanese?'”.
The video has caused a great deal of outrage and showed us that racism is still an issue in this country.