An Indian-origin CEO was racially abused and told to “go back to India” and also take along Nikki Haley after he said that he will not support President Donald Trump’s economic agenda after the US leader appeared to defend white supremacists following the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia where white supremacists clashed with counter-demonstrators.
US-born Ravin Gandhi, 44 founder, and CEO of GMM Nonstick Coatings, a global supplier of coatings for cookware and bakeware, wrote an op-ed for CNBC following Trump’s Charlottesville remarks but was quickly trolled and racially abused by readers, the Chicago Tribune reported.
“I recently told the New York Times I was ‘rooting’ for certain aspects of Trump’s economic agenda,” Gandhi wrote in his article for CNBC. “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. 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,” he added.
In reaction, he received many emails and tweets about the words he put in the article.
“You’re a f****** Indian pig” and “Get your f****** garbage and go back to India, and sell it there,” a woman said in a voicemail she left on YouTube.
“You can stick your stickies up your sticky Indian (expletive) and you can take that other half-(expletive) Bangladesh creep with you, Nikki Haley. She’s the one that started all this when she took down the Confederate flag. So don’t tell us that you gave him 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,” the Trump supporter continued.
“Even though my race is a complete non-issue in my day-to-day life, the sad reality is there’s a group of racists in the USA that views me as a second-class citizen. 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,” he added.
With that he wants to make it clear that he doesn’t think these haters are Trump supporters yet they continued to racially abuse him.
“Republicans and Democrats alike, liberals and conservatives alike, can agree this is a fringe element,” Gandhi said. “The fact that Trump equated hate groups with those protesting hate lit me up,” he said. “His moral leadership on this issue is reprehensible,” he added. “I know I’m on the right side of history here. That’s how I sleep at night,” he stated.