After years of listening to her neighbor's racist tirades, Autumn Tillman says she'd had enough. She recorded her confrontation with the man and the video has gone viral.
WARNING: THE VIDEO CONTAINS GRAPHIC LANGUAGE
Tillman claims her neighbor David Rosner spends days pacing up and down their hallways spuing racist vitriol – lately directed at the mostly Asian families who live in their mid-Market building.
Tillman can be heard saying to Rosner in the video, "Do you ever shut the (expletive) up? Ever shut the (expletive) up, in front of my door with your racist (expletive)?"
She provided video evidence of Rosner saying things such as "Go live in Asia. Funny how it's a white country – 200 years of white supremacy," and "If you thought Asian lives matter, they don't matter to us one bit." She tells KPIX 5 that many of the families have children, who're terrified of Rosner and try to avoid him.
So when Tillman, who is s singer and was born in San Francisco, exploded on Rosner, it was no surprise that she received an outpouring of thanks from the Asian community for taking a stand for them.
"I thank her for it, I mean no one really talks to him, but to always come out the side of his neck and saying comments like that, I don't know if he's wanting to pick a fight," said neighbor Edwin Gutierrez.
The video has since racked up more than 120,000 views.
"Nobody should ever have to hear that they have to go back to their own country or anything like that, I'm sorry," said Tillman. "My building is like 70 percent Asian families."
"Asian people have been there for the black community. They're always on the frontline with their signs, demanding justice for my community. They're always on social media, when you go to a lot of Asian people – like you go to their social media – you see the Black Lives Matter hashtags," said Tillman. "They're just as angry as the black community is."
When KPIX 5 reporter Betty Yu confronted Rosner in the hallway of the building about his harassment of his neighbors, Yu asked him whether he was a white supremacist.
"I would prefer everybody being white," he said. "I would prefer using Aryan genetics to make every person a white person and a male. We don't really see a need at this point for people of color."
The building property manager, Zenaida Saenz says, that although the police have been called on him several times, "Physically he's not really a threat, but the way he talks sometimes, it's really no sense,"
As for Tillman, she's working on a website called Blacks for Asian Lives Matter to unite the communities.
"If someone's talking about someone's ethnicity, making fun of it, whatever, please stick up for them, because all it takes is just a voice," she said.
