The mother of a mayor in a New Jersey town is blaming immigrants — who she believes are not Americans — for her son’s potential loss in the primary. Her racist rant reflects a fear among some white people of no longer being the majority race.
“Go to hell PALISADES PARK, let the GD KOREANS have this F’n town,” Lorraine Rotundo, 80, wrote in a now-deleted Facebook post. “All of us AMERICANS are so done. I am going to suggest that only English be spoken in our Boro Hall at least while an AMERICAN is still the mayor.”
Rotundo accused residents of Palisades Park, N.J., of voting illegally.
“Any American working there has no idea what is going on because Korean is mostly spoken there, not English,” she added.
Rotundo’s son, James Rotundo, currently serves as mayor of Palisades Park. His challenger for the Democratic nomination, Chris Chung, holds a thin lead over the incumbent in the primary election. There are just about 100 votes left to be counted, which are expected to be tallied Monday.
More than half of Palisades Park’s residents are Asian, the majority of whom are Korean.
“She’s upset about her son losing, I mean it’s a mother trying to defend her son, who loves her son,” James Rotundo said.
It’s more likely that Lorraine Rotundo is upset about the changing demographics of her town, where she has lived for nearly her whole life. Only 6 percent of Palisades Park was Korean in 1980. Racism in the form of aggression toward immigrants has been widespread in Donald Trump’s America. People from lawyers to immigration agents have had their hate-filled diatribes documented on video.
It’s not surprising, considering that the president recently called immigrants “animals.”
Paul Swibinski, James Rotundo’s campaign manager, told The Washington Post that the mayor’s mother is “very old,” “homebound” and “delusional” — not specifying further what that means — and said the Facebook post is not indicative of a bigger issue.
Probably not.
“Before you start calling anyone bigoted, how would you feel if that happened in your neighborhood” Carlson said.
Palisades Park has a history littered with racism against its Korean residents. In the early ’90s, the town required all businesses with signs in Korean to also put up signage in English of the same font size.
“But what Koreans saw as the biggest affront came in 1996, when the city passed an ordinance that critics say disproportionately affected late-night Korean restaurants and karaoke bars,” The Post reported.
At that time, an ordinance required karaoke bars and restaurants to close their businesses at 9:00 pm and 3:00 am, respectively. This disproportionately affected Koreans, who own most of the karaoke bars.
“It excluded ‘premises commonly known as ‘diners,” a clause that allows the borough’s one 24-hour diner, owned by a Greek-American, to stay open,” the New York Times reported.
Chung, James Rotundo’s challenger, told northjersey.com the Facebook post was “heartbreaking” — espeically because he lived next door to Lorraine Rotundo for seven years.
Jimmie Chae, who organized a rally on Sunday to bring attention to the despicable incident, told the publication he’s disappointed that there isn’t more of an outcry.
“Have his mom come down to town hall and next town meeting and publicly apologize and say she is sorry,” Chae said. “If this was the Italian community or the African-American community, you would have community leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton come out immediately, have an uproar and say it’s unacceptable and demand an apology. It’s ridiculous that things like this get brushed under the rug.”
