racism toronto

Minor traffic incident sends Toronto man on unprompted racist tirade

A woman was confronted with racism and spat on in an apparent road rage incident this week in Toronto.

The incident started around 2 p.m. on Sept. 15 in North York and was captured on dash camera video, Michelle Kyi tells blogTO. The video, posted to YouTube, starts with a man stepping out of his car and gesturing for Kyi to move to the left.

She tells the man in the video tha she can't move to that side because she doesn't want to drive on the sidewalk. A construction truck was blocking the way, so she asked the other driver to move back so she could move forward.

"And then he started gesturing me to move, but I was not comfortable to jump the curb," she says. "I'd have no other place to move other than backwards, which is pretty difficult for me to do anyway."

The man honks and refuses to move. The interaction becomes hostile from there and the man gets out of his car, walking right up to her car.

"Move your fucking car," he says.

Kyi says she was trying to get home. You can't see it in the video but she says the man started to make fun of her.

"He was mocking me or you know, like a kid would mock you."

She says she was trying to stay calm but at the point gets angry.

"Yeah, you little shit," she shouted in the video. "What are you going to do?"

The video skips ahead as Kyi says she took out some parts where nothing was happening. In the next part, the man gets back in his car and drives up on the sidewalk. That's where things take a turn for the worse: He stops his car in front of her and utters a racial slur, clearly audible on the video.

She says he then spat on her face and in the video the sound of spitting is heard.

"It was disgusting," she says. "I couldn't stop washing my face."

The whole incident was shocking for Kyi. She moved to Toronto from Myanmar when she was 17 years old but had never encountered this type of racism.

"I've never, I've never actually experienced real racism before," she says. "I've been called names, but never racist names."

Kyi says she had school yesterday but plans to report the incident to police.

Lead photo by

Michelle Kyi Screen Shot


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