Racially charged road rage encounter outside Bethesda bagel shop caught on camera

Officials are investigating a racially charged verbal dispute between a man and woman outside of a Bethesda, Maryland, bagel shop that was caught on camera as a road rage incident.

In the video you see a man get out of his car and confront the woman with racist remarks. 

The woman then accuses the man of calling her son the N-word. 
 
"You’re not my mother," the man responds. "Get out of here."

He then confronts the woman with verbal attacks.

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"We’re going to drop a bomb on Hiroshima. We’re going to annihilate Japan and you too."

"I’m not even Japanese you idiot," the woman replies. "Racist."

The incident then escalates when the man challenges the woman to a fight. 

"If you want to fight, let's go," he says in the video. 

That's when another person intervenes by effectively persuading the man to get back into his car. 
 
Montgomery County police are investigating the incident as bias instead of a hate crime until they're able to gather more information. 

The video on Reddit is attracting hundreds of comments with most of them condemning the man's actions. 

“My initial reaction was one of anger and one of frustration at the time we’re living in," said Asian Americans Advancing Justice President and Executive Director John C. Yang. 

Yang said incidents like this are unfortunately on the rise. 
 
His organization, as well as the Anti-Defamation League, released a report Wednesday highlighting a nationwide surge in reports of xenophobic and racist incidents targeting members of the Asian American community. 

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“We’ve collected over 2,000 self-reported incidents of hate against the Asian American community in the last two months alone," Yang said. "This is real to us. In that sense seeing this video, unfortunately, was unsurprising.”

Anyone with information about the incident is asked to call Montgomery Police.