Joori Jung of Detroit was beginning a routine class via Zoom, as she has been doing as a dance instructor since her studio closed due to the viral outbreak.
Ten minutes into her lesson, she noticed two strangers join her Zoom session, which was open to the public.
“What’s up my (expletive)?” one male newcomer said to the class, as seen in the video recording of the lesson provided to the Free Press.
Jung got up calmly from her pose to address the situation on her computer, where two crashers had enabled their audio, and only one had video.
“Why the (expletive) are you looking like that, why are you smiling?” One said as Jung, the founder and artistic director of ArtLab J, worked to figure out how to remove the newcomers.
In the time it took Jung to work the technology — less than one minute — both male crashers are heard spewing out taunts using faux foreign accents. One asked Jung, who is from Korea, why she gave him the coronavirus.
With a rise in businesses and educational forums turning to video-conferencing with the online app Zoom, hackers have been increasingly “zoombombing.”
Jung is founder and artistic director of ArtLab J, and has been offering free virtual classes to the public without registration or a password. That will be changing, and students will now be required to register and will receive a link and a password via e-mail.
This was her first experience with racial-based prejudice since moving to the US ten years ago.
“Living in Detroit, and I’m an Asian woman, people worry about it. But actually I’ve never worried about that,” she said, “even when people call out to me, saying ‘Hey China!’ It’s a big country, so sometimes people don’t know about smaller countries. “People targeting Asians, and I get why people could think that way, but coronavirus shouldn’t be related to a group.”
See this complete story at Detroit Free Press.