Racial Profiling, it’s not just for cops anymore!  Well, it’s never just been theirs ever really. I’m a retail manager and have been for 25+ years. I’m going to be really really honest here. We racially profile customers ALL THE TIME.  Yes, we make assumptions about every person based on what they look like. Anyone who says they haven’t is a fucking liar.  I try very very hard to be mindful now, but in the past, I’ve made snap decisions about people in my store.

Think about it retail peeps.  How many times has a manager told you to watch someone because they look “shifty”?  How many times have you thought someone looked suspicious and reported it to someone?  A few years ago I started paying attention to the circumstances around this and I noticed some things.  We would send out “security alerts” which would highlight suspicious activity or fraud/shoplifting attempts.  I started to notice that the descriptions had some similarities. Easily 70-90% of subjects were African American or Hispanic.  Those numbers seemed a bit off to me.  I asked about it and was flatly told that they are the people who are caught so, well, that’s that.

The implication being that minorities were most likely to attempt to commit or commit crimes so they were caught more.  Before, you start to argue…I know cops who say the same thing. Let us be honest, when people question why there are more African Americans in prison based on their population the answer is…they commit more crimes.  Stop and think about that for a second.  The assumption that they are just inherently more criminal than everyone else.  It’s prevalent and deeply held belief by a lot of people.

I think that’s a bullshit argument. In fact, I know it’s a bullshit argument. How?  Because I’ve seen why it is.  I started to pay attention to who we were “watching” in the store.  I became very aware of who we were judging as being someone who was up to no good.  Who were we following?  Who did we feel needed “extra customer service’?  Black people, that’s who.  Everyone was at attention if an African American or heaven forbid a group came into the store.  You would stop what you were doing to make sure they knew you were watching them. Every person in that store knows they’re there and is suddenly busy near them. Do not think for a second that people complaining about “shopping while black” treatment are exaggerating. They are absolutely not.

Meanwhile, we’re not watching the people who are really shoplifting.  One time I was a computer on the sales floor but off of the aisle.  I was paged to the front and happened to have a woman pass by me and walk a few steps ahead of me towards the front.  She was a white lady very well dressed…business women type.  She was carrying a $300 set of sheets,  I walked behind her all the way up and saw her walk right by the registers and right out the door.  Not only did no one stop her…no one noticed her.  She walked right out the door with $300 like she was a fucking ghost. I could not believe it. Not that she was stealing but that no one paid any attention to her.

No one paid her any attention because she wasn’t what we’ve been trained to believe a thief looks like. She wasn’t what we think a shoplifter is.  That made her invisible.  That was a fucking revelation.  I realized that our security alerts were full of minorities because that’s who we were watching.  Of course, we’re going to catch them doing more, we watch them so much more closely. For every security alert, we sent with a suspicious brown or black person on it how many other people just walked without us even seeing?  Now, look bigger. How many people are in prison because police “watch them more carefully”?  The expectation of criminality is different depending on the person’s race. So, yes we racially profile in retail. Every store does even if they have policies against it.  It’s bullshit and it’s wrong.  I do my best to change the culture from inside, but we’re just small part of a bigger problem.