Shopping While Black (video)

The Aweful Truth of Who Steals in Stores

Shopping While Black

1. "May I help you?" she said as I looked through the top-of-the-line, non-stick pots and pans. I had been there 20 minutes looking and deciding If I should get the whole set, which would replace some pieces I bought only recently from other name-brands. Of course it would be a waste, but buying the set seemed more economical than buying the missing pieces from my kitchen set. I turned to her and observed she wasn't looking to be useful, but said it as a warning to get out. "No I'm just looking," I said nonchalantly. She stood there blocking my view now. She said nothing else and simply stood there like a Catholic nun shooing me off with her look.


    Racial profiling in stores is so prevalent that researchers have even given it a name -- Shopping While Black. When it happens, black shoppers are made to feel both unwelcome and under suspicion



2. I walked into the electronics store. I had just received a bonus at work out of the blue and felt I should treat myself to some new gadget. I wasn't prepared for the astonishing amount of new gadgets on display. The labels with the price tags did not help either since they were written in store codes only the clerks could understand. I stood looking puzzled for 10 minutes. The clerks were gathered around the desk talking to each other about what they did last night. I noticed they would occasionally look over and sigh in my direction. A Black customer was walking out and said over his shoulder, "maybe someone should help this man, he has several expensive suits in his hand, obviously he wants to spend money." Finally a clerk comes over and says, "yes!" But, just then a white customer walks in and she greets them and asks can she help. All the other clerks also greet the customer. Then another white customer walks in and they all greet him too. I am paralyzed with disgust. I simply leave and go to a shop that doesn't treat me like a pariah.


    "Most retail inventory loss statistics have show that [sic] the majority of shoplifters to be of the Caucasian race. To concentrate surveillance on minority customers is not only improper, but is an ineffective method of controlling shoplifting losses at most locations."



3. I'm looking at the underwear section digging through the sizes and not having a good time. For every time I find my size, it's not the color I want. And, there are so many that my digging is tedious and time consuming. Suddenly, I feel eyes on my back. In my peripheral vision, I see a husky man to one side and a husky unattractive woman to another side. They are painfully pretending to shop. As I move to the shirts section, they mirror me. I'm not one given to being stalked though and so I leave, putting back everything I had picked up to buy. This would seem like a rare incident, but it happens immediately when I enter stores and very very often. As soon as I open the door it seems the stalkers are there. I haven't done anything suspicious except walk in the store and I'm immediately being shadowed and followed.


    "Statistically, the most likely person to steal from a store is a store employee. The next most likely to steal is a college educated white male. Hmm -- could it be that the real reason that store employees and white managers make such a point of targeting black shoppers is that it creates a perfect smokescreen for their own dishonesty and greed -- not only can they rob the stores blind, they can then point the finger of blame at a visually conspicuous victim."



One more note: if the media weren't so racist, racism would die out -- the media is the single most culpable institution when it comes to racial stereotyping. Turn on the news, open a newspaper and SHOW me the stories where blacks (or latinos for that matter) are portrayed in an accurate, positive light. There's a lot of money at stake in maintaining this racist atmosphere -- prisons, for instance, are huge sources of revenue; and ensuring a perpetual underclass of minorities means less competition in the job market for white people.


The country is clearly ready for change -- witness the election of President Obama -- but until and unless the media starts serving the population as a whole, rather than an entitled and greedy subsection of it -- we won't see any real change in this country. The frightening thing about this is that not content with corrupting this country with racism, we also sell our racist television shows to other countries in order to spread the poison further. Anytime you do come across a rare show that features inter-racial couples whose primary focus is the actual relationship and not their race, you can pretty much count on that show being canceled. Think "Wonderfalls" or "Firefly" or any one of a dozen more amazing shows. What planet are the people in charge of programming living on? They are so far out of touch with reality, they might as well be living on Saturn. Look around you. The color of this country is not just changing. It has already changed. Ratings are falling for a reason. 



Race still sells in the news.  And, telling republicans that Blacks are crooks and thieves, still gets viewership.   Telling democrats that the Blacks they have hated for nearly a century now, since the beginning of the KKK, which was started by southern DEMOCRATS, still sows fear into nice white democrat homes.


Meanwhile Black entrepreneurs are suffering mega-setbacks by not being able to open Black owned stores.  Couple that with a staggering 25% unemployment amongst the Americanized Africans in this country and you continually see the widening of the economic gap between whites and Black, and yet you do NOT see a spike in theft among Blacks in this country.


The larger firms that know security and research loss prevention all point to whites as the largest purveyor of store shrinkage.  Yet, the news and media continues to fuel the fires of thinking Blacks have somehow cornered the market on theft.  Peruse and court papers for any length of time and you'll see it is not even remotely true.