Shoppers fighting back against ‘shopping while black’ profiling with social media, lawsuits

If you don’t know what shopping while black means, here’s what it looked like last month when it happened to Milwaukee Bucks player John Henson.

He wrote about it on Instagram.

On Oct. 19, Henson, who is black, went to buy a Rolex at a high-end jewelry store in the mostly all-white community of Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin.

He said that as he walked up to the store, employees locked the door even though it was regular business hours. He rang the doorbell twice and no one answered, he said.

What he didn’t know: An employee inside was calling 911 to report that Henson and three of his friends were outside the store and could be the suspicious people spotted in front of the store the week before.

Henson said that when the police arrived they too watched him, then questioned him about the car he was driving, thinking it might be stolen.

“This was one of the most degrading and racially prejudice(d) things I’ve ever experienced in life and wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” the NBA player wrote on Instagram.

There’s a saying that if you don’t what it means to shop while black you’re not black – or Hispanic for that matter. It refers to when a person of color is racially profiled while they’re shopping – followed around or watched closely by employees or security, in some cases treated rudely, like a potential criminal, in ways far more egregious than just bad customer service.

Another nickname for retail racism: Shop and frisk.

In a 2007 Gallup survey, 47 percent of black people surveyed said they don’t think they are not treated equally by retailers. More than one-quarter of those surveyed felt they were targeted because of their race while shopping in the last month.

As the biggest shopping of the season of the year arrives, much is at stake for retailers who racially profile a group that holds considerable purchasing power. After the Henson incident, talk of boycotting retailers on Black Friday began to bubble up in some circles.

According to Nielsen’s recently released 2015 African-American Consumer Report, African-American buying power in the U.S. amounts to $1 trillion.

The issue of shopping while black has gathered widespread attention in recent years as victims speak out – blogging about it, sharing experiences on social media – and, in a growing number of cases, filing lawsuits against retailers.

The list of companies sued for racially profiling customers is long and growing, including Macy’s, Barney’s, Ross Dress for Less, Dillard, Walmart, Best Buy, Walgreens, Eddie Bauer and, most recently, CVS.

In early June, four former security guards at CVS stores in New York filed a federal lawsuit alleging that their supervisors regularly told them to tail black and Hispanic shoppers.

The lawsuit claims that the supervisors told them “black people always are the ones that are the thieves,” and that “lots of Hispanic people steal.”

Yet statistics don’t bear that out.

According to the National Association for Shoplifting Prevention, there is no profile for a typical shoplifter.

David Gottlieb, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told The New York Times that “this is the first time a group of employees has banded together to provide an inside account and expose the blatant racial profiling policy at one of the largest retailers in the world.”

CVS issued a statement saying that it was shocked by the allegations and would “defend against them vigorously.” The company said it rigorously enforces its nondiscrimination policies.

In a similar lawsuit in 2012, two former employees of a luxury perfume shop in Manhattan sued the shop for racial discrimination against employees and customers, claiming that the owner of Bond No. 9 called blacks “thieves.”

The former employees claimed that employees were told to go on alert when black customers walked in and to signal their presence by using the phrase “the light bulbs need changing.”

Cases of shopping while black, dismissed by some as “playing the race card,” has afflicted many among the famous who have spoken openly about being racially profiled by stores.

“There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store," President Obama saidafter the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin. “That includes me."

Model Tyson Beckford has talked about getting followed around whenever he shops at Barney’s on Madison Avenue in New York. “I might have the most recognizable face in the world, but I still get followed all the time any time I go to a store,” he has said. “It’s sad.”

Talk show host Wendy Williams has said that she’s been followed so closely by security in stores she’s actually turned around and said, “excuse me!”

When it happened to Oprah Winfrey in 2013, the media dubbed it her own “Pretty Woman” moment, a reference to the 1990 movie in which a prostitute played by Julia Roberts is refused service in an expensive boutique.

The TV mogul was in a shop in Zurich and asked to look at a handbag worth $38,000. Winfrey told reporters that the shop assistant refused to show her the bag, telling one of the richest women in the world that the bag was “too expensive.”

The incident, which the store later chalked up to a misunderstanding, became such a stain on Switzerland’s squeaky clean image that the Swiss tourism board itself issued an apology to Winfrey.

NBA player Henson also received an apology, a personal one from the president of Schwanke-Kasten Jewelers, who shook Henson’s hand and said in a statement that “no one should ever have to experience what he experienced.”

Henson called the apology sincere but did not close the book on the topic.

“I am going to do some things to raise awareness of situations like that and go from there,” he told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Social media has been key to getting the public’s attention about the problem.

In a case that captured nationwide attention last summer, teenage Vine user Rashid Polowas in a convenience store in his small Minnesota town when he noticed store employees watching him as they pretended to be rearranging items and working at the drink machine.

He’d been treated that way in stores before. This time he pulled out his cell phone and recorded the spying clerks. At one point, when one of them walked around a corner to check on him, Polo, says to the camera, “there she goes! She thinks I’m stealing.”

The teen uploaded the video, and a follow-up dubbed “It happened again,” to Vine where they were quickly viewed by millions.

Polo vowed to The Hollywood Reporter that he’ll keep making the Vines as long as necessary.

“If it keeps happening, I'm going to be forced to record it," he said. “Hopefully it doesn't happen again because it's very annoying and it's a touchy subject with many people.”

Consumers are fighting back with more than just tweets and videos.

Last August, Barneys New York and Macy's flagship store in Manhattan agreed to pay penalties of $525,000 and $650,000 respectively after New York’s attorney general spent months investigating repeated racial profiling complaints from shoppers.

In the Barneys investigation, the attorney general determined that security personnel accused an overwhelming number of black and Hispanic customers of shoplifting and credit card fraud.

After the initial lawsuits were filed, a group of major fashion retailers including Barneys, Macy’s, Neiman Marcus, Bloomingdale’s and Saks Fifth Avenue in New York met ahead of the 2013 holiday shopping season to talk about ways to prevent racial profiling.

Earlier this year, Shaquoya Burns, a 32-year medical assistant at Providence Portland Medical Center, sued Ross Dress for Less after an incident in Portland, Oregon.

According to her attorneys, who have filed several “shopping while black” lawsuits this year against Portland area chain stores and a shopping mall, a store manager told he she’d have to leave the premises because she was a known thief banned from Ross stores nationwide.

The only thing Burns had in common with the banned shoplifter: They’re both black.

Burns filed a $230,000 lawsuit against the store and the manager.

“Discrimination is a terrible thing because you can't get away from it,” Burns’ attorney Greg Kafoury told The Oregonian. “You go to school, you get a good job, but you're always vulnerable to it. Someone can make you feel like dirt.”

This story was originally published November 24, 2015 at 6:47 PM with the headline "Shoppers fighting back against ‘shopping while black’ profiling with social media, lawsuits."