Shopping while black. African Americans continue to face retail racism
“Retail settings are often sites where anti-black bias is made evident, requiring black shoppers to navigate racial hierarchies while procuring goods,” Pittman writes. “Second, discrimination alters the experience of shopping, arguably raising the costs and reducing the rewards derived from consumption. When a store’s sales staff is hesitant to serve black shoppers or suspects that they are prospective shoplifters, shopping no longer becomes a form of leisure.
In another paper published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, researchers examined racial discrimination in a retail setting:
“To investigate racial discrimination in the marketplace, we conducted a field experiment to examine both overt and subtle forms of retail discrimination. ‘Customers’ browsing in high-end retail stores asked a salesperson if they would remove a security sensor from a pair of sunglasses before trying them on in front of a mirror. Although the request to remove the sensor was granted in all conditions, the salespersons showed greater levels of suspicion (i.e., staring, following) in the black conditions, especially in the male-group condition. These findings are consistent with current field research examining subtle biases toward other stigmatized groups,” the researchers wrote.
President Obama once said: “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. That includes me.”
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By Michelle Singletary