YourBlackLife: Shopping While Black

Almost every Black person has stories about being followed in stores or given suspicious looks while shopping. It has gotten to the point where even Oprah was once mistaken for a normal Black woman, and denied access into an expensive store. It happens almost everyday, but some poeple refuse to let it go. Some black people are suing- not just for the money, but for revenge on the humiliation that racial profiling causes.

Consider the example of a man named Alfred Ashford.- A Black man accused of shoplifting meat from a grocery store (article on WWEEK.COM):

"The security guard at the Safeway on Southeast 122nd Avenue and Powell Boulevard recorded several suspicious observations in her logbook for March 12, 2005.

But the incident that caused the biggest stir that day began with Alfred Ashford's entry into the Safeway at about 5 pm. That prompted Sandercock to write, "Black male at meat.... Has receipt in hand." Holding his shrink-wrapped pork chops, Ashford was staring at the meat case, searching for steaks to get in exchange.

Sandercock read her notes during a deposition in a discrimination and false-arrest trial in Multnomah County Circuit Court against her, Safeway and her employer, DePaul Industries. The suit ended last month with a $44,000 out-of-court settlement for Ashford, a 65-year-old former school counselor who supplements his income by playing piano at a church.

Portland police don't track arrests for shoplifting by race. But Ashford's attorney, Greg Kafoury, says this case and others like it represent an underreported phenomenon of racial profiling, "shopping while black."

"It's a major problem," Kafoury says. "Black kids grow up being identified as criminals when they go into a store. It's one of the first ways they realize that life is going to be different."

Ashford's case also represents what lawyers nationwide warn is a growing national trend in litigation: a rise in discrimination and false-arrest suits against retailers who single out black customers. Last year, the Macy's department-store chain settled a racial-profiling case in U.S. District Court in New York state for $600,000. "



(Continue to full article by Angela Valdez)




The interesting is, a video on YouTube posted by CCTV Cinema caught shoplifters on surveillance...and most of them were not black.