More Thoughts on Racial Profiling

By Alison Thurston

In my post last week, I talked about my experience working in retail and being told by my managers to follow around black women, to make sure they did not steal. I wrote that though it does make me feel uneasy, it often serves its purpose. I don’t want my stellar retail career to cause me to sell out (though it may be too late…) or lose perspective on how social context determines so much of what we do. I think that I did do a little of that with my last post. My managers have doubtless been privy to the constant messages sent implicitly and explicitly by the media saying that black people are somehow more deviant. The social context definitely has affected everyone on staff, including myself. So even if it works, it’s all of our responsibility to recognize it and not allow it to have enough of an effect on us that we make one person who comes in feel harassed.

This week, I’ve mulled over what I wrote then and I think my mind has changed a bit. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an employee, especially an entry-level position in a large chain. I think that part of the reason I was able to carry out my manager’s orders (other than the one hardest to overlook: every store clerk is very replaceable) is that I had absorbed company culture. As I said, I’ve been with the company since the spring of 2008—that’s two years. Even though for much of it I was at Princeton, I still felt some lingering allegiance to the place that gave me a steady job through high school and even for the paltry few weeks that I spent at home when I returned from Turkey last summer.

We’re trained to do everything we can to make sure the store makes its sales goals, from hawking credit cards of dubious worth to turning in fellow employees who seem to be acting suspicious (and therefore hurting the store’s profitability by even thinking about stealing) to yes, following around customers for “loss prevention.”

A few times a year, many members of our “team” (one of our old managers was crazy about using sports lingo to describe thing that went on in the store) spend all-night shifts counting every piece of merchandise we have. The end result of this counting is never even—when we subtract the amount of say, baby blue size 5 leggings sold from the amount that enters the store, there is almost always a deficit. If the percentage that has gone missing is more than our store’s target, we’re all in trouble. I think that because I’ve labored under the knowledge that someone I know will be held accountable for loss, it’s made it easier for me to be suspicious of way more people than I should have.

I think that in order to mitigate the effects of the messages about race that we are all bombarded with, it’s important for all employees to question their prejudices and try to see clearly the situation at hand. If my managers could see each guest of our store as an individual, rather than a member of a group they’ve been told is deviant, we could probably do a better job at loss prevention and make fewer honest people feel suspected. If the message from on high (read: corporate) reinforced that everyone who comes into the store is innocent until proven guilty, and provided tools for spotting those who may be stealing, rather than leaving up to individual employees (and their prejudices) then we as a company would be a lot better off. I have a shift tomorrow night. I could be asked to follow someone around the store, and I will do as I’m asked, because Princeton does not pay for itself. But I’ll do it with a new outlook, and I will not presume anyone to be guilty because of the color of their skin.

Image from LDRBRS’s flickr.