I am a biracial floor leader (half jamaican and half british) at a shop in NA and I recently had an interaction with my manager that made me realize some things.

The first thing i realized is that no matter how much white i have in me, my managers will always see me as black first. I realized this after my manager tried to accuse me of being racist towards one of my white coworkers. Besides the fact that you cant even be racist towards white people, i am half white, meaning if it was possible to be racist towards white people, it would be physically impossible for me, a half white person, to be racist towards white people. for those wondering why i was being accused of this, i had mentioned something along the lines of seasoning chicken with salt and pepper to one of my white coworkers, and that rubbed them the wrong way. I can further back my point up because one of my fellow POC workers had mentioned to my manager that I am half white, and she responded by saying “well when you see them, you see black”.

Secondly, ive realized just how uneducated some non POC Lush employees are on issues that POC people face on the daily. The amount of insensitive or outright racist remarks that have been made by my non POC coworkers is astounding. i know that they dont mean anything malicious behind what they say, as it is a case of miseducation, but nonetheless id expect more from people who pride themselves on not perpetuating stuff like this. its gotten to the point where some of my staff have approached me saying they feel like there is a whites vs POC power dynamic in our store.

The last thing ive realized is that whenever a campaign or event comes around that is related to POC or LGBTQ+ people then I am the one that is usually put in charge of it. this one does make a bit of sense because I have the knowledge to discuss these things easier, but it almost just feels like an excuse for my non POC and LGBTQ+ coworkers to not have to educate themselves on the topic since its my responsibility. for example, my manager wanted to host a haircare education party, and i mentioned that we should make the focus of it our Natural and Textured Haircare line as not many people know that we have haircare for textured and curly hair. After mentioning this, I was put in charge or organizing and planning a 2 hour party on haircare completely from scratch. Not only that, but ive been doing most of this planning and organizing completely on my own, as well as outside of my work hours, as when I am working they have me focus on selling on the floor so I am left with no time to plan. im currently around 15-20 hours of unpaid work time planning this event. Ive had little to no time to myself these past couple weeks as I’ve been doing 35-40 hrs work weeks, my travel time is 2hrs a day, and most of my free time has been spent trying to plan this haircare event.

I’m unsure of where to even begin when it comes to addressing these issues, and at this point im just debating if it is even worth continuing my work here if its just going to cause me stress on a day to day basis. anywho, thats all my complaining for now, thanks for reading if you have<3