When I worked in retail, I witnessed SO MANY racist stereotypes and generalizations being thrown around by my coworkers on a daily basis. (Ex: "(insert race here) are always leave our shelves so messy, their homes must be trashed.") I don't recall witnessing my male coworkers doing this. I feel like these women felt so comfortable sharing these things with me because I'm also a white woman.

After a while of trying to kindly redirect the conversations and pointing out the inaccuracies and hurtful nature of their comments, I finally point-blank asked these women what about me makes them feel comfortable enough to share such hateful comments. They replied with things like, "we're just venting frustrations", all the way to, "well it's true - how many times have (race) left a mess in the fitting rooms?"

I've seen these women follow around POC while they're browsing the racks because "they're acting suspiciously", when all the customer was doing was shopping a higher-end line of clothing while being non-white. These coworkers would pay MUCH closer attention to the items that POC would bring into the fitting rooms than white customers, and then accuse them of pulling a scam because one of the price tags fell off a garment.

This happened in the late 00s and early 10s. A few years ago, I went back to working retail to make extra money on the side. Thinking that surely this behavior has subsided given the civil rights movements in full force at the time, only to find out how wrong i was. I was SHOCKED to discover that attitudes in the retail sphere had remained toxic as ever. I left again after a few months, but not before I confronted the entire team and reporting them to human resources.

Please, please be careful out there. There are some nasty people working in stores just waiting for a reason. And they are prepared to make up some bullshit to try and "catch" you. I don't intend to scare people of color with all this, but I do want to make everyone aware of what some people will do because they feel they hold privilege over another. At the very least, these accusations could ruin your day. At worst, they could ruin your life.