In Black America; Dr. Jerome D. Williams "Shopping While Black"

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is in Black America. That's the point. You know, when I've testified in these cases, I think the defendants have tried to make the argument that African-Americans steal more, they're more likely to steal and to engage in shoplifting. And I've looked at the data, I've looked at the FBI data, the national data, I've looked at local data from police departments, we've looked at data from different companies at survey and collect retail data, and interestingly in some of the data that I look at, the most common person to shoplift was a white woman in her 50s. But what happens is, if you're not typically suspected of shoplifting, you're not going to be watched. So it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think a certain group of people are going to shoplift more, and that's where

the surveillance cameras are going to be trained, and then obviously you're going to find and catch more people. But that doesn't mean they're shoplifting the most. In fact, there's a study done up in New England, but they had a very controlled study of cars that were stopped, and when they actually did this under a controlled study, they actually found more contraband among white drivers than they did among black and Hispanic drivers. Dr. Jerome D. Williams, Professor in Communication, the Department of Advertising, the University of Texas at Austin. There's a lot of evidence that African-Americans make extremely good customers. Market research shows that African-American customers are extremely brand loyal, and purchasing so great consistently show that they outspend all other minorities on consumer products. Today, racial profiling in stores is so prevalent that researchers have given the name, shopping while black. When it happens, African-American shoppers are made to feel unwelcome and under suspicion. In a 2007 Gallup survey, 47% of African-American surveys said they are not treated equally

by retailers, more than one quarter of those surveys felt that they were targeted because of their race while shopping in the last 30 days. racial profiling lawsuits against major retailers have made headlines across the country. In 2005, a major New York Department store paid New York State a settlement of 600,000 African-Eternity General Founders, and the majority of the people detained at a sampling of the stores were African-Americans and Latinos, and disproportionately high number compared with the percentage of minorities shopping at the store. A few years earlier, store employees at a national chain admitted they were instructed to follow African-American customers around the store and avoid giving them large shopping bags. I'm Johnny O'Hanston, Jr., and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Shopping While Black with Dr. Jerome D. Williams, PhD, In Black America.

One of the things we've talked about in some of the studies is that if you have a black sounding name, for example, and you put it on your resume, there have been studies where you just randomly assign names to the same resume, and you know, you can get a name like Tamika and a name like Nancy, and you put it on the same resume, and you're going to get a different response. So even names evoke different responses, and you know the way you dress when people see you is going to evoke a different response. It's not right. It shouldn't be that way, but that's the reality of the world we live in, and it's probably going to be a long time before those things change. It may have to happen after our generation, and it may be this younger generation where I see that in my mind, there seems to be a greater sense of fairness in treating people equally, as they get into positions of management, and if there's more and more, they are the sales personnel dealing with people. I think some of this will dissipate the type of, that may put me out of a job in terms of my research, but hey, that would gladly accept that. Racial profiling is an improper and legal practice based on the belief that certain ethnic groups are more likely to shoplift than others, because of this misguided store employees

will focus their surveillance on the customer's color rather than their conduct. Racial buyers can blind store personnel and cause them to monitor only the ethnic minorities that ignore the real source of theft. Racial profiling eventually leads to appalling of false theft accusations, wrongful detention and harassment, where no real probable cause exists. The results is that minority groups are made to feel like they can't be trusted, and are unwelcome in stores. African Americans call it shopping while black. Unless the wrongful conduct is corrected by management, civil rights violations will occur and false arrest lawsuits will continue and sorely damage the reputation of the retailer. Customers' surveillance based solely on the race of a customer is not only improper, but is an effective method of controlling losses due to shoplifting. The thought of racial profiling is just tasteful, a 1999 Gallup Poll confirmed that 81% of American disapproval of the practice despite disbelief, the same poll indicates that 75%

of African American men say they have been victim of racial profiling while shopping. Dr. Jerome D. Williams, the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin, has researched market discrimination. After all was said and done, you know, I got an apology after they saw that I was a professor and I was Dr. Williams and all of that, but it got me thinking, you know, how often does this occur? What's interesting, you know, probably six, seven years later, there were two young teenagers about my son's age who went into Eddie Bauer, also accused of shoplifting, almost an identical set of circumstances. Well, they were a little smarter than I am, even though I have a PhD, but they filed a lawsuit, I think they were awarded about $3 million, and so that also caught my attention too, that, you know, people can file lawsuits and get a satisfaction that way, but I've been pursuing it as an academic interest for a number of years and trying to track it, and our results have shown that this occurs quite a bit, quite frequently, and much more so

than most people realize. What psychological effect does this have on the individual who was on the receiving ends of this type of discrimination? Well, no, it's interesting, and our research, we talk about three responses, three general categories, what we call voice, and then where you file some type of action, where you respond to it, loyalty, where you basically say, I'm going to do this, I'm going to keep shopping at the store, and essentially exit, where you just leave the store and say, I'm not going to shop there anymore, but despite the fact that this happens so much, very few people file lawsuits because of the fact, I mean, there are many more opportunities to file lawsuits and people actually do because they're a psychic cost, they're emotional costs, they're financial costs, and there's no guarantee you're even going to win the lawsuit, even when you're right. And so what happens is that, you know, you're right, there are effects, there's self-esteem, you know, you're beaten down, and you're treated that way, loss of self-respect, loss

of dignity, when people just don't treat you the way that they should, and so this can have some psychological effects too. Does one who's been affected by this change their behavior, meaning that they would dress a certain way when they go shopping, in order not to be perceived as someone that's doing something illegal? Exactly, and I mean, I think you're very perceptive about that because if you, you know, we do quantitative research, and we do qualitative research where we let people tell us about their experiences, and as we do this qualitative research and people pour out their experiences and pour out their heart in terms of what's happened to them, many of them have said, you know, when I go to a store now, I make sure I dress up because I don't want people looking at me with suspicion. And really, you really shouldn't have to do that. I mean, everyone should be treated the same, but with many African-Americans, I've heard them say that to order to take the spotlight off of them, they're going to make sure that when they go into a store, you know, they're not dressed a certain way.

Now, there's an interesting phenomenon that's starting to occur now, and we've talked about racial profiling, but the ACLU is now looking at what they call hip hop profiling, that is people who dress in a style that's reflective of, you know, people of the hip hop culture, and so the assumption is that if you're dressed a certain way, and you've got baggy pants, and, you know, your shoe strings are entied, and you've got, you know, your pants hanging over your behind, and, you know, your suspicion of creating something that even though you may not have done anything, and so you can dress anywhere you want to dress, and if you haven't done anything, you should still be treated, you know, the same as anyone else. One would suspect that this type of behavior wouldn't be going on. I would assume that retailers, knowing that the population shift is shifting to a more brown society, and to 88 young customers, and particularly older customers of our generation, of this type of behavior, this is going to be a detrimental effect to their business in

the long term. You would think so, you would think so, because if you alienate a group of customers in a century leaving money on the table, because if they leave your store, and they're not expending their money there, they're spending it at your competitor's store, you're going to suffer financially. Now, an interesting case, Denys, many years ago, they were the incident with the Secret Service agents who went into Denys, and they weren't seated where their white colleagues were, and there were some incidents in California, well, Denys got a lot of negative press over that, and at one point they did a survey, and they found out that, according to this one survey, 49, 50% of African Americans said they would never eat at Denys, and was mainly because of this bad press that they were receiving. Now, fortunately, for Denys, they recognized that they needed to address the issue, and they took some real aggressive steps, and they turned things around, and today I would say Denys is a company that has come a long way, and it's one of the companies that's really touted many times as a good place for African Americans to work.

One would also suspect that you and I, since we're not notable figures, you may be, but I'm not. We'll receive a certain type of treatment, and one who's a notable individual will receive a certain type of a treatment, but obviously, if you're African American, it doesn't matter what social, economic status you hold. Yeah, you're right. You mean, you take a person like Oprah Winfrey or Chris Roth, and you would think people would know them because they're on television and they move. Nice. Well, you know, there was an incident with Hermet, the Paris store where Oprah Winfrey was there. Now, Oprah, if I have a recall, she's actually advertised the Hermet products on her show, and I think, and I may be wrong in this, but I know celebrities, and I don't know about Oprah in particular, but celebrities particularly have this opportunity to have Hermets close to the store so that they can go there and shop because they have enough money just to have their own shopping time. So Oprah certainly is in that category, but on that particular day, she's standing out there knocking on the door, and evidently

the guy didn't recognize her. In fact, I think they shot themselves in the foot even more so because I think the guy said, well, something like, well, you know, we've been having trouble with folks in North Africa, and so we didn't want to let her in. But, you know, when you think about it, I'm glad that incidents like this have happened to celebrities such as Oprah and Chris Rock's mom being, that they've taken action because this brings more attention to this phenomenon because a lot of people downplay it and don't think it's, you know, it's that prevalent. They always think people just playing the race car. And while I'm glad that from that standpoint, it's happened and people are covering it in the press. I'm also a little dismay that when it happens to the average person, let's say you and me, people don't pay attention to it. We really shouldn't have to have it happen to a celebrity or somebody to say, hey, this is an important event. Now, we shouldn't have to have to have Danny Glover standing in New York City and can't get a cab for us to say we're going to take action. Because it happens every day to just a common person and we need to address the issue because

it affects so many other people other than just celebrities. Instant, it happened to me in Austin a couple of years ago and you really don't notice until you become real perceptive of your surroundings. Went to a restaurant and was sitting in an area of the restaurant and I began to notice that people of color was all being seated in this area and now people of color was being seated in another area. And I mentioned to my wife said, is this the Negro section or the people of color section of the restaurant? And then I asked the waitress, I say, are you sitting all the people of color in this section because it looks that way. Is that a form of discrimination? Or is it unspoken policy, but someone have already instructed them, obviously? Well, I don't know the circumstances there. I will say this, I have been an expert witness

in many, many court cases and I've seen many, many different circumstances and I can't sit here and say that every case that I've looked at was actual discrimination. Now sometimes we choose to self-select where we want to live, where we want to go to church, we may decide to go to a historically black school, but those are choices that we make because we feel comfortable in a certain environment. And maybe they figured Negroes feel comfortable eating together, I don't know. I don't know either. That may be the case, but I think when it becomes a form of discrimination in my mind, I mean, I don't have anything wrong if all the black folks want to sit in a certain section of the restaurant, if they feel comfortable there. What I do have a problem with, if they don't get the same level of service, if they have to wait longer, if they have to pay higher prices, in other words, when the level of treatment is such that it's less than with the general population we get, then I have a problem with that. The Civil Rights Act legislated certain activities and well, it tried to legislate minds

that but certain activities and behavior. But it also has a gray area when it's not in a public accommodation, then the buyer beware to certain extent. And that's a problem. That's a problem. If you look at the laws and you look at the legislation, we have not caught up with where we are in the 21st century. And we have been working with people in Congress, you know, I gave a part of a workshop at the Congressional Black Caucus two or three years ago. There are certain members of Congress that have been very receptive to legislation, but they're looking for us to propose something that would change things. But you're absolutely right. If you go back to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, what they tried to do was to identify those areas where discrimination was most prominent. And there was most the most egregious acts of discrimination. And so if we're in a restaurant or a lunch counter or a movie theater or a bus stop or where you had to sit in the back

of the bus, they specify these areas and they call them places of public accommodation. Well, that's good on one hand, but on the other hand, you can't specify every place where a marketplace discrimination occurs. So if it occurs in a place that's not specified as a place of public accommodation, you may in fact be discriminated against. But when you go to court, the judge may say, hey, look, this doesn't fall under the Civil Rights Act because where this happened is not a, you know, maybe it's at a car dealership. And they don't allow you to take a test drive of a car if you're black, but they will allow white customers. And they may say, well, that's not a place of public accommodation. So, you know, we can't help you if you're filing under that particular law. Now there may be other laws that may cover it. But frankly, we have a lot of work to do to update our laws to make sure that we can come to the point where wherever the discrimination occurs, we can have legislation that will deal with it. Policymakers looking at this as a serious issue for the American public. I think some are, you know, a few years ago, particularly after 9-11, and there was a

lot of profiling going on at airports and even among people who looked Muslim that weren't Muslim like Sikhs and other people. And, you know, you may have people that for whatever reason dress a certain way if they put a head covering on or they have a beard and security guards, maybe more suspicious of them. So there was a lot of profiling going on. And so, a lot of people started talking about we need legislation and there was a lot of attention given to it then. But it always seems to only occur if there's a celebrity or if there's something prominent that happens like 9-11. And my point is, you know, and you and I know this has been going on for years and it happens every day, but no one seems to be jumping on the bandwagon to let's address the everyday common problem of marketplace discrimination. In fact, a profiling occurs every day. Now, there has been more attention about driving profiling. And you see a lot of people trying to pass laws about, you know, the so-called driving while black phenomenon. Alluding to the earlier question about corporate America becoming more sensitive to these

type of behaviors, do you see this conversation going on in corporate boardrooms of trying to address policies and programs and procedures in which employees are going to follow? It's definitely going on in some corporations. And I have to say, based on my perceptions and other corporations, the conversation may be going on, but it's not going on in the way that it should be going on. A lot of companies are sticking their heads in the sand. And I'm going to go on record here and say this here in Texas, we have 100 lawsuits against Dillard's department store. Now, I'm not going to say every employee of Dillard's and every person in management and every store, but, you know, where there's smoke, there's fire. And if you get a hundred law cases and a situation, something's going on there. And I've looked at the data myself. I've testified in many of these cases as an expert witness, and there's one case in particular where you look at all the department stores in a mall,

and you look at all the shoplifting that's going on. And the black population in this area is 10% and the percentage of blacks that are being stopped for shoplifting is about 6 to 10% in every store in the mall. But in Dillard's, it's like 30 to 40%. That says there's something going on there. I was going to bring up the shoplifting. Obviously, stereotypes or stereotypical images have not gone by the wayside. So they're looking at people of color, and particularly African-Americans as being major shoplifters. And that may not be the case. That's a point. You know, when I've testified in these cases, I think the defendants have tried to make the argument that African-Americans steal more. They're more likely to steal and to engage in shoplifting. And I've looked at the data. I've looked at the FBI data, the national data. I've looked at local data from police departments. We've looked at data from different companies at Survey and collect retail data. And interestingly, in some of the data that I looked at,

the most common person to shoplift was a white woman in her 50s. But what happens is if you're not typically suspected of shoplifting, you're not going to be watched. So it's kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you think a certain group of people are going to shoplift more, then that's where the surveillance cameras are going to be trained. And then obviously you're going to find and catch more people. But that doesn't mean they're shoplifting the most. In fact, there was a study done up in New England. I believe it was in Massachusetts or Rhode Island where they had a very controlled study of cars that were stopped. And when they actually did this under a controlled study, they actually found more contraband among white drivers than they did among black and Hispanic drivers. What are some of the key factors that allow this type of behavior to continue? One of the key factors is that if you have a company, and most companies will have policies, if you ask any company, they're going to say, oh, we don't tolerate that. We have policies,

we cheat all of our customers fairly. And that's what it says. That's what's on the books. And what happens, though, at the local level, it may be a franchise, like you may be a national corporation, but you may have a franchise at a local level. And that person running that business may not comply with the corporate policy. And when they violate it, the other problem is they may just get a slap on the wrist or corporate management may just turn its head. And I've looked at some of these companies as a result of testifying in court cases. And what I've found is that the policy says that if the franchise engages in discrimination, the franchise is supposed to be terminated. But in those cases, the franchise has never terminated. How does this behavior relate to or equate to advertising? Well, how it relates to advertising, and that's a good question because I'm in advertising. And you say, well, what is he doing studying marketplace discrimination? Well, it all has to do with what we call brand equity. Brand equity is the image of your company, how people perceive it. And it goes back to that survey with Denny's.

If you're trying to advertise and you're Denny's, or let's say you're Cracker Barrel with this incident that just happened with Chris Rock's mom, and you're trying to build up a certain brand equity, the way your company has perceived and how the worth it's given in the minds of the consumer, and you're contending with this negative publicity because of lawsuits, it's going to dilute the brand equity. So one of the things that we can measure is the fact of how people look at your advertising as a corporation, if they don't think you're treating them fairly. And so a company can't afford to do this going back to what you said a few minutes ago, African Americans representing about 12% of the population, spending about $700 billion. And if you add the six or seven hundred billion dollars that Hispanic Latinos spend and Asians, you have people of color spending a lot of money. And if you have a reputation or an image or a perception that you're not treating people fairly, that can cut deeply into those over trillion dollars that people of color

are spending. Dr. Winfrey Rontan, I have a teenage son and he wears the hip hop guard, at least in my present, he doesn't have him sagging off his back side. But what do we tell particularly young African American men who are wearing this apparel that when they go to them all because my son does go to them all, behavior in which we shouldn't have to articulate to them. But obviously we have to. That's a tough question because young people are different than you and me. And you know, they're going to say, look, you know, if I want to address this way and I have four boys, you know, you can't be telling them where you got to do this, you got to do that. And I have a son who's a Harvard MBA. And at the time he was graduating from Harvard, he had a shaved head, he had a goatee. And I said to him, I said, well, you know, you're six foot three, you're a black male, you have a shaved head, you got to goatee, you can look intimidating to somebody.

And that might affect the job that you might get. Well, he insisted that, you know, I am who I am, and I should be able to dress the way I am. And he ended up getting a very decent job. But I'm not going to say that's going to happen in the case of every young black male. You know, for example, you mentioned the Texas relays. We had an incident here in Texas just a couple years ago. I think it was either one of the black fraternities or some black group wanted to hold something after the Texas relays in one of the hotels. A lot of people came in dressed in a rap music hip-hop garb. Well, even though they had reserved the room for the party, at that point in time, the hotel management canceled their reservation because of the look of the people coming into the hotel. Wasn't right, but the reality is that happens in the marketplace. Now, I don't have any answers. I mean, young people, if they want to dress a certain way, I think you have to understand that there could be consequences of it. You know, I teach a class here at Texas on image of African

Americans in the media. And one of the things we've talked about in some of the studies is that if you have a black sounding name, for example, and you put it on your resume, there've been studies where you just randomly assign names to the same resume. And you know, you can get a name like Tamika and a name like Nancy and you put it on the same resume and you're going to get a different response. So even names evoke different responses. And you know the way you dress when people see you is going to evoke a different response. It's not right. It shouldn't be that way, but that's the reality of the world we live in. And it's probably going to be a long time before those things change. It may have to happen after our generation. It may be this younger generation where I see that in my mind, it seems to be a greater sense of fairness and treating people equally. And as they get into positions of management, and if there is more and more, they are the sales personnel dealing with people, I think some of this will dissipate the type of that may put me out of a job in terms of my research, but hey, that would gladly accept that.

Having gathered all this information and research, besides this program, how are you all attempting to disseminate this information to the public and to corporate America that there needs to be a paradigm shift here? Well, one of the things we're trying to do is to start a center. Okay. You know, I worked at Howard University for a couple of years. And as you know, Howard is the premier, historically black college, university. And I tried to get a center going there. And of all places, you would think, well, Howard should have been a place that we should have gotten it going. And we couldn't get the funding, you know, for a lot of different reasons. Now I'm here at the University of Texas, and I've tried to form some alliances with the Congressional Black Caucus, with the ACLU, with the NAACP, different Congress people, getting the university. I'm trying to get the university to buy into this concept. So we're knocking on some doors. And we hope to get a center started where we can not only conduct the kind of research that I've been doing along with some of my colleagues, but we can also be like a

clearing house for people to voice these incidents. And so we can keep track of them. And we want to be a place where we can publish kind of a state of the nation in terms of how retailers are doing. Like the NAACP does a report card on businesses. We should be able to do, but generally that report card measures how businesses are in terms of hiring, working with suppliers, etc. But we don't have a report card in terms of how businesses treat customers. And that's one of the things we hope we can do in the center too. Dr. Jerome D Williams, PhD professor of communication, the University of Texas at Austin. If you have questions, comments or suggestions asked you future in Black America programs, email us at lowercase J Hanson, H-A-N-S-O-N at kut.org. Also let us know what radio station you heard us over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. You can hear previous programs online at kut.org. Until you have the opportunity again for technical producer Dave with Alvaranth,

I'm John L Hansen Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week. CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America CDs, KUT radio, one university station, Austin, Texas, 78712. That's in Black America CDs, KUT radio, one university station, Austin, Texas, 78712. This has been a production of KUT radio.