Abstract
Shopping While Black: Consumer Racial Profiling in America is a moderately brief book that presents the history of and research on consumer racial profiling (CRP). However, its mild brevity is not indicative of its depth. Despite being to the point, the book is an intellectually dense and comprehensive examination of its topic. It should be noted that Distinguished Professor Shaun L. Gabbidon and Professor George E. Higgins’ book is a part of the Criminology and Justice Studies series, which publishes books intended for undergraduate and graduate students, but written in a fashion that may also be of benefit to a lay audience. Although it is the authors’ recommendation that Shopping While Black is best suited for students and researchers working in the domains of Criminology, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Security Studies, and Law, I concur that the book would additionally be a worthwhile introduction to CRP for mainstream readers seeking to acquire knowledge on racial profiling in shopping.
According to Gabbidon and Higgins (2020), consumer racial profiling “occurs when a shopper is singled out for unwarranted bad treatment/service and/or criminal suspicion based on their racial/ethnic background” (p. xii). Although it is the authors’ position that CRP is a subject sorely in need of more research, they meticulously sift through a substantial amount of quantitative and qualitative research throughout the course of their book. They begin by unpacking the historical context and development of CRP. While walking readers through this, the authors note that profilers did not always intuitively link black people as the primary suspects of shoplifting. The book illustrates that, in fact, prior to the mid-20th century, wealthy white women were thought to be the most frequent retail thieves. Before that time period, blacks were typically unable to enter white-owned brick and mortar businesses due to the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision of 1896—which of course legalized segregation. It was after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, as well as the 1960s Civil Rights Acts, that CRP became a widespread phenomenon. Many white business owners were unhappy with being forced to serve the black customers they saw as nothing more than violent criminals, and consequently, CRP became a normal experience for black consumers.
Gabbidon and Higgins situate consumer racial profiling among two prominent theoretical frameworks in criminology—labeling theory and conflict theory. They argue that labeling theory is an appropriate foundation because profilers regularly perceive blacks to be shoplifters, even though research suggests that they are no more likely than whites to steal in retail settings. The authors posit that the labeling of black people as shoplifting suspects can inherently lead to them being falsely accused by profilers, as well as being overrepresented among apprehended offenders. The authors place CRP within the literature on conflict theory by proposing that businesses owned by dominant social groups may be inclined to treat minority group customers as a threat. Gabbidon and Higgins suggest that the owners and managers of these businesses may deem black customers to be shoplifters, and thus this mentality may find its way into their store associates and security staff.
The authors analyze data on CRP from an array of sources, including Gallup’s 2004 Minority Rights & Relations/Black-White Social Audit. They state that, to date, this has been the only national poll to take a concentrated look at CRP. Gabbidon and Higgins also analyze data from the 2009 Penn State Poll in order to determine how much public support there is for CRP. Multivariate analysis and logistic regression are used to examine the two aforementioned surveys. Curiously, the authors found some support for CRP among black respondents, and thus they chose to home in on those participants by extracting them from the Gallup poll for additional analyses. The authors decided to do so in an effort to better understand the characteristics and demographics of those black participants who support CRP. Qualitative analysis was performed on a subsequent Penn State Poll from 2012, which sought to accurately explain why the public may support or oppose the use of CRP in retail settings. Gabbidon and Higgins provide a number of emergent themes from their analysis, and they provide further context for them by means of comments from the study’s participants. In addition to all of these analyses, Gabbidon and Higgins examine over twenty court case studies concerning consumer racial profiling. One of these cases, 2005’s People of the State of New York, by Eliot Spitzer, Attorney General of the State of New York v. Macy’s East, provides the basis for how the authors’ believe CRP can begin to be addressed. Some of the things the authors suggest are the installation of security monitor positions, specific recordkeeping which would document all shoplifting accusation confrontations, and training for every employee so they can learn to properly identify behavioral cues common among shoplifters. This last piece is particularly critical as Gabbidon and Higgins provide empirical evidence that CRP is not an effective practice toward the prevention of shoplifting. In fact, they show that a far more successful way to identify potential shoplifters is for employees and security staff to pay attention to certain behavioral cues customers may display, rather than demographic characteristics.
The strengths of Shopping While Black are numerous. The book offers a detailed and easy-to-follow narrative for the reader to comprehend how CRP came to be a pervasive practice, as well as how, where, and by whom it is applied. The authors’ analyses and the accompanying explanations for their findings provide readers much to glean from in order to appreciate the frequency of CRP. Readers will also learn what contexts it occurs in, whom exactly is victimized, and how it may affect victims’ lives. For instructors who may use the book as reading material for a course, I think the plentiful case studies would be a valuable tool to engage students. However, and by the authors’ own admission, a weakness of the book is that on occasion they speculate beyond the data in order to understand the rationale behind survey participants’ attitudes and to explain a few of the research findings. This is a challenge intrinsic to any research analyzing secondary data, and it is perhaps especially so given CRP is a topic in which there is a paucity of research.
By citing past research and presenting their own findings, one salient point the authors stress throughout Shopping While Black is that any black person could be subject to consumer racial profiling. Gabbidon and Higgins emphasize that social class does not alter this. They explain that a black consumer who appears to be of higher social status can still be racially profiled, as the authors gesture to the personal victimization stories of black scholars and criminal justice professionals, as well as the similar experiences of famous black figures like Oprah Winfrey. Gabbidon and Higgins argue that the damage of CRP is profound not just for its victims, but also the businesses in which profilers work. The authors underscore how greatly black lives can be affected by CRP, as they state that “engaging in it has the potential to literally ruin lives” (p. 116). Furthermore, the authors expound that black consumers spend over a trillion dollars annually, and they suggest this number is particularly critical as almost two-thirds of blacks will not return to a store after they have been racially profiled by staff. Given the risk to businesses’ revenue, it seems peculiar that consumer racial profiling continues to be prevalent, especially as it is a practice in which the authors specify does not work.
