Videos capturing everyday indignities and injury toward Black or Brown consumers have become media staples, showing the complexity, risk, and traumas many shoppers encounter in retail, restaurants, and other marketplaces. But each one quickly fades in the media spotlight. In Retail Racism, Michelle Dunlap helps readers understand the ongoing experiences of Black and Brown people as they navigate this reality. Based on 19 in-depth interviews with consumers across the country, Dunlap aims to create a larger discussion that engages readers and empowers them to interrupt, disrupt, and ameliorate the inappropriate and racialized handling of consumers in America today. In doing so, Retail Racism is about not only shopping, but also humane living in America, including surviving and making sense of inequitable experiences, what to do about them, and the larger issues and contexts that surround the marketplace for Black and Brown people. A portion of the author proceeds from book sales are automatically donated to The Florida Education Fund (FEF), a non-profit organization established in 1984 to help provide opportunities for educational advancement.

Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses. Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods. In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil. Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Race has long shaped shopping experiences for many Americans. Retail exchanges and establishments have made headlines as flashpoints for conflict not only between blacks and whites, but also between whites, Mexicans, Asian Americans, and a wide variety of other ethnic groups, who have at times found themselves unwelcome at white-owned businesses. Race and Retail documents the extent to which retail establishments, both past and present, have often catered to specific ethnic and racial groups. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the original essays collected here explore selling and buying practices of nonwhite populations around the world and the barriers that shape these habits, such as racial discrimination, food deserts, and gentrification. The contributors highlight more contemporary issues by raising questions about how race informs business owners’ ideas about consumer demand, resulting in substandard quality and higher prices for minorities than in predominantly white neighborhoods. In a wide-ranging exploration of the subject, they also address revitalization and gentrification in South Korean and Latino neighborhoods in California, Arab and Turkish coffeehouses and hookah lounges in South Paterson, New Jersey, and tourist capoeira consumption in Brazil. Race and Retail illuminates the complex play of forces at work in racialized retail markets and the everyday impact of those forces on minority consumers. The essays demonstrate how past practice remains in force in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

Winner of the 2022 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Outstanding Book Award! Shopping While Black: Consumer Racial Profiling in America lays out the results of nearly two decades of research on racial profiling in retail settings. Gabbidon and Higgins address the generally neglected racial profiling that occurs in retail settings. Although there is no existing national database on shoplifting or consumer racial profiling (CRP) from which to study the problem, they survey relevant legal cases and available data sources. This problem clearly affects a large number of racial/ethnic minorities, and causes real harm to the victims, such as the emotional trauma attached to being excessively monitored in stores and, in the worst-case scenarios, falsely accused of shoplifting. Their analysis is informed by their own experience: one co-author is a former security executive for a large retailer, and both are Black men who understand firsthand the sting of being profiled because of their color. After providing an overview of the history of CRP and the official and unofficial data sources and criminological literature on this topic, they address public opinion polls, as well as the extent and impact of victimization. They also provide a review of CRP litigation, provide recommendations for retailers to reduce racial profiling, and also chart some directions for future research. This book is appropriate for researchers as well as advanced undergraduates and graduate students in Criminology, Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Security Studies, and Law programs, and will be of interest to the general reader.

We need to talk about racism before it destroys our democracy. And that conversation needs to start with an acknowledgement that racism is coded into even the most ordinary interactions. Every time we interact with another human being, we unconsciously draw on a set of expectations to guide us through the encounter. What many of us in the United States—especially white people—do not recognize is that centuries of institutional racism have inescapably molded those expectations. This leads us to act with implicit biases that can shape everything from how we greet our neighbors to whether we take a second look at a resume. This is tacit racism, and it is one of the most pernicious threats to our nation. In Tacit Racism, Anne Warfield Rawls and Waverly Duck illustrate the many ways in which racism is coded into the everyday social expectations of Americans, in what they call Interaction Orders of Race. They argue that these interactions can produce racial inequality, whether the people involved are aware of it or not, and that by overlooking tacit racism in favor of the fiction of a “color-blind” nation, we are harming not only our society’s most disadvantaged—but endangering the society itself. Ultimately, by exposing this legacy of racism in ordinary social interactions, Rawls and Duck hope to stop us from merely pretending we are a democratic society and show us how we can truly become one.

Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption: A Sociological View looks at the central concerns of consumer culture through the lens of race and ethnicity. Each chapter illustrates the connections between race, ethnicity, and consumption by focusing on a specific theme: identity, crossing cultures, marketing and advertising, neighborhoods, discrimination, and social activism. By exploring issues such as multicultural marketing, cultural appropriation, consumer racial profiling, urban food deserts, and racialized political consumerism, students, scholars, and other curious readers will gain insight on the ways that racial and ethnic boundaries shape, and are shaped by, consumption. This book goes beyond the typical treatments of race and ethnicity in introductory texts on consumption by not only providing a comprehensive overview of the major theories and concepts that sociologists use to make sense of consumption, race, and ethnicity, but also by examining these themes within distinctly contemporary contexts such as digital platforms and activism. Documenting the complexities and contradictions within consumer culture, Race, Ethnicity, and Consumption is an excellent text for sociology courses on consumers and consumption, race and ethnicity, the economy, and inequality. It will also be an informative resource for courses on consumer culture in the broader social sciences, marketing, and the humanities.

Welfare Racism analyzes the impact of racism on US welfare policy. Through historical and present-day analysis, the authors show how race-based attitudes, policy making, and administrative policies have long had a negative impact on public assistance programs. The book adds an important and controversial voice to the current welfare debates surrounding the recent legilation that abolished the AFDC.

What we got wrong -- A concept catches fire -- Food desert realities : perception, money, and transportation -- Food desert realities : social capital, household dynamics, and taste -- The "Healthy food" frame -- The problem solvers -- A path forward -- Epilogue -- Appendix : food desert media database.

Within the context of the nation's changing demographic and cultural landscape, this one of a kind book brings together a national roster of leading practitioners and scholars who recommend innovative strategies for reducing racial and ethnic disparities that are pervasive across all fields of practice in the health and human services.

In this book, Traci Parker examines the movement to racially integrate white-collar work and consumption in American department stores, and broadens our understanding of historical transformations in African American class and labor formation. Built on the goals, organization, and momentum of earlier struggles for justice, the department store movement channeled the power of store workers and consumers to promote black freedom in the mid-twentieth century. Sponsoring lunch counter sit-ins and protests in the 1950s and 1960s, and challenging discrimination in the courts in the 1970s, this movement ended in the early 1980s with the conclusion of the Sears, Roebuck, and Co. affirmative action cases and the transformation and consolidation of American department stores. In documenting the experiences of African American workers and consumers during this era, Parker highlights the department store as a key site for the inception of a modern black middle class, and demonstrates the ways that both work and consumption were battlegrounds for civil rights.