Singer Leona Lewis details being racially profiled while shopping with her father in London
Leona Lewis recently shared a deeply personal experience in which she and her father were racially profiled while out shopping in London's Chelsea neighborhood.
The three-time Grammy nominee, who rose to fame after winning the U.K.'s "The X Factor" in 2006, shared an Instagram video detailing the encounter, which she said took place a few years ago.
She explained that she wanted to share the experience because she's heard many say that racism is not as prevalent in the U.K. as it is in the United States. Lewis said the encounter happened when she and her dad were looking around to buy some new things for her home following a meeting she had with her management company.
"We saw this cute little shop that we went into, and we were looking around and there were other customers in there," she said, not disclosing the name of the store. "I didn't realize at the time but all of the other customers were white -- me and my dad were the only black people in there."
"So we're looking around, picking up stuff as you usually do in a store, and I started to notice that the lady store owner was kind of hovering around," Lewis continued. "Eventually she came up to my dad and I and said, 'You need to put that down. You need to put that stuff down. You're not allowed to touch it.'"
Lewis and her father were confused at first and didn't understand why they were being asked to do so, as other white customers in the store were picking up items.
She explained to the store owner that they were checking out different items they were likely going to buy and asked why they were being asked to put them down.
However, the store owner simply became "really confrontational" and more adamant about Lewis and her father not touching items. "Now I could see people in the store, like I said, it was a lot of white people, and they were looking and kind of like whispering under their breaths and they started leaving the store. I became confrontational because obviously it sparked like this rage in me as to why we're being singled out and targeted."
She and her father were the only customers remaining in the store at that point, as all the other customers left following the confrontation.
"She became really defensive, got really agitated and ran behind the counter and said, 'I'm calling the police on you -- you need to get out my store now,'" Lewis shared. "And I just became so enraged."
She said she remembers her father, who she describes as "the most lovable, big black guy," trying to calm her down during the incident.
"I couldn't calm down. I was so angry, I knew what this woman was doing to us, but my dad has been in positions like this before -- same as me, but in a different way," Lewis said. "He, you know, he knew that I need to make myself smaller, and I need to make myself calm and that just enraged me even more."
Lewis said her father managed to get her to leave the store, and she went to her car and completely broke down. Her father then grabbed her CD from the car and went back into the store. When he came back out about five minutes later, the woman who had racially profiled the pair was with him.
"I was like hyperventilating I was so angry, and the woman was at the side of the car. She knocked and she said, 'I'm so, so sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know who you were.' That just kind of -- my heart kind of sank."
"I confronted her and said, 'You're racist, you're racist. You targeted me and my dad -- you wanted to throw us out of the store because of our color ... And she was kind of in denial." Lewis said the woman claimed she "just got scared" and thought the pair might "take something."
"That is the conditioning that we have," the singer pointed out. "This conditioning that we were going to take something -- black people, oh, they're going to steal something, or there's something to be scared of, or people with darker skin tones are going to do something bad."
The singer said she wished the white people in the store, who left because they knew it was wrong that Lewis and her father were being racially profiled, had actually spoken up.
"For the people that are not speaking out or not saying anything, like you're the people that left ... you kind of, 'Oh, it's disgusting, but it's going to disrupt my day too much to really get involved and really stand by their side and say, Hey, what are you doing? Why are you targeting them? This is wrong.'"
She urged her fans to speak against racial injustice. "You need to stand with us and you need to acknowledge that it's happening because when you don't acknowledge that it's happening, you're diminishing the pain and you're diminishing our humanity," she said.
"I'm someone who's mixed race. My mom is white, my dad is black, and I had a beautiful representation of what that unity meant for me. Because when that comes together in the most loving way, it is the most beautiful thing. Equal and beautiful," she added. "But that's not the reality of what's going on."
