The Racism at Your Local Beauty Supply Store
It’s easy to pretend racism isn’t prevalent in Canada.
With everything happening in the United States, we look at ourselves and have the nerve to deem our country a ‘safe haven’. The day Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, the internet was flooded with jokes and memes about packing up and heading to Canada, where you could be free of racism and fear. As much as I chuckled and retweeted, I still found myself wondering where exactly in Canada has racism gone extinct?
As a young black woman who has lived in North America my entire life, I have never felt safe here. Ive never publicly spoken about this topic, because apart of me truly believed that because I was never physically harmed, it wasn’t so bad. A part of me believed that maybe it was all in my head, maybe I was over thinking, but after working six weeks at a Beauty Supply Store, I realized that there was no way I could be making it all up. All of the anger, confusion and anxiety I have felt around the way I’ve been treated by other races in public was warranted.
Most beauty supply stores have a targeted audience. Black people. The shelves are stocked with products specifically aimed at our hair types, wigs and weaves (that, lets be honest, we could find for better quality and prices online), and even skin bleaching soaps and lotions. The store owners however, are usually of Asian decent. People who have most likely never used these products at all, so how do you sell black people products that you don’t know much about? You hire us.
The employees of beauty supply stores are exclusively black women who you can go to with the problem of a dry scalp, and be shown exactly what products you should and shouldn’t add to your wash day routine. The black women I worked with knew more about hair products than I could even imagine, they would even go as far as to cut your wig for you, and give you tips on how to style it. These women are the backbone of the store in general, so why are we treated with such disrespect from the moment we walk in, to the moment we leave?
The day of my first shift, the black woman who trained me let me know immediately that the owners of the store do not let us eat in the employee office. We were instructed to eat outside, in the mall at the bench just in front of the store. I didn’t question it, it was something I accepted immediately because I was so used to being told that I was ‘other’ that I was used to it. As my shift progressed, my trainer let me know that the washrooms were also outside and in the mall, just a 2 minute walk down past the store and I couldn’t miss it. Of course I saw no issue there, that was until I was shown the wig room. Now the wig room was connected to the employee’s office by a door. I had only then noticed that door lead to a quaint little washroom that we were forbidden to use. I found that odd, but again, I dismissed it.
I realized as the days went by, that none of the black women I worked with were trained on cash. I knew I wasn’t trained, and I had hoped to be trained eventually, but as I watched my fellow employee’s (one of which had been working there for two years) I saw that none of them went anywhere near the cash register. We weren’t trusted with the money. There was one more room I was instructed to never enter, the room with all of the hair products that hadn’t been shelved yet. We weren’t trusted with those either.
As days turned to weeks at my job, I felt more and more pressure to do everything perfectly, though my training had been just 15 minutes of being shown around the store. I was berated and embarrassed (in the middle of the store, and in front of customers) for little mistakes that I hadn’t been taught not to make. This beauty supply store was armed with several security cameras and I was never in charge of the store on my own, yet, I was to blame if a customer had stolen something and I was told my job wasn’t to ‘brush wigs’ my job was to watch customers. My job was to keep an eye on other black people who entered the store, and make sure that they didn’t steal. I was even pushed as far as to chase a woman out of the store who had stolen from them. I was enraged that day, never in any job that I have ever worked for, had I been instructed to chase someone out of the store who had been suspected of stealing. If you’ve worked anywhere, they constantly tell you the complete opposite. Had that situation turned dangerous, I could’ve been seriously hurt over a 10$ pack of hair all in the name of a store who didn’t treat me with respect in the first place.
Though the customers are spending their hard earned cash on these products, they are just as disrespected as the employees. Customers would constantly complain to me about being severely watched as they browsed the store, though it was apparently my job I could never bring myself to do it. I knew the feeling. I was told to never let a customer try on more than 3 wigs per visit because any more and they are ‘wasting my time’, which is what lead to my termination, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. To refuse to help a customer because she was indecisive and ‘wasting my time’, when my only real job was to help customers in the first place.
We know the way we are treated in stores like these. Ive had people come to me on multiple occasions, worried about my well being at my job after seeing the way I was spoken to, or sometimes just checking in and making sure my shift was going okay and that I wasn’t being mistreated. We know, we all do. We see it and we feel it, but what can we do about it? I am but a cog in a mighty machine, but we all know what we can do when we come together for change.
Black dollars matter, and If it wasn’t for us, black people, stores like this wouldn’t even exist and Im starting to think that maybe they shouldn’t.
