Spice Slams Walmart For Racial Profiling: “I Feel A Way!”
Spice is heated! The Dancehall Queen experienced the ugly wrath of racial profiling while shopping at Walmart on Saturday. She took to her Instagram Live immediately after the incident to vent to her more than 3 million followers in quite a bit of a rage.
In what was apparently a little shopping spree, Spice explained that while she was checking-out three trolleys of merchandise (i.e. “@walmartfashion”) she seemingly created some “excitement” when opted to pay with cash.
“When mi tek out the cash and a count up the money…mi see a black woman run come from over Jericho, ‘Ummm excuse me, ummm, you know we gotta double count?’ She use one f**k-up word, mi neven know it, it come een like a dem store word where she a try fi seh di woman alone cya count di cash, somebody else haffi count which it has happened to me before when mi go Louis Vuitton and use mi cash…”
Spice said the employees informed her that they weren’t equipped with a counterfeit bill detector and would have to take turns double-checking her cash. “You know mi a get ignorant now cah memba you nuh, me stand up a di counter, you know the line long in deh cause a Christmas now … so everybody a look like, ‘ah wah dis now?”
She said the employees (three Black women) went on to further embarrass her by asking why some of the $50 bills looked different from the others. “Mi just take the rest a money out a mi bag and say, ‘you want a next one?’ … Make she see say there is more where that came from.” Upon realizing her distress, one of the ladies then told Spice, to not “feel a way” about them screening her.
“B*tch, I feel a way!, Walmart I feel a way!” Spice exclaimed. “Yuh see if mi did white, sad to say, she woulda expect seh mi coulda have so much money. But she don’t know mi, she don’t know seh a Spice. She just see a likkle black girl come wid di three trolley a cash out and she see cash so she tun eediat. She black enuh, but true society done embed it inna our mind already seh we nuffi have so much money and we nuffi push out three trolley outta Walmart.”
The Clean singer said she usually tries to “act nice and decent” when abroad, but having been the direct victim of what she felt was racial profiling caused her “Jamaican side” to surface. “Mi seh di Jamaican just come outta mi. Mi seh, ‘lady, I don’t care weh yuh waan seh, I feel a way’,” she continued.
Spice said it was instances like these that inspired her 2018 single Black Hypocrisy . The track hit out against systemic classism and racism, and formed part of her Capture EP.
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