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From NPR:

Several people in Oregon succeed in suing retailers for racial discrimination

April 27, 20234:37 PM ET
Heard on All Things Considered
By Katia Riddle

Historically, it’s been hard to prosecute cases of racial discrimination against customers. But some in Oregon have had recent success suing retailers for discriminating against them.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

Many people of color are familiar with the experience of shopping while Black, walking into a store and being followed by a security guard, maybe being asked to leave or asked for a receipt on the way out. Legal recourse can be difficult, but as Katia Riddle reports, several people in Oregon have had success suing retailers for racial discrimination.

KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: March 26, 2020, was a day that would change Michael Mangum’s life forever. It started, like many other days, with the to-do list. His wife had been bugging him to replace a lightbulb.

MICHAEL MANGUM: And I knew my wife was going to be coming home from work, so I said, I better go get this lightbulb.

RIDDLE: The light he needed was for the refrigerator—a tiny, specialized bulb, not something he had in the house. He went to Walmart. In the aisle, he described seeing out of the corner of his eye a guy standing close by.

MANGUM: And the first thing out of his mouth was, what are you looking at me for? So I looked back to my right to see if it was somebody else he could have been talking to.

RIDDLE: The guy was a security guard.

MANGUM: I said, man, you just need to leave me alone. I’m just looking for a lightbulb.

RIDDLE: Instead, he says, the security guard told him to leave. Mangum refused. The security guard called the police. Now, Mangum is an outreach worker, and he says after this incident, he thought of the vulnerable teenagers he mentors. Something he tells them all the time—stand up for yourself.

MANGUM: And then when this happened to me, I had to practice what I preach to the youth. You know?

RIDDLE: He took Walmart to court for racial discrimination and won.… The jury awarded the maximum amount in this case, more than $4 million. …

KAFOURY: A ton of white guilt about what white people have done to Black people in our country came out through the Black Lives Matter movement.

CHRIS DOMINIC: From what we’ve seen, I would say that is true.

RIDDLE: Chris Dominic is a jury consultant in Portland. He studies the behavior of juries and says before George Floyd, there was often at least one holdout on a jury in these kinds of cases, often a white person—not anymore.

DOMINIC: And so now there’s a general sense that, OK, there’s a contingency of people out there that are shamelessly racist.

RIDDLE: Dominic says this is especially true in Democratic strongholds, like Portland.

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