Woman racially abused in ‘spine-chilling’ rant
A mother-of-three who was racially abused by another supermarket shopper with ‘‘spinechilling composure’’ says society still seems unprepared to call out far-right beliefs.
Melanie Sharma-Barrow and her 12-year-old daughter were at the fish counter at their local New World – Victoria Park, Auckland – on Friday at 12.30pm when a woman in her 20s or 30s approached repeating a sentence she could not quite hear.
‘‘The fourth time I heard it quite clearly. ‘Yous people aren’t so high up in the evolution tree’.’’
Sharma-Barrow said the supermarket failed to take action, police were slow to act, and hate speech should be taken more seriously. She fears little has been learned from the Christchurch mosque terrorist attacks.
A Foodstuffs spokeswoman defended how its staff handled the incident, saying the customer was understood to have a mental condition. But Sharma-Barrow said mental illness and racism were not synonymous and too often used as an excuse.
She tried walking away to get the woman away from her daughter, saying it was ‘‘not very nice’’.
‘‘She kept saying: ‘You’re lower than us’.’’
The woman took her face mask off to ‘‘tell us what she thought about our status’’. A man who said he was her father told the woman it was wrong, asked her to apologise, and said she ‘‘sometimes says things like this’’.
‘‘The woman was composed. It was spine-chilling,’’ SharmaBarrow said.
During the whole interaction, ‘‘not one person got involved’’, so she went to speak with staff. ‘‘I said, ‘I’ve just been racially abused, where have you been?’ ’’
A group of young female staff members kindly rallied around her and her daughter. The staff members also expressed feeling racially targeted by the comments, but did not seem to have much power other than to stare at the abuser until she became so uncomfortable she left the store, she.
Sharma-Barrow said she had written a complaint to the supermarket chain, but it was yet to respond.
Foodstuffs NZ head of corporate affairs Antoinette Laird said staff ‘‘took appropriate steps at the time to monitor the situation’’.
‘‘The customer is a regular visitor to the store, and we understand has a mental health condition, which may have contributed to the exchange.’’
Sharma-Barrow reported the incident to police.