In a 2016 Snapchat video, Zendaya recounted a negative interaction she had with a cashier at a Vons supermarket. All the “Dune: Part Two” star was doing was trying to purchase a few hundred dollars worth of gift cards when a female cashier treated her disrespectfully, leading Zendaya to believe that she and the friend accompanying her had been racially profiled by the woman. “I don’t think she was a huge fan of our skin tone,” she said. According to Zendaya, she was ready to pay for the cards and had her wallet out. However, the cashier didn’t just refuse to sell the cards to the actor — she purportedly grabbed her wallet and tossed it. “‘You can’t afford this’ is how she looked at me,” Zendaya continued, [1:04] ending her anecdote with a remark that was seemingly about racial discrimination remaining a prevalent problem. “There’s so much progress to be done,” she said.
Amid the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, Zendaya told InStyle that seeing the harm that racial injustice can cause is difficult for her. “This time is very hard to talk about. It’s painful,” she said. She also recalled how the 2016 fatal police shootings of two Black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, made her upset and worried about her father. “I didn’t want him to go out and do anything. … He knows what he knows. But I still had that fear, and that scared me.”
