A video of an angry shopper Karen has gone viral, showing the woman proudly parading through a Denver Target wearing blackface, aggressively—and cynically—asking employees for Pride merchandise.
The video was uploaded to Twitter, the platform now known as X, by @iceyxblues on Wednesday but removed early Thursday. TMZ identified the rogue shopper as Ersilia Campbell.
“My mom and i dealt w[ith] this in a target in denver today,” the post was captioned. “Dude wtf.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Campbell can be seen in the clip very visibly wearing dark brown makeup caked all over her face and leaning over a red counter.
“You’re a horrible person,” someone off-camera tells Campbell when she gets to the counter.
“You’re a horrible person,” Campbell echoes back.
“You’re literally doing blackface,” the person holding the camera tells her.
Campbell acknowledges her offensive appearance.
“Lester Holt did whiteface and nobody said shit,” she says, referencing the NBC news anchor dressing up as British singer Susan Boyle for Halloween.
“Where’s your Pride section?” Campbell asks the sales reps behind the counter, referring to the controversy surrounding products Target sold during Pride Month. “I need to know! …Oh, I thought they were celebrating this and they took our flag forever? No? I was wrong. My bad. I don’t shop at Target.”
Then, Campbell walks past the checkout counters and leaves the store.
According to TMZ, after Campbell left Target, she went to a Starbucks wearing a shirt covered in pro-Trump stickers and complained about how she lost her job with the U.S. Postal Service. The outlet reported that Campbell was fired in February, and a trespassing notice was posted at the post office indicating she was banned. Employees were warned to call Postal Inspection if they saw her there.
Unlike blackface, which is rooted in racism to reinforce Black people’s inferiority, whiteface doesn’t have a derogatory connotation. Blackface stems back to white performers darkening their skin to mock enslaved and free Black people, and those performances turned into Black caricatures that are still prevalent.
Neither Campbell nor Target immediately returned The Daily Beast’s requests for comment Thursday.
