Carla Barrientos was 19 and a couple months into her job at Abercrombie & Fitch’s Bakersfield store when she asked her manager for more hours and day shifts.
There weren’t any available, he told Barrientos, a CSUB communications student at the time. Barrientos persisted, saying she didn’t enjoy the stocking, vacuuming and window cleaning that came with night hours, and that a friend offered to swap shifts with her.
“But Carla,” he responded, “you’re such a good window washer.”
Barrientos' friend offered an alternative explanation: “I bet you they’re not scheduling you because you’re Black.”
Soon Barrientos wasn’t getting scheduled at all.
Barrientos is now 38 and tells that story in the documentary “White Hot: The Rise and Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch” premiering on Netflix April 19. The 88-minute film explores the preppy clothier’s rise in the late 1990s, early 2000s as the place for the “cool” kids to shop and the later exposure of its discriminatory hiring and marketing practices.
Those practices resulted in discrimination lawsuits against the company including a 2003 class action one in which Barrientos was a named plaintiff. It alleged employment discrimination against Blacks, Latinos, Asians, females and others in favor of young, fit, whites — especially male ones with ripped abs like the models in its advertisements and store posters.
The lawsuit was settled in 2004 for $40 million and a consent decree in which Abercrombie & Fitch agreed to overhaul its employment and advertising tactics. The documentary goes on to explore the company’s initial failures to live up to its promises, what’s happened since and the degree to which the culture and attitudes that fueled the retailer’s success still exist today.
Barrientos sat down with the documentary’s director for a two-hour interview in Los Angeles in November 2020 and watched the final product last week. Her story is front and center in it.
“It’s something I’m proud of, the way I handled such an ugly situation,” Barrientos said in an interview about the documentary this week. “I want people to know about it, and hopefully it will inspire them to make changes in their own personal (life) or to say something if they see something that isn’t right.”
Abercrombie & Fitch acknowledged its ugly past in a response to the documentary published on social media March 31.
"In the spirit of transparency, we want to directly acknowledge the news of an upcoming documentary that will feature Abercrombie & Fitch and focus on an era that took place under previous leadership," it said. "While the problematic elements of that era have already been subject to wide and valid criticism over the years, we want to be clear that they are actions, behaviors and decisions that would not be permitted or tolerated at the company now."
All-American girl
Barrientos was like a lot of young people in the late 1990s, early 2000s who shopped at and worked for Abercrombie & Fitch stores, which sold clothes described in the documentary as a cross between sexy Calvin Klein and all-American Ralph Lauren.
“I liked the way they looked. I liked the way they fit,” Barrientos said. “I was very much into the low-rise, really fitted look. … And like I said in the film, it looked all-American, and what made me not fit that?”
She noticed the company’s marketing was “99.9 percent white,” but she didn’t perceive it as overtly racist and could still see herself fitting into that space.
The store managers never scheduled Barrientos a lot of hours, she said. The ones they did assign her usually started at 6 or 8 p.m. — toward or at the end of closing time. That meant her duties were stocking, cleaning and setting out merchandise for the next day, not working the floor with customers as she hoped to spend more time doing.
And while it didn’t scream “racism” to her, she noticed differences between her and those working days.
“I wasn’t blind. I could see who was working in the day when I would go to the mall and hang out with friends or shop with family,” Barrientos said. “And they did not look like me as far as the color of their skin. They were white, still young like me, but they were not Black. They were not Latino. They were not Asian.”
So it felt more painful than shocking when her friend, a fellow college student, said out loud what she instinctively knew to be true: that race was the reason she wasn’t getting day shifts. Instead of protesting, Barrientos pleaded with store managers to explain what she could do to win them over.
Eventually they gave her no shifts, which she describes as “fired by phased out.” She focused on her studies and her other job, at the CSUB help desk doing computer repair for staff and faculty.
Barrientos earned a bachelor’s degree in communications in 2006, credential to teach special education in 2010, and master’s degree in education in 2014, all from CSUB. Today she is a program specialist with the Kern County Superintendent of School’s office and past president of the CSUB Alumni Association.
Telling her story
When Barrientos was still in college, her younger sister read about the class action lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch and encouraged her to call the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Barrientos did, and a grueling series of depositions followed that revealed to her the problem was systemic, not just in the Bakersfield store.
“I didn’t want it to happen to anyone else,” she said of her decision to push through with the litigation. “I knew it was wrong and if there was anything I could do to change it, I was going to do it.”
Barrientos received a payout she declined to disclose as a result of the settlement. She was also among the diverse group of former Abercrombie & Fitch store employees interviewed by Morley Safer for a “60 Minutes” piece that aired in 2004, an “amazing” experience for someone who’d grown up watching the legendary news program, and still does.
It was one of Barrientos’ fellow class-action plaintiffs who suggested the “White Hot” producers interview her, and Director Alison Klayman did. Barrientos said she told her story again because she’s proud of having been part of the case and believes it’s important for people to know how racism has affected so many people in so many different ways.
She also hopes the film will empower people to stand up against discrimination. That includes her children, Julian, 3, and Gianna, nine months, whom she shares with her husband, Jorge Barrientos, director of marketing for law firm Chain | Cohn | Clark.
“I would hope that my children, if they’re ever faced with racism or prejudice because of their color, will have the strength to say, ‘No, this is not right,’” Barrientos said. “Or if they see someone else treated that way, they can say, ‘This is not right.'"
The Barrientos family (l to r): Jorge, Julian, Carla and Gianna.
Original source can be found here.
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