Timothy Birdnow

A tempest is brewing after an employee of Old Navy accused the company of racism when filming an episode of Queer Eye. She claims she and other employees were told to stay in back while the company brought in white workers.

According to Philly Mag

According to Alvarado and two other store employees who were present, approximately 10 white Old Navy employees from other locations participated in the taping of a segment for Queer Eye,which is shooting its fifth season in the city.

"I was told to go to the back of the store by [Old Navy managers] involved with the production,” Alvarado, a ship-to-store lead, told Philadelphiamagazine. "About six of my fellow co-workers were there, and we were shooed away from the camera as they filmed with these outside employees, who came from West Chester, Mount Pocono, and New Jersey. It immediately seemed odd to me that they were being used to tape at our store location when we already have a diverse group of workers who had been preparing for Queer Eye to come for nearly a week.”

Now, there are any number of reasons why an employee may be asked to stay out of the way of filming; she may be too loud, or too, uh, flamboyant, or whatnot. Maybe she was just a bad employee and the company decided not to reward her. But, of course, if you are a minority you can always gall back on the good old accusation:

"I felt the racism the moment I was being told by managers to go to sections of the store that I usually don’t work around,” a third Center City Old Navy employee of color said. "It became clear that we weren’t going to be filmed because we hadn’t been asked to sign consent forms, and they made it a point to keep us as far away from the cameras as possible. Most of the staff and managers at our store location are black.”

Managers at the Center City location referred Philadelphia magazine to Old Navy’s corporate office for comment. A spokesperson sent the following statement by email:

"At Old Navy, we celebrate the diversity of our teams and our customers and foster an environment of inclusion and belonging. We were proud to work with The Queer Eye show to film at our store in Philadelphia and to feature our local store manager on camera. We also worked with additional employees in the area to help ensure the store ran seamlessly for customers, as the location was open for business during filming, and we expect they may appear in background shots. These individuals are reflective of our diverse employee population. We would never select employees to participate – or not – based on race. That is completely inaccurate and against the values we stand for as a company.”

Netflix and Queer Eye both deny participating in this decision.

Question; if this is about racism, why shoot it at an inner city store? Wouldn't Old Navy have been wiser to go to some lilly-white neighborhood? I suspect the reason this woman was sent away was because she was either uncooperative or just plain coyote ugly. The same is probably true of the others.

I get a kick out of this; it's what happens when liberal meets liberal. Old Navy had to know what they were getting into just by agreeing to host a show called Queer Eyer for the Straight Guy". It starts out full of political correctness. You have to walk on eggshells in such an instance. And Netflix? These are the guys giving Barack Obama a bunch of air time. No doubt Old Navy looked at the workforce and realized that none of the people there were going to be inviting to potential customers. They didn't want to look like a thug hangout. So they asked some of the workers to stay in back. They probably would have used them judiciously, but the minorities immediately got their hackles up.

This is what you get when you play the Left's game; they eat their own.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:28 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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