Leona Lewis has revealed a racist incident she and her father suffered.
The X Factor winning songstress shared the story of an occasion on which she and her dad suffered racial discrimination in an emotional Instagram video.
Sharing details of the offensive experience with her 600,000 followers, Leona wrote, 'This deeply impacted me. I hope you will listen until the end.'
Going on to relay the racist account, Leona said, "A few years ago, my dad and I were on a high street in London. At the time, my management company was in Fulham, so we were walking around the area after a meeting."
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Explaining that she and her father decided to pop into a "cute store" along the way, Leona added that the pair were the only Black people inside the shop.
Continuing, she said that as she browsed the shop, she could feel the lady working there "hovering" around her. The woman eventually approached Leona and her dad and told her to stop touching the store's stock.
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"She came up to my dad and I and said, ‘You need to put that stuff down, you’re not allowed to touch it’.
"Every other person was picking stuff up, looking at it. I immediately knew what was happening and I asked her, ‘Why? Everyone else is picking stuff up. Why do we have to put stuff down? We’re just looking at it, I’m probably going to buy it'."
https://www.instagram.com/tv/CBGxBMQgNxG/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Revealing that she and the lady both became confrontational, Leona said "It sparked this rage in me over being singled out and targeted.
"[By now it was just] me, this woman, and my dad in the store. And she became really defensive, really agitated, and ran behind the counter. She said she was going to call the police on us if we didn’t leave the store now.
"I couldn’t calm down because I was so angry. I knew what this woman was doing to us. But my dad has been in positions like this before and he knew that I needed to make myself smaller. And that just enraged me even more."
Recalling that she left the shop and began sobbing in the car, Leona said that her dad went back inside with her CD to show the woman, who then came out to tell her, "I'm so sorry, I didn't know who you were."
"My heart kind of sank. I confronted her and said, ‘You’re racist. You’re a racist. You targeted me and my dad, you wanted to throw us out of the store because we’re Black. You’re racist'."
Alluding to the conversations surrounding racism happening all over the world right now, Leona exclaimed, "This is racism. So when people in the UK are saying that racism isn’t a problem here, it is a problem. It’s a big problem."
