On Martin Luther King Day, January 17, 2022, Xuna Hu, a Springfield resident, was shopping at the Lowe's at 3101 Wabash Avenue in Springfield, Illinois, when she was racially harassed by a customer whose daughter Jennifer works at the store. She was told, "GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY" after the woman hostilely took one of the two firepits from her that she was planning to purchase, and when Xuna followed her to the checkout station with her cellphone camera on to demand an apology, another employee, David, blocked access to Jennifer and her mother, dismissed her request, and repeatedly demanded that she stop recording and erase her video. David kept demanding that Xuna erase the video because he claimed that she "was making [the incident] something bigger than it was."

However, Lowe's should know that for an Asian American to be told to "Go back to your country," is to experience an unfortunately too common example of anti-Asian hate and racism. Asian Americans have been in the US for more than 175 years and those of us who live here have every right to call it home. The United States is our country too, so for someone who sees an Asian face and says "GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRY," they are assuming foreignness and expressing their belief that we do not belong in this country as much as a white person does, and that is just plain wrong. That's blatantly racist and wrong. 

We demand that Lowe's acknowledge that their employees were wrong to stand by and allow this racial bullying and harassment to take place and repeatedly deny that anything wrong had happened. We further demand that Lowe's require racial sensitivity training for their employees so that they treat all customers, regardless of racial background, with respect and dignity at their stores. Ms. Hu simply wanted to shop in peace at your store and was reserving two firepits while her father went to get a cart to take them to checkout. When the offending customer went up to her to demand that she give up one of the firepits, simply because she had not yet paid for them, your employees could have taken the opportunity to find another firepit for the other customer to purchase. You could have sold three firepits instead of two and supported racial equity on Martin Luther King Day. Instead, your employees defended a racist bully and allowed her to have her way, while an Asian American customer was deprived of dignity and respect, treated like she did not matter and as if she did not deserve to spend her hard-earned money like everyone else at your store, and that for her to be racially harassed and told to "Go back to your country" was an acceptable experience for Asian Americans to have at Lowe's. The video and Ms. Hu's account of what happened to her can be found on her Facebook page. We, the undersigned, urge Lowe's to do the right thing. Issue an apology to Xuna Hu and require racial sensitivity training for your employees.