On ‘I Love Boosters’ & Who Gets To Critique Capitalism

I was a middle class suburban kid who would have been fine if I was fired from my job shilling “So Cal, so low” jeans at the mall. I was also a worker being paid minimum wage, facing microaggressions and forced to dress the part or pack it up. When Hollister’s parent company, Abercrombie & Fitch was facing lawsuits for discrimination, they promoted me and my other colleagues of color to be the front-of-house greeters. We smiled, said the taglines, and made the company feel better about its blatant racism and exploitation. I Love Boosters is for retail workers who never got to express their rage, for the boosters just trying to make a buck, and for everyone whose lives have been made worse by billionaires just getting richer by the day. Actors are actually some of the best people to critique capitalism because, as I Love Boosters never forgets, survival, especially for working-class women of color, has always required performance as much as perseverance.