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She said she remembers her father, who she describes as \"the most lovable, big black guy,\" trying to calm her down during the incident.

\"I couldn't calm down. I was so angry, I knew what this woman was doing to us, but my dad has been in positions like this before -- same as me, but in a different way,\" Lewis said. \"He, you know, he knew that I need to make myself smaller, and I need to make myself calm and that just enraged me even more.\"

Lewis said her father managed to get her to leave the store, and she went to her car and completely broke down. Her father then grabbed her CD from the car and went back into the store. When he came back out about five minutes later, the woman who had racially profiled the pair was with him.

\"I was like hyperventilating I was so angry, and the woman was at the side of the car. She knocked and she said, 'I'm so, so sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know who you were.' That just kind of -- my heart kind of sank.\"

\"I confronted her and said, 'You're racist, you're racist. You targeted me and my dad -- you wanted to throw us out of the store because of our color ... And she was kind of in denial.\" Lewis said the woman claimed she \"just got scared\" and thought the pair might \"take something.\"

\"That is the conditioning that we have,\" the singer pointed out. \"This conditioning that we were going to take something -- black people, oh, they're going to steal something, or there's something to be scared of, or people with darker skin tones are going to do something bad.\"

The singer said she wished the white people in the store, who left because they knew it was wrong that Lewis and her father were being racially profiled, had actually spoken up.

\"For the people that are not speaking out or not saying anything, like you're the people that left ... you kind of, 'Oh, it's disgusting, but it's going to disrupt my day too much to really get involved and really stand by their side and say, Hey, what are you doing? Why are you targeting them? This is wrong.'\"

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Leona Lewis 🎼 (@leonalewis) on Jun 3, 2020 at 3:43pm PDT

She urged her fans to speak against racial injustice. \"You need to stand with us and you need to acknowledge that it's happening because when you don't acknowledge that it's happening, you're diminishing the pain and you're diminishing our humanity,\" she said.

\"I'm someone who's mixed race. My mom is white, my dad is black, and I had a beautiful representation of what that unity meant for me. Because when that comes together in the most loving way, it is the most beautiful thing. Equal and beautiful,\" she added. \"But that's not the reality of what's going on.\"

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