Claim: Women were seen shopping nude at a supermarket in the US to celebrate the emancipation of slaves..
Fact: The video does not show an incident from the US or France, or Haitian immigrants from Springfield, Ohio. It is, in fact, from the Hartbeespoort Dam area in South Africa, where women shopped nude as a form of protest at a local grocery store called SUPERSPAR, located in the Islands Shopping Center.
The video was first shared on TikTok by user @wortiu. However, since it went viral on X (formerly Twitter), no trace of the original video can be found.
Interestingly, the video has since been shared on social media with multiple different claims. The video went viral on X when it was posted (archive) by @CosmicMads on 14 September 2024, with the caption, “It is coming soon to America! 👀”
The video was reposted (archive) on X (formerly Twitter) on the same day by another user who claimed that the incident did take place in the US. The X user @happyaccoun shared the video with a caption in Arabic that read:
“!يوم البلابيص في امريكا.. يحتفل السود باليوم الوطني لتحرير العبيد عراة حفاة كما ولدتهم امهاتهم”
According to Google Translate, this reads as follows in English:
“Balabis Day [Clothes Day] in America.. Blacks celebrate the National Day for the Emancipation of Slaves, naked and barefoot, as their mothers gave birth to them!”
However, on 15 September, the video was posted (archive) by @MoniCaycedo888 with the claim that the incident took place in France. The caption, written in Spanish, stated:
“🔥🔥🔥En este momento en FRANCIA🇨🇵, cuanto tiempo pasará para que lleguen a América!👀”
According to Google Translate, this reads as follows in English:
“🔥🔥🔥 Right now in FRANCE 🇨🇵, how long will it take for them to reach America! 👀”
Soon enough, the video was associated with the ongoing anti-immigrant narrative about the Haitian population in Springfield, Ohio, which went viral this month when several social media users posted false claims about members of the community abducting and eating people’s pets.
An X user, @Emilio2763, posted (archive) the video with the caption:
“Give Them a Break. They Just Learned They Can’t Eat People’s Pets. In Another 500 Years They’ll Learn What Shirts Are…”
Fact or Fiction?
Soch Fact Check investigated the claim after noting the comments under @Emilio2763’s post which pointed out that the incident had not taken place in the US.
The video was reposted (archive), with one user inquiring, “Is this Springfield, OH?”
Many X users took to the comment sections of these posts, guessing where this incident took place. This can be seen here (archive), here (archive), here (archive), and here (archive).
In particular, we looked into a comment by one user who claimed (archive) this incident was “an act of protest done in a South African mall” and had attached a link (archive) to a YouTube video.
The video was uploaded on 10 July 2024 by TV Yabantu, which describes itself as an indigenous African television network. According to the network’s website (archive):
“TV Yabantu is a Mama Africa Television Network, that thrives and serves to bringing you the best Indigenous African content, in order to entertain, educate, inform, restore, preserve, protect, promote and awaken Africans to the values of our Cultural Traditions through Film. Tv for the people of Africa By Africans.”
The YouTube video matches the keyframes of the videos posted in the claim, as seen below.
Taking cues from this video, we then searched for “Hartbeespoort Dam SUPERSPAR” on Google which led us to images of the interior and the storefront of the grocery outlet. In particular, the walls inside the shop, as well as the facade of the store in these images is visibly identical to what we see in the video in question. The visuals below demonstrate this.
According to the narrator of the video, the incident took place at the SUPERSPAR in the Islands Shopping Center, in Hartbeespoort Dam in South Africa. The narrator states that the women, referred to as “African Goddesses,” are revisiting the store after a confrontation with the store manager the week before. Soch Fact Check found a shorter video (archive) of the incident uploaded by TV Yabantu on 4 July 2024 to YouTube which shows the date “29/06/2024” for the first eight seconds, as seen below:
In this timeframe, the narrator describes the first encounter between the women and the store manager. While the exact date and time can not be confirmed, both encounters appear to have occurred recently, between 29 June and 10 July 2024.
The narrator added that the manager had asked the women to stop shopping and exit the store “as he had felt that his white customers felt uncomfortable”. He had also threatened to call the police. In the video, between 4:40–6:40, the women are shown dancing in unison outside the store.
Furthermore, Soch Fact Check found an article (archive) published on 14 September 2024 by the Nigerian news website Green White Green which also corroborated the incident. As evidence, the article cited a comment (archive) on a video, posted (archive) by X user @Naija_PR, which claimed that the incident is a “protest by African goddesses as a result of a confrontation with the manager of SUPERSPAR in Hartbeespoort, South Africa a week earlier.”
Therefore, Soch Fact Check, rates the claim that a video shows Black women, particularly Haitian immigrants, shopping nude at a grocery store in the US, as false.
Virality
The post on X by @CosmicMads has 6 million views and 6.2 K reposts.
The post on X by @happyaccoun has 90.1 K views.
The post on X by @MoniCaycedo888 has 125.2 K views.
The post on X by @Emilio2763 has 354.5 K views.
Conclusion: The video does not show women shopping nude at a store in the US or France.. The video is of an incident that took place at a local grocery store called SUPERSPAR, located in the Hartbeespoort Dam area in South Africa. It shows women shopping at the store, apparently as a sign of protest after a confrontation with the manager of SUPERSPAR.
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Background image in cover photo: Google Images