Consumer discrimination occurs when sales clerks and other store employees, including security personnel, treat customers differently because of their race or ethnicity. The goal of the present research was to examine how participants perceived a case of consumer discrimination and what actions they felt the victim should take. Based on Robinson's theory of perceptual segregation, we examined whether the perceptions and responses of white participants differed from those of people of color. We also drew on the liberation psychology tenets of conscientization and de‐ideologization with particular emphasis on taking the perspective of the oppressed, by measuring participants’ level of perceived societal discrimination. These two individual difference variables (participant race and perceived societal discrimination) significantly predicted participants’ perceptions of the situation and their emotional responses, which, in turn, mediated how they thought the customer should respond.