Anti-social media
BBQ Becky, Permit Patty and why the internet is shaming white people who police people ‘simply for being black’
It’s now a weekly, if not daily, occurrence: A video is posted on Facebook or Twitter showing a white person calling police on black people for minor violations or nothing at all, a new form of social media shaming that has exposed the everyday racism black Americans face and brought swift repercussions for the perpetrators.
Tagged with nicknames such as BBQ Becky and Permit Patty, white people who have reported black people for sitting in Starbucks, shopping at CVS, mowing lawns, playing golf, staying at an Airbnb or napping on a couch in a college dorm are being publicly named, mocked and, in some cases, fired from their jobs.
White people have been policing black behavior for a long time. If they think someone black seems out of place, they know they can say something to the property manager, a store supervisor or the police, sociologists who study race say. Many black people in such situations don’t bother to complain publicly.
They say they’re unlikely to be believed or their concerns will be dismissed. And they don’t want to escalate the incident and end up in jail or worse.
Now footage captured on smartphones and spread instantly on social media is shining the spotlight on how black people are singled out “simply because they are black,” says George Yancy, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and author of “Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America.” And that, Yancy says, is new.
“Black people experience polic-
ing every day, even if it’s just a look or a gaze,” he says. “What social media is doing is magnifying the elephant in the room in such a way as to reveal to white people the reality that black people experience all the time.”
The firestorm was set off in May by a white woman, Jennifer Schulte, who was rechristened BBQ Becky after she called police on two black men for using a charcoal grill at a public park in Oakland, California. Police eventually advised the men charcoal wasn’t permitted in that part of the park, but the YouTube video of the interaction – with Schulte on the phone arguing with other residents – went viral.
Three weeks later, the community threw a BBQ’n While Black cookout at the lake where the incident occurred.
“Hello, I’d like to report black people minding their own business,” joked one meme showing a stern Schulte in dark sunglasses, blue hoodie and pulledback hair with a phone pressed to her ear.
Spreading at internet speed
On the internet, images of Schulte were inserted into scenes from “Black Panther” and into a famous painting of The Last Supper. She was pictured reporting Rosa Parks for sitting at the front of the bus, NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem and former President Barack Obama for wearing a tan suit while he was president. “Saturday Night Live” even had her show up during the “Weekend Update” and the credits.
Last month, a white woman in San Francisco dubbed “Permit Patty” got the meme treatment after she called police about an 8-year-old girl selling bottled water outside her apartment building to raise money for a trip to Disneyland after her mom lost her job.
Erin Austin, the girl’s mother, recorded Alison Ettel, who said she was calling police because the child didn’t have a permit.
According to a transcript of the 911 report, Ettel called to ask if a vendor operating without a permit was legal and was transferred to the police, who did not show up. In the aftermath, she resigned as CEO of a medicinal marijuana dispensary.
Memes are a shorthand communication, bursts of images or videos wrapped in humor and created to be passed around the internet, often with hashtags, to send a political or social message.
At first, people filmed the incidents out of fear they could end in violence when police arrived. Then they became teachable moments about racism.
And that’s forcing more people to recognize and reckon with white racial attitudes and behavior in a way they never have before. “If it’s a white girl selling lemonade, a white woman is not going to call the police and say: ‘Hey, there is a suspicious person selling lemonade without the appropriate permit. I want the police to come,’ ” says Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, a Duke sociology professor who studies race.
White people have a long and dangerous history of calling the police on black people for simply going about their daily lives, says Anne Rawls, a sociology professor at Bentley University who has studied the phenomenon for decades and has dubbed it “citizen callers.”
She and Meghan Hollis, a criminal justice professor at Texas State University, estimate that 80 percent of policing involves responding to citizen calls for service.
What’s different now is that callers are no longer hiding behind their phones, Rawls says.
“They are getting into people’s faces,” she said. “They are feeling emboldened.”
Uncomfortable realities
America has a legacy of racism going back hundreds of years, so what’s giving people new license to confront blacks and other minorities in public spaces?
John Powell, who leads the UC Berkeley Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society, blames President Donald Trump’s rhetoric on race and immigration and his equating activists protesting racism with neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Trump’s supporters, like the president himself, don’t see it that way.
A recent Quinnipiac University poll found 86 percent of Republicans said he wasn’t racist, compared with 47 percent for the entire country.
Rawls says the outing of white people on social media has begun to challenge what language and behavior is considered acceptable.
It also is making people confront an uncomfortable reality: that the people being caught on film are not Ku Klux Klan members but seemingly average Americans.
Says Rawls, “If we were all wearing bodycams, we would catch ourselves doing similar kinds of things.”
“What social media is doing is magnifying the elephant in the room in such a way as to reveal to white people the reality that black people experience all the time.” George Yancy Author of “Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America”