BBQ Becky, Permit Patty and Why the Internet Is Shaming White People Who Police People ‘Simply for Being Black’

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Tagged with nicknames like BBQ Becky and Permit Patty, white people who’ve 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 these 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 situation 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, says Yancy, is new.

“Black people experience policing 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.”

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The current 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. The 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.

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At first, people filmed the incidents out of fear they could end in violence when police arrived. Then they became teachable moments about racism.

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And that’s forcing more people to recognize and reckon with white racial attitudes and behavior in a way they never have before.

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“The pervasiveness of technology, that can help in an incident like this” to hold people accountable, Officer Herman Baza, a spokesman for the California Highway Patrol, told local television station KTVU.

People often think of racism as major acts of aggression, but sociologists say smaller scale acts, sometimes referred to as microagressions, are more common. They can include everything from disapproving looks to chastising remarks for perceived infractions of racial etiquette, social norms dating back to slavery days and Jim Crow laws on racial segregation that dictated how black people should behave in public and interact with white people.

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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 this phenomenon for decades and has dubbed it “citizen callers.”

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Rawls says the outing of white people on social media has begun to challenge what language and behavior is considered acceptable. It’s also making people confront an uncomfortable reality, that the people being caught on film are not Ku Klux Klan members, but seemingly average Americans all over the country who could be their friends, family members or neighbors, evidence that racial attitudes are deeply entrenched in American society and cross political lines.

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The awareness growing through viral social media posts is a start, but technology has its limits and alone can’t curb racism or microaggressions, sociologists say.

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