Brian Thomas, left, gets help from Ibn Shabazz of Smib Smoothcuts, to show off the shirts he made with Ouma Wartel (not pictured) at the “BBQ-ing while Black” event at Lake Merritt off Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland, Calif., on Sunday, May 20, 2018. (Laura A. Oda/Bay Area News Group)
OAKLAND — There it was again, at the top of Kenzie Smith’s endless Facebook feed: the image of a frowning woman in a navy-blue jacket and sunglasses holding a phone firmly to her ear.
This was no coincidence. For the past five years, Smith has seen the meme everywhere, his algorithm apparently having figured out that the woman known widely as BBQ Becky is forever linked to one of the strangest and most unpleasant days of his life.
Like most memes, this one has transcended its origins. The reams of content it generates typically do not reference Oakland’s Lake Merritt, where Smith first met the woman in question, Jennifer Schulte, who reported him and his friends to police in 2018 for barbecuing with a charcoal grill.
The infamous BBQ Becky incident, as it’s now known, was one of the earliest well-known instances of what has become a regularly documented social phenomenon of white people calling the police on Black people over interpersonal run-ins that are observably less unsafe than how they describe them to authorities.
Closer to home, the viral incident was a flashpoint of racial tension around Lake Merritt, one of the East Bay’s most important public spaces and a rare point of convergence among the city’s diverse communities.
The confrontation that followed, which quickly put Oakland under a national media microscope, came out of a “fear of the unknown. It was ignorance,” said Leon “DNas” Sykes, a friend of Smith’s. “It was anti-Blackness, and it’s something we have to work through every single day just to live our lives.”
Even to those who don’t know the story, a quick summary might sound familiar, largely because it introduced the world to a name that became synonymous with displays of privilege or entitlement by White women: “Becky,” later joined by “Karen.”
Schulte, a White passerby, called 911 multiple times over a three-hour span to report Smith, along with his friend Onsayo Abram and others — all of whom are Black — for using a charcoal grill on the Lakeshore Avenue lawn, where it wasn’t allowed.
Smith texted his then-wife, Michelle Snider, who arrived from a nearby restaurant and began filming Schulte. Snider questioned Schulte about why she called 911 over a small barbecue among Black people, prompting Schulte to say the group’s race had nothing to do with it.
Snider and Schulte, both White, became tangled in a frantic war of words — each accusing the other of harassment — in a nearly half-mile pursuit to a Quik Stop on Merritt Avenue, where Schulte spotted a responding Oakland police officer and began sobbing.
The 24-minute video, viewed 10 million times on YouTube, is long and uncomfortable. In an interview, Snider said she now cringes at herself watching it but stands by her intent in filming the video.
“I wouldn’t have done things any differently,” she said.
Little still is known publicly about Schulte, an environmental consultant who moved to California in the 2000s to receive her doctorate in chemical engineering at Stanford University and, according to her former employer, continued working in Walnut Creek until 2020.
Records show that Schulte, listed in consultant reports as an air quality and climate change specialist, had lived at least for some time in the vicinity of Lake Merritt in Oakland. She did not respond to multiple interview requests, and efforts to reach her through former associates were unsuccessful.
The BBQ Becky video quickly spawned a world of internet memes, garnering enough infamy to be referenced on “Saturday Night Live.” But while it was fanning outrage and inspiring jeers at the national level, back in Oakland it brought to the surface underlying tensions around race and belonging.
A series of “BBQing While Black” events were held in response to help Oakland’s Black residents assert their right to gather at Lake Merritt, which had long been a free-spirited staple of Oakland’s multiculturalism before police crackdowns of festivals in the 1990s and anti-cruising laws.
“There had been a longstanding fight in the city about who belongs here, who deserves to be here,” Nicole Lee, an Oakland native and head of the Urban Peace Movement, said in an interview.
By the time signs went up in the mid-2010s forbidding drinking, smoking or barbecuing, the atmosphere around the lake had noticeably changed, longtime residents noted in interviews.
City officials, though, maintain that recent developments — such as a working group dedicated to improving well-being at Lake Merritt — have helped vendors easily obtain permits, improved vehicle traffic conditions and protected abundant natural resources at the three-mile lake, which is the country’s oldest national wildlife preserve.
When it comes to enforcing the rules, however, calling police is not considered a rational response, said Joe Devries, the deputy city administrator. “It’s, ‘Here’s why these rules exist; they’re not designed to take away your fun, they’re designed for everyone to have fun.’ ”
Months after the BBQ Becky incident went viral, a “Permit Patty” emerged in San Francisco — and promptly apologized — for summoning police to a scene where a Black girl was selling bottled water. In Cleveland that same year, white neighbors called 911 after a 12-year-old Black boy hired to mow a lawn trimmed into some of the grass on their property.
In the 2019 book “Thick: And Other Essays,” Tressie McMillam Cottom described the emerging phenomenon as “social media clips of white people calling police on Black people for merely existing,”
On a recent Saturday at Lake Merritt, young parents ushered a baby stroller down the sidewalk path as another couple enjoyed a picnic for their third date. Nearby, on the same Lakeshore lawn where the BBQ Becky phenomenon was born, members of a Black empowerment group called the Original Blackprint engaged in a kind of dance therapy.
Still, things are noticeably quieter. Lakeshore rarely sees barbecues these days.
“My friends and I would come out here and kick it, but then we’d get blamed for the trash, loud music,” said Nathan Spidell, who was walking with his wife, Shanice, and young son, Atlas. “There hasn’t been enough effort by the city to make it a collaborative space, so it’s definitely gotten more dead. I don’t know where the kids are at any more.”
Everyone interviewed at the lake that afternoon had either heard of BBQ Becky or recognized, almost intuitively, the beats of it — the “weaponizing of police against Black people,” as another lakegoer, Odelia Younge, called it.
Smith, the man who had been barbecuing that day and whose Facebook feed is still dominated by images of Schulte, said the incident’s notoriety has been both a “blessing and a curse.” Three days after it happened, when the video was all over the internet, the local media and CNN, he walked out of his house to applause from his neighbors. He was called a hero for holding his ground. Dave Chappelle held front seats for Smith and Snider at a San Francisco show where the comedian riffed on “Becky” for a half-hour straight.
Smith briefly launched a bid for City Council before being tapped to serve on a city Parks and Recreation commission by Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan.
In between, what Smith says people did not see is the traumatic stress he suffered from believing police might send him to jail. The sudden attention, especially when thousands of hateful, racist messages began filling his inbox accusing him of lying, made him feel unsafe.
Still, during one of the subsequent BBQing While Black events at the lake, Smith walked over to what he had heard was Schulte’s residence in Oakland, where he left a note on the front step inviting her out to the event. It’s unclear if she ever got the note, and she didn’t show up.
“I told her I would shake her hand if she shook mine,” Smith said.
Originally published at Shomik Mukherjee