{"id":72412,"date":"2018-05-29T11:41:33","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T16:41:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=72412"},"modified":"2018-05-29T11:41:33","modified_gmt":"2018-05-29T16:41:33","slug":"summer-reading-with-bbq-becky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2018\/05\/29\/summer-reading-with-bbq-becky\/","title":{"rendered":"Summer Reading with BBQ Becky"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the past few months, we have seen several high profile news stories about white Americans threatening to call, or calling, police on people of color for a range of everyday activities like\u00a0<\/span>looking out of place on a college tour<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>speaking Spanish with cashiers at a local restaurant<\/span><\/a>, meeting at Starbucks<\/a>, and <\/span>removing luggage from your AirBnB<\/span><\/a>. Perhaps most notably, one viral YouTube video showing a white woman calling the police on a group of Black people supposedly violating park rules by using charcoal on their grill spawned the meme<\/span>\u00a0“BBQ Becky.” <\/span><\/p>\n

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While the meme pokes fun at white fears of people of color, these incidents reflect bigger trends about who we think belongs in social settings and public spaces. Often, these perceptions \u2014 about who should and shouldn\u2019t be at particular places \u2014 are rooted in race and racial difference.<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s research on that! Beliefs about belonging particularly affect how Black people are treated in America. Sociologist Elijah Anderson has written extensively about how certain social settings are cast as a \u201cwhite space\u201d or a \u201cblack space.\u201d Often, these labels extend to public settings, including businesses, shopping malls, and parks. Labels like these are important because they can lead to differences in how some people are treated, like the exclusion of the two Black men from Starbucks.<\/span><\/p>\n