bbq becky

Samuel Getachew, 2019 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Finalist, Had Message For BBQ Becky

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Samuel Getachew, 2019 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Finalist From YouTube Channel: May 17, 2019 at 01:03PM ONN – Samuel Getachew, 2019 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate Finalist, Had Message For BBQ Becky Where I “liked” this YouTube video, thus auto-posting it to Oakland News Now, because Samuel Getachew made the poem as a message to Dr. … Read more

Michelle Dione Snider, You Rep Oakland Post, A Black News Site, Yet Blast Me For Pointing Out Racism

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Michelle Dione Snider, You Rep Oakland Post, A Black News Site, Yet Blast Me For Pointing Out Racism

Michelle Dione Snider, You Rep Oakland Post, A Black News Site, Yet Blast Me For Pointing Out Racism

ONN – Michelle Dione Snider, You Rep Oakland Post, A Black News Site, Yet Blast Me For Pointing Out Racism

Michelle Dione Snider is the Associate Editor of the Oakland Post, and even though we’ve never actually met or talked on the phone, was a friend of the Facebook variety. She’s best known as the person who made the famous BBQ Becky video from 2018. With that, I believed she was sensitive to racism against blacks in America. Apparently, and shockingly, I learned I am mistaken.

For reasons best known to her, Michelle elected to get on Facebook and attack me for pointing out that an Oaklandside entry on Oakland City Council Race At-Large Candidate Derreck Johnson explaining that he filed for bankruptcy while running his business was racist. As I said before, it tried to make him look bad in an area that’s the focus of many black business problems: being under-capitalized. I do not support Derreck Johnson’s run against my friend Oakland At Large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, but that does not mean I’m going to sit by and watch an attack I view as racist from my own experience as a black man in America.

But, even though Michelle Dione represents The Oakland Post, a black news website and news paper, she just decided to attack me on Facebook, and say “That’s a non-profit journalism organization”, as if that buys Oaklandside the place to be unassailable. Then, she went off and accused me of making bots to inflate my web traffic. That, right there, showed me she has no idea how the web works. And she’s trying to put me in the typically racist place of being the black guy who does something criminal. On top of that, she obviously has no respect for what I’ve done for The Oakland Post over the years.

If you go and look at the sidebar for Oakland News Now, you will see that Post Newsgroup Publisher and friend Paul Cobb is presented as a special person, and because he is. Paul Cobb can say that he knew Martin Luther King, Jr. In fact, Paul and I talked about that in 2007. Have a look:

Also, in 2016, I was hired to boost The Oakland Post website’s traffic and also correct a vast number of problems. The Oakland Post was not on key news aggregators (and now it’s not, again after my work to put it back on them), and did not understand how to use basic search engine optimization practices. I boosted The Oakland Post web traffic by as much as 300 percent. Now, if Michelle Dione thinks I make traffic bots, as she claims, then one would think she would be happy I used them to help the The Oakland Post, right? What a riot!

Michelle must understand that she can’t represent a black news organization and have white sensibilities. Media is the last bastion of white supremacy. For Michelle to throw the typical “they’re better than you” and “what you do is criminal” take on me, begs for a fight I’m happy to wage. I’m sick and tired of institutional racism. I will not put up with it. And for a person who represent a black news organization, and yet is white and seems to have little sensitivity at all to racist images in media, is all kinds of wrong – it’s racist. I am not saying a person has to be black to recognize racism in media, but I am saying one can’t say they represent a black media publication, yet are demonstrably blind to see racism in media.

As an update, another colleague who’s with the The Oakland Post, also white and female, also took to Mark Zuckerberg’s site to attack me, and this time for the post you’re reading. That both can’t at all see what racism in media looks like is sad, but even sadder is they are allowed to present such a problem of blindness to racist media images and stories while representing a black-owned publication. (And it’s even more disturbing to see a black person in media advance such classic institutional racism).

I fear for Oakland’s future because it points to an environment where any black person who points to institutional racism draws a white-led attack on their point of view, rather than any desire to want to see change.

I am not expecting an apology. I am very disappointed to learn that, all of this time, Michelle has issues, personal issues, with me. And I’ve never met her.

In closing, I add these words from one of my favorite songs, Private Idaho by The B-52’s, and it is a message for Michelle, and the obviously racially unsympathetic view she expressed:

Keep off the path, beware of the gate
Watch out for signs that say “hidden driveways”
Don’t let the chlorine in your eyes
Blind you to the awful surprise
That’s been waitin’ for you at
The bottom of the bottomless blue, blue, blue pool
You’re livin’ in your own Private Idaho, Idaho
You’re out of control, the rivers that roll
You fell into the water and down to Idaho
Get out of that state
Get out of the state you’re in
You better beware

According to Songfacts, “In this song, the fine state of Idaho is used to represent a case of paranoia – the lyrics “get out of that state” meaning to get out of that state of mind.” What I am pointing to is a state of mind that protects the idea that white-ran traditional media is beyond reproach.

And now, I think I’ll close with this fun addition, and because we need a giant dose of levity, with some mix of irony:

Stay tuned.

Zennie

Note from Zennie62Media and Oakland News Now: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a vlogger with the Zennie62 on YouTube Partner Channel, then uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours. Now, news is reported with a smartphone: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.

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https://youtu.be/kfKWdK7fbfc

Oakland, Berkeley, SF Bay Area White Folks Must Stop Telling Black Folks What Racism Is

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End Racism Thru Unity

I’ve noticed a really annoying trend in the San Francisco Bay Area of late, more specifically the last six years, and more intensely over the last four years (which happens to coincide with the election of Donald Trump as POTUS). It’s white folks telling black folks what racism is.

W.Kamal Bell
W.Kamal Bell

The most bothersome examples pop-up in news publications, and in social media, again, related to something a news reporter thinks or someone who dares write a “letter to the editor”.

Let’s take one piece written by Richard Keats II that I happened to see in Berkeleyside, and related to what happened to local comedian W.Kamal Bell at the closed Elmwood Café, now called Baker & Commons.

If you remember, what happened that eventually launched W.Kamal Bell into national view thanks to CNN, was that he was walking up to meet his wife and a friend, when a worker rushed out and ordered him to leave area. The worker believed that Mr. Bell was a homeless black man and in the worker’s mind, it was just fine to treat him as undesirable. The worker’s prejudice was so deep, the person did not even stop to consider that the “ homeless black man” was actually a black man who knew the white folks he was talking to, let alone married to one of them!

What happened to W.Kamal Bell is all too common in the San Francisco Bay Area, and in America: someone white thinks someone else who’s black, basically, just doesn’t belong. The many ways this staple of institutional racism is expressed are legion:

• A white student at Berkeley thinks a black student got in only because of affirmative action, and says so.
• White San Francisco Bay Area news reporters constantly couch something a black person does that they don’t like as criminal or illegal, whereas a white person is called “clever” or pioneering, or some equivalent. (Media and technology are the last bastions of white supremacist thought in America. Just count the micro-small number of media and tech organizations owned by blacks – like Zennie62Media, Inc.)
• A white woman gets upset that a black man is singing “Grease” out loud with his white female friends, and so voices her displeasure. (That happened to me in Las Vegas two years ago at the Cosmopolitan LV.)
• A white woman comes upon black men setting up a barbecue at Lake Merritt, tells them she bought the Lake for $5 million (a good reason to immediately brand her as nuts), and harasses them for two hours before calling 9-11 on them because she says they’re not supposed to cook there. (That was BBQ Becky AKA Jennifer Schulte, in Oakland two years ago.)

As I wrote, I can go on and on and on. But here comes people like Richard Keats II who have the nerve to write that “The slight W. Kamau Bell experienced at the Elmwood Café does not rise to the level of racism. He just experienced several seconds of emotional agitation.” Seriously, he wrote that. He did.

Richard Keats II is not black – he’s white. In his letter, he does not stop to show any type of sympathy for what W. Kamau Bell experienced. He does what a giant number of white folks have done since 2016: witness a racist act done to someone black, or do it themselves, and then says what happened was not racist when the black victim dares speak up. This crap must stop. For someone who has not walked your shoes to tell you what to think and how to feel is, in itself, offensive.  And its racist, on top of the racist actions such responses seek to defend.

In Richard Keats II’s mind, racism has to be something violent. Also, he thinks that if W. Kamau Bell  was more communicative, there would not be a problem.   That’s crazy. Mr. Keats doesn’t seem to get that what the worker did was wrong – period.  Mr. Bell should not have had to explain anything to him.

What Mr. Keats and others who think like him seem to want is some door to be kept open that allows them to be mean to black folks. What cracked me up about what Mr. Keats wrote back in 2018 was that he came up with this typically Bay Area psuedo-scientific “let me show I can do research and cite articles to prove I’m smart” bullshit approach to justify that he, when it all breaks down, just doesn’t want to see how a black person perceives the world around them. And just wants to be racist toward that black person – but in a way that he, Keats, doesn’t think is racist. Wow.

Even worse, the “research” examples he provides have zero to do with blacks and racism. He refers to the LGBTQ community, as if that’s, well, the same. It is, only from a straight-white-male-centric point of view. Which, I might add, a person does not have to be straight, white, or male to have – one can be black and afflicted with the same problem. Think about that when a black person tells you “The white man’s ice is colder.”

Wake up, will ya?

Keats, and others like him, seem to forget is that if we as a society keep letting what he calls “slights” that “ don’t rise to the level of racism” go, eventually, we get the many racist encounters that have been captured on cell phone camera this year. All done by white people who did not get the message that they were being racist, and quite possibility had a habit of that kind of behavior before it was captured on camera. Amy Cooper, in New York’s Central Park, making a fake “help, a black man’s attacking me” call to the NYPD. I’ll bet that’s not the first time she’s done something like that.

In this post-George Floyd world, what anyone white must stop doing is discounting the complaints of someone black that they’re being racist. That white person must train themselves to ask one question of that black person: “How can I be better?” Then, they have to be prepared to listen.

We can’t have a society where only white women can say that we should hear them. Everyone has to listen to each other. If I say something you did was racist, don’t tell me it wasn’t and don’t try and find someone else black to cover for you. Humble yourself and ask how you can be a better person toward me. Ask me what it is to be treated in a racist way. Then, take a seat, and say nothing: just listen.

Stay tuned. Happy Star Trek Day! (Remember the IDIC?)

And watch W. Kamau Bell’s show United Shades on CNN. After all, it was basically born in Berkeley, at The Elmwood Café.

Oakland: Fake Body Bag, Hangman Noose Found At Lake Merritt On Lakeshore June 17 – Update

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Oakland: Fake Body Bag And Hangman Noose Found At Lake Merritt On Lakeshore Side Thursday Morning

Oakland: Fake Body Bag And Hangman Noose Found At Lake Merritt On Lakeshore Side Thursday Morning   ONN – Oakland: Fake Body Bag And Hangman Noose Found At Lake Merritt On Lakeshore Side Thursday Morning June 17 Kenzie Mouton, the man who was the victim of the racist 911 call and rant by BBQ Becky … Read more

Amy Cooper Calls Police On Black Man Who Asked Her To Leash Her Dog In NYC

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Amy Cooper Calls Police On Black Man Who Asked Her To Leash Her Dog In Nyc

Amy Cooper Calls Police On Black Man Who Asked Her To Leash Her Dog In NYC ONN – Amy Cooper Calls Police On Black Man Who Asked Her To Leash Her Dog In NYC. Amy Cooper is a VP of Investment Solutions for Franklin Templeton in New York City. Her racist behavior done to an … Read more

Oakland Zoo Has No Black Zookeepers And Liz Karsa Tells Me To “Chill Out” About It

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Oakland Zoo Has No Black Zookeepers And Liz Karsa Tells Me To “chill Out” About It

Oakland Zoo Has No Black Zookeepers And Liz Karsa Tells Me To “Chill Out” About It ONN – Oakland Zoo Has No Black Zookeepers And Liz Karsa Tells Me To “Chill Out” About It UPDATE: The Oakland Zoo Has African American Zookeepers, And We Interview Liz Abram. So it all started with this video posted … Read more

Oakland, California Has Not Hired A Black Chief Of Police Since 2011. Why?

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Oakland, California Has Not Hired A Black Chief Of Police Since 2011. Why?

Oakland, California Has Not Hired A Black Chief Of Police Since 2011. Why? ONN – Oakland, California Has Not Hired A Black Chief Of Police Since 2011, Why? This week, Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf hired Susan Manheimer, the newly retired San Mateo Chief of Police, to become the Interim Chief of Police in Oakland. While … Read more

Lorie Carter Owens, Oaklanders, Must Understand Oakland Police Chief History And Blacks

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Lorie Carter Owens, Oaklanders, Must Understand Oakland Police Chief History And Blacks

Lorie Carter Owens, Oaklanders, Must Understand Oakland Police Chief History And Blacks ONN – Lorie Carter Owens, Oaklanders, Must Understand Oakland Police Chief History And Blacks Oaklander Lorie Carter Owens took time to engage me in the Facebook Group NAACP Oakland, and because I made the video blog called “Susan Manheimer: Oakland Mayor Schaaf’s Allergy … Read more

Only Black Man In A Cafe In Oakland – Sign Of A Diversity Problem In 2016 Before BBQ Becky

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Zennie Abraham Vlogging At Oakland Cafe In 2016

Only Black Man In A Cafe In Oakland – Sign Of A Diversity Problem In 2016 Before BBQ Becky ONN – Only Black Man In A Cafe In Oakland – Sign Of A Diversity Problem In 2016 Before BBQ Becky In this vlog at Perch Cafe on Grand, I noted the first time being the … Read more

Warriors NBA, Raiders’ Jon Gruden Tops Most Searched Oakland Stories For 2018

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What’s the most searched story in Oakland in 2018? To determine that, this blogger went to Google Trends to get the answer to that question. Why Google Trends? According to a number of sources, from StatCounter to Business Insider, Google has over a 90 percent market share rate, and not just on web-based searches, but … Read more

Oakland Lesleigh Franklin Threatens Jordan Cordova: Parking While Brown, Shows Racism Is Mental Illness

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Lesleigh-Franklin-Oakland

Oakland Lesleigh Franklin Threatens Jordan Cordova: Parking While Brown, Shows Racism Is Mental Illness

Kenzie Smith Oakland City Council Candidate Talks Nia Wilson And BBQ Becky On Livestream

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kenzie-smith-oakland-city-counci

Oakland News Now – Kenzie Smith Oakland City Council Candidate Talks Nia Wilson And BBQ Becky On Livestream. And for a wide ranging talk that was as revealing as it was long. I leaned that Bbq Becky claimed that she purchased Lake Merritt for $5.7 million and told Kenzie it was privately owned. In total … Read more

Kenzie Smith’s Over Abel Guillen, Nikki Bas In Oakland City Council District Two Race, Says Google Trends

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IMG_1683

The Oakland City Council District Two seat held by Abel Guillen has a new challenger: Kenzie Smith. Now, the most likely Oakland voter over 50 might be saying “Who’s Kenzie Smith?”, the one under 50 but older than 40 may react with “The BBQ Becky Guy?”, and someone under 40 in Oakland might say “dude’s … Read more

Mark Davis Las Vegas Stadium BBQ Slab In Oakland Raiders Fans Face

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mark-davis-las-vegas-stadium-bbq

On Thursday of this week, Oakland Raiders Owner Mark Davis personally served barbeque to 700 Las Vegas Stadium construction workers. It was Mr. Davis’ way of thanking them for getting this far in building what (let’s be honest) will be a game-changing facility for the Las Vegas Valley. But, considering Mark Davis and the Raiders … Read more

“Jogger Joe” Not “BBQ Becky” Marks Another Lake Merritt Oakland Race – Class Incident

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another-lake-merritt-oakland-rac-1

Oakland now has “Jogger Joe” to go with “BBQ Becky”. UPDATE: “Jogger Joe” goes by the name Henry Sintay, and is dangerous – more here. On Sunday, April 29th, 2018, the peaceful gathering of a racially mixed, yet mostly black group of family and friends to enjoy barbeque at Lake Merritt in Oakland was marred … Read more

Oakland BBQ Becky Incident Focus Of Charcoal Grill On Lake Merritt Photo On 2018 NBA Finals Game 2

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oakland-bbq-becky-incident-focus

During the 3rd Quarter of 2018 NBA Finals Game 2 Cleveland Cavaliers vs Golden State Warriors, ABC and ESPN flashed a photo of a person in a hoodie cooking on a charcoal grill on Lake Merritt. The photo, that was shown with the Cadillac sponsor logo in the foreground along with the Larry O’Brien Trophy. … Read more

Mr. Kenzie Smith: Rebecca Kaplan Recommends And Nominates Him To City Of Oakland Parks and Recreation Advisory Commission

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City of Oakland

Update: Rebecca Kaplan to run for Mayor of Oakland for third time. Click here for more information. Editor’s note: Mr. Kenzie Smith is the Oakland man who was harrassed by Jennifer Schulte just for barbecuing on Lakeshote Avenue, nest to Lake Merritt on April 30th, 2018. The resultant video made by his wife sparked a … Read more