Even in Oakland, calling the cops on black people just...

The first time I saw the video of a white woman on the phone with police because two black men were using a charcoal grill at Lake Merritt, I thought it was a parody, a provocative satire on race in America.

But, no, this is America, a country where a black person must be prepared for the possibility that police might be called to investigate and indict their blackness.

In April, two black men in Philadelphia were arrested on suspicion of trespassing at a Starbucks after a barista called police to say the men, seated at a table waiting for a colleague, refused to leave.

Earlier this month, three black Airbnb guests who had just checked out of their rental in Rialto (San Bernardino County) were swarmed by several police cars because a neighbor — who saw them carrying their luggage from the home — thought they were burglars.

And last week, a black Yale University graduate student had the police called on her after a white student found her sleeping in a common room of their dorm.

Calling the police to investigate the innocuous behavior of black people isn’t supposed to happen in Oakland, a city proud of its cultural identity. But here we are.

I don’t have a checklist for when it’s appropriate to call police, but I do know the police have more important things to do than to patrol weekend cookouts at Lake Merritt.

It’s so disturbing to me that this happened at the lake where, after days of vandalism and unrest following the 2016 presidential election, several thousand people linked arms and hands in a harmonious, peaceful demonstration.

If you haven’t seen the almost 25-minute video of the woman who called police at Lake Merritt, here’s a brief recap. On April 29, the woman called police to report the use of a charcoal grill in a non-approved area. It’s true there are designated locations for charcoal grilling at the lake, and the cookout was in an area reserved for non-charcoal grills.

Please ask yourself this: Would that make you call the police?

Kenzie Smith and Onsayo Abram were spending their Sunday afternoon relaxing at Lake Merritt with a barbecue when the unidentified woman told them they were breaking a park rule and called police, refusing to leave the scene as she waited for law enforcement to arrive. This went on for some two hours.

Finally, Smith’s wife, Michelle Snider, began to record the situation, confronting the woman and turning the tables on her. The video has been viewed almost 1.5 million times on YouTube.

“It’s not about race,” the woman told Snider.

That’s easy to say when nobody looks at you sideways because of the color of your skin.

The video ends after Snider followed the woman to the Qwik Stop on Merritt Avenue, where the woman is seen crying and steadying herself on an Oakland police officer’s SUV.

“These people started coming up and harassing me,” the woman tells the officer.

I’m blessed (or cursed, depending on how you see things) with an empathic heart, which is why I want to understand why the woman wasted a glorious, sun-soaked Sunday afternoon at the lake on the phone with the police.

I want to know if she would have dialed 911 had it been white men using charcoal.

I wonder if she stopped to think — before she decided to call police — about all those videos we have seen from across the U.S. of police brutalizing and killing black people.

Because this is America, where any interaction between black people and the police has the potential to turn deadly.

This is why black people started chanting that black lives matter.

This is why a coffee shop in East Oakland doesn’t serve uniformed police officers.

This is why a church in Oakland wants to create alternatives to calling police.

Some internet sleuths have named a person they believe is the woman in that video. I thought I’d knock on the door of that person — to see if it really is her and to see if she’d talk about what happened. After leaving a handwritten note at the door, I sat on the steps to remove a pebble in my shoe.

I left, thinking — what if someone called the cops. A suspicious black man is taking his shoes off, and he’s not wearing socks!

Racial segregation, a policy that was once enforced by police officers, is now illegal, but racial profiling, a vestige of this country’s racist history, endures in public spaces. And it’s preserved when white people call the police on black and brown people for trivial offenses.

“I really feel the issues of race, to some extent, have been heightened by the disrespect of African Americans that Trump has shown,” said Oakland civil rights lawyer John Burris, referring to our president, who’s repeatedly demonstrated he can’t completely mask his racist beliefs in public. “I think it has caused people to be more race-conscious than before.”

Some folks in Oakland are responding to the incident with — what else? — a cookout. An event Sunday, cheekily titled BBQ’N While Black, will be held at Lake Merritt.

“People are tired of being harassed,” said Jhamel Robinson, one of the organizers. “Trump getting in office made racist white people bold.”

Robinson, 28, is an Oakland native. The freelance graphic designer, who owns the Real Oakland, a clothing company, designed the flyer for the cookout. When I saw it, I thought it was another of the dozens of memes that have been circulating on social media, like the Photoshopped image of the Lake Merritt woman holding her phone to her ear while sitting behind Rosa Parks on a bus.

“I thought it would be funny to put this lady on the flyer, and just see what happens,” Robinson said. “Black folks, that’s what we do.”

Yes, we laugh through the pain. Another thing black folks do: We open our arms to others.

“We didn’t want people to think it was just a black thing,” Robinson said of the cookout. “If you with negativity, don’t come. If you about positivity, come through.”

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr