A White Student Called the Police on a Black Student Who Was Napping. Yale Says It’s ‘Deeply Troubled.’

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Yale University officials said on Thursday they were “deeply troubled” by an incident in which a white graduate student called the campus police on a black graduate student who was napping in a common room of their dormitory. The incident, which blew up into a national controversy after the black student posted videos of the encounters on Facebook Live, is prompting Yale officials to double down on commitments to make the campus more welcoming to diverse students.

Lolade Siyonbola, a 34-year-old graduate student in African studies, said she was writing a paper when she nodded off shortly after midnight on Tuesday morning on a couch in a common area of the Hall of Graduate Studies, a Gothic-style dorm near the campus’s center.

A graduate student in philosophy, who was identified by people who recognized her in one of the videos as Sarah Braasch, turned on the light at about 1:30 a.m. and told her she couldn’t sleep there, Siyonbola said.

“I have every right to call police,” Braasch tells her in the video. “You cannot sleep in that room.”

After three campus police officers arrived, they asked Siyonbola for her ID, and she asked why they needed it. A female police officer said, “You’re in a Yale building, and we need to make sure you belong here.”

Siyonbola took the officers to her room and unlocked it, but they insisted they still needed to see her ID. In a calm but increasingly irritated voice, Siyonbola questioned the need for the ID and the interrogation.

Facebook screen shot

“I deserve to be here. I pay tuition like everybody else,” she told the campus officers. “I’m not going to justify my existence here.”

Siyonbola told the officers she wasn’t sure she wanted to turn over her identification card to them, but eventually she did. “I don’t know if there’s even a justification for you actually being in the building,” she said.

A police-department supervisor who was summoned to the scene told Siyonbola that checking an ID was “protocol.”

Two videos she posted to Facebook Live — one showing her encounter with Braasch and the other with the responding police officers — quickly went viral, along with the Twitter hashtag #nappingwhileblack. By Thursday afternoon, the video showing her interactions with the police had been shared nearly 11,000 times and had drawn more than 12,000 reactions.

A Yale spokeswoman said that both students had been asked to provide identification and that the police had admonished Braasch that Siyonbola had a right to be there. The reason it took so long to clear Siyonbola, she said, is that the name on her card was her preferred name and didn’t exactly match the name in her student records.

She said that, as it does with every police incident, the university will review the response of the officers, who she said “are trained on unconscious bias, de-escalation techniques, and problem solving.”

At one point, while they were waiting for a dispatcher to confirm that she was in fact a Yale student, a police supervisor told Siyonbola it was going to be OK.

“I know it’s going to be OK,” she replied. “I know I’m not in trouble. My ancestors built this university. I am not going to be harassed.”

Choosing to Be a Slave

Braasch, who told the police she didn’t know Siyonbola, did not respond to requests for comment. She is described on the university’s website as having two engineering degrees from the University of Minnesota as well as a law degree from Fordham University. It says she is a member of the New York State Bar.

Siyonbola, who worked in the technology industry and published a book on African history and diaspora migration, also did not respond to requests for comment.

In a 2010 article that circulated on Twitter on Thursday, Braasch argued that some slaves may have wanted to remain slaves. “Who are we to tell people that they can’t be slaves if they want to be,” she asks in the piece, which compares some slaves with women who choose to become “slaves” in abusive religious traditions.

The magazine that printed the essay, The Humanist, removed the piece from its website on Thursday because it said it had recently learned that the article contained racially offensive arguments. The editors apologized for leaving it posted for so long.

The Yale incident, which prompted complaints of racial profiling, joined a growing list of recent cases in which white people called the police because of seemingly ordinary encounters with minority-group members.

Last week the police at Colorado State University at Fort Collins pulled two Native American teenagers off a campus tour and questioned them after the mother of another student said they had made her uncomfortable.

And last month two black men who were waiting for a business meeting at a Starbucks in Philadelphia were arrested after an employee called the police because they weren’t ordering anything.

In an email to students on Thursday, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s secretary and vice president for student life, said she was “deeply troubled” by the incident, which she said had unfolded within “a difficult national context.”

Goff-Crews said Yale would hold “listening sessions” in the coming days and months. She said that despite the work done in recent years to strengthen responses to complaints of racial bias and harassment, “this incident and others recently reported to me underscore that we have work to do to make Yale not only excellent but also inclusive.”

Last October, Yale announced a series of steps to make it easier for people to lodge discrimination and harassment complaints. They include an updated version of the Bulldog Mobil app, which allows people to report such incidents anonymously to the campus authorities.

‘A Truly Inclusive Place’

Lynn Cooley, dean of Yale’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, on Tuesday sent an email to all of the school’s master’s and doctoral students, calling for a commitment to mutual respect and open dialogue.

“Incidents like that of last night remind us of the continued work needed to make Yale a truly inclusive place,” Cooley wrote. “I am committed to redoubling our efforts to build a supportive community in which all graduate students are empowered in their intellectual pursuits and professional goals within a welcoming environment.”

Siyonbola told the responding officers that although this was her first run-in with Braasch, the philosophy student had called the campus police earlier this year to report that a friend of Siyonbola’s was in the stairwell.

The officer asked why Braasch would have done that. “Because he was in a stairwell and he was black,” Siyonbola responded.

The Yale Daily News reported in March that Siyonbola and Jean-Louis Reneson, another black graduate student, had submitted a complaint describing that incident, which they said happened in February, after Siyonbola invited Reneson and some other students to a meeting in her dorm.

Reneson got lost in the building, the complaint said, and asked Braasch for directions. Instead she physically blocked him and called the campus police, saying an intruder in her building was making her feel uncomfortable.

The police left after confirming that he was there for a student meeting, the newspaper reported.

On Thursday, Siyonbola posted a note of thanks on Facebook. “Grateful for all the love, kind words and prayers, your support has been overwhelming,” she wrote. “Black Yale community is beyond incredible and is taking good care of me. I know this incident is a drop in the bucket of trauma black folk have endured since Day 1 America, and you all have stories.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.