Student at Center of ‘Napping While Black’ Furor Lashes Out at Yale Officials and ‘Woke Intersectional Feminists’

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The student whose complaint to the Yale Police Department ignited the 2018 “napping while black” controversy tore into administrators, the campus police, and fellow graduate students in an essay published late last month on the social-media website Medium. Sarah Braasch wrote that she had been “vilified on a global scale as something akin to a genocidal villain” as a result of the incident.

In the early hours of May 8, 2018, Braasch, a philosophy graduate student, called the campus police after finding Lolade Siyonbola, a black graduate student in African studies, asleep in a dormitory common room. The incident, which received national media attention after the black student posted viral videos of the women’s encounters, prompted the university to hold listening sessions and reaffirm its commitment to inclusivity.

Backlash from the episode has essentially ruined Braasch’s career prospects, she writes in the Medium essay. Her lawyers filed a legal brief on Friday asking the police department to release body-camera footage of the incident, which, she writes, “exposes them as liars.”

Braasch filed a request for the release of the footage last summer. The police department initially denied her request, claiming that the video includes uncorroborated allegations. Braasch then filed a Freedom of Information Act request, which led to a review by Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission. That body plans to decide by July whether the police must release the footage, the Yale Daily News reported.

Braasch wrote the essay in response to a widely read Medium piece by James Hatch, 52-year-old Yale freshman and U.S. Navy veteran. While he arrived at the university expecting to find liberal “snowflakes,” Hatch wrote in the December 21 essay, he instead discovered curious, tolerant classmates.

In contrast, Braasch refers her Yale peers as “woke intersectional feminists” who “tried to destroy me.”

Braasch traces the attacks on her to 2015, when online searches turned up anti-LGBTQ comments a professorial candidate had previously made. After some students worked to keep the candidate from getting the job, Braasch told them they were violating his civil rights.

“I was immediately denounced as anti-LGBTQ,” she writes.

Then in 2018, Braasch called the campus police twice to report incidents involving black students. The first occurred in February, when she called to report her discomfort with a black student, Reneson Jean-Louis, standing in a stairwell near her dorm room.

Three months later, she called campus police again to report Siyonbola, who had fallen asleep in a dormitory common room. After that, Braasch alleges, administrators “interrogated” her about views she had expressed in blog posts.

At the beginning of June 2018, Braasch says she was charged with racial harassment. Four months after that, the charges were withdrawn, she says. Yale officials declined to confirm Braasch’s assertions, writing in an email that the university “does not comment on student records or disciplinary actions.”

Braasch wrote in the Medium essay that she struggles with mental-health illnesses, including post-traumatic stress disorder, which she says contributed to the 2018 incidents. She declined to be interviewed for this article, but she agreed to answer questions via email. Braasch said she plans to graduate in the fall of 2020.

The 2018 confrontation between Braasch and Siyonbola grabbed headlines because it was just one in a series of similar incidents.

Kari Winter, a professor in the department of global gender and sexuality studies at the University at Buffalo, said Braasch’s response to the outcry should be considered within a larger historical context.

“It may seem as if … her side of the story is just being heard, but her side of the story is always available in American history,” Winter said. “The story of a white woman in relation to people of color is always going to get more social support until society changes.”

Creating space for students to learn about other perspectives is key, Winter said.

“The core thing students need to learn is the possibility of listening to other points of view,” she said. “There’s almost no skill more important than that.”

Emma Dill is an editorial intern at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter @EmmaKDill, or email her at emma.dill@chronicle.com.