HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student at Center of ‘Napping While Black’ Furor Lashes Out at Yale Officials and ‘Woke Intersectional Feminists.’
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.”
I’m sure there are both kinds of students, but I know which variety feels safe in attacking others, knowing it will be supported by Yale’s terrible administration.