The common room was off-limits for sleeping
Another one of these – another “___ while black” item. This time it’s falling asleep while working on a paper in the dorm common room while black.
Other entrants include: couponing while black, graduating too boisterously while black, waiting for a school bus while black, throwing a kindergarten temper tantrum while black, drinking iced tea while black, waiting at Starbucks while black, AirBnB’ing while black, shopping for underwear while black, having a loud conversation while black, golfing too slowly while black, buying clothes at Barney’s while black, or Macy’s, or Nordstrom Rack, getting locked out of your own home while black, going to the gym while black, asking for the Waffle House corporate number while black and reading C.S. Lewis while black, among others.
I recognize several of those without following the links – the graduating too boisterously one, the Starbucks, at least one of the buying clothes, the locked out of your own house.
Siyonbola is a first-year graduate student in the African Studies department at Yale. She had papers and books spread out in a common room while writing a paper Monday, but had flipped off the lights and went to sleep, she explained in her Facebook Live video.
Another graduate student, Sarah Braasch, walked in, turned on the lights and said she was calling police. The common room was off-limits for sleeping, she added.
There’s a slight gap there – between a claimed rule about not sleeping in the common room and calling the police. There are intermediate steps between a minor rule violation and calling the police. Life is full of rules, explicit and implicit, but they don’t all involve calling the police in cases of violation. It’s a rule violation to use the “10 items or fewer” line at the grocery store if you have 20 items in your cart, but that doesn’t mean it’s worth calling the police to deal with it. Sleeping in a dorm common room seems high on the list of non-police-worthy violations. It actually seems like the kind of violation it’s ok to ignore if it’s not bothering anyone. If Brasach wanted to do something in the common room – watch tv, work with the lights on, chat with friends, whatever – surely she could have just done that, leaving Siyonbola to move to her room to nap or go back to writing her paper according to preference.
Agitated, Siyonbola went to Braasch’s room, aiming a cellphone camera at her, and demanded to know why she had called the authorities.
“I have every right to call the police,” Braasch said after snapping a photo of Siyonbola. “You cannot sleep in that room.”
I don’t think that’s even correct. The police frown on frivolous calls. I don’t think we do have “every right” to call the police over a small rule violation. Do parents call the police when their children talk while chewing? I doubt it.
The issue is, of course, much bigger than Yale. People have picketed coffee shops and received apologies from CEOs and college presidents over viral issues of bias that spread at the speed of the Internet, giving institutions an instantaneous black eye.
And with the “while black” incidents piling up, the aggrieved parties have begun to point out the similarities — sometimes in the very videos they post.
And this is one of those places where “identity politics” and “standpoint epistemology” come into play, simply because white people don’t realize how much this kind of thing happens because it doesn’t happen to us. It’s fatally easy to do that homemade epistemology thing of rifling quickly through one’s memory for examples of the kind of thing under discussion, turning up nothing, and concluding that nothing is all there is. It’s fatally easy to forget that one’s own experience can’t always be assumed to stand for everyone else’s experience.
In a post on her Facebook page a day after the incident, Siyonbola also acknowledged that other black people have endured similar treatment.
“Grateful for all the love, kind words and prayers, your support has been overwhelming 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.”
Then she invited anyone reading her post to share similar stories.
By Thursday, 1,400 people had commented.
Maybe some day we can do better.
While white people in general may not realize how common this sort of thing is, the white people who call the police are often very well aware of what they are doing. They know that the police will harass the minority person they have deliberately chosen to target for police harassment. They deliberately and willfully choose not only to harass, but to positively endanger the life of the target of their completely unnecessary police call. Evidence about her beliefs and prior actions makes it clear that this is the case with Braasch, and there are many other cases where it is equally evident.
I am not at all sympathetic to the racist fears and assumptions which drive the call to police in other cases which aren’t so transparently deliberate, but this sort of deliberate harassment is completely unconscionable and ought to be subject to prosecution for false or frivolous reporting. Violating a dorm rule against sleeping in the common room is NOT a crime, period. And Braasch certainly knew that Siyonbola was a fellow student and not an intruder in the residence who didn’t belong there. So why wasn’t Braasch charged, or at least ticketed, for her nuisance call? Because she’s a white person whose “fear of” (actually just animosity against) a black person just for being black is always-already justified.
Good point; thank you. I was taking the minimalist view for the sake of pointing out that even if she didn’t do it out of malice it’s a grotesque thing to do – but that gave short shrift to the likelihood that it was racist malice.
The story did say the cops admonished Braasch, but not more than that. Not good enough.
Other sites I’ve read indicate that Braasch is an ex-JW who left in her teens. At the risk of being overly charitable to her, I’ll put some of the blame on the damage of being raised in that cult.
Here’s where you lost me:
But seriously…
The cops seem totally professional to me. People are rightly upset when cops jump in and use excessive force. Here they were calm and would have resolved the situation in a just a few minutes if not for a name glitch. Siyonbola seems to want to characterize it as police harassment, but I really don’t see it. I get her point that she shouldn’t have to show her ID, but I think from the cops’ perspective that’s just a way to quickly establish she’s a student there and it’s a non-issue, and that’s how they treat it.
The person calling the cops seems to be the real villain. I’d like to hear if she has some explanation for this crazy overreaction, especially calling 911 (rather than a non-emergency police number), but it’s hard to imagine what it would be.
Skeletor @ 4, I do see Ophelia’s point, I think. While the cops seemed pretty professional, at least by comparison to some other well publicised occasions, they did engage in what I’d call micro aggression. As a white student n New Zealand I would never have expected to have to show ID under similar circumstances. In fact, I can’t imagine it arising. I would expect that the cops or security would, if they bothered turning up, see someone who looked like a student, clearly studying and with a room key. They’d shrug, lecture the person who called them and depart.
To ignore the ample evidence in front of them and demand ID, then to make an issue of a mismatch to the database despite a reasonable explanation, is something that I doubt many white people would experience.
The fact that calling the cops was such an overreaction and that the complainant has done this before is an aggravating factor.
@5: The campus cops *may* have a standard protocol they’re required to follow when someone reports a person they think doesn’t belong there — ask for, and verify, student ID. So it’s not clear to me (pending further details) that they did anything wrong. So far, I’m putting this all on the person who called them in, for no adequate reason, for which waste of their time they reportedly told her off. She sounds like a bit of a control freak with at least a streak of racism.
Steve, they may have a standard procedure. I’ll guarantee that they also have wide discretion over many of the procedures that they have. Front line staff in any profession (and especially those like police) cannot adhere to a standard procedure rigidly under all circumstances. Instead they are (should be) trained to exercise judgement as to what is safe and appropriate given the circumstances and the law. What seems to be happening in the US is far too many cases of the intersection of maliciously motivated complainants calling police combined with the cops rigidly applying procedure in the case of black people, but applying discretion for non-black people.
That’s when they don’t just shoot them or beat them up (the black people that is).
If there really is a rule about sleeping in that room, it’s bound to be to prevent drunk students routinely passing out in there overnight, not to stop people having a quick nap while studying. In my mind this makes the fabricated excuse for calling the police even more vicious.
Posts #1 and #8 reminded me of an incident that happened when I was about ten. While at school, a kid I disliked was walking down the slippery dip. The school had forbidden us from doing that, in case we tripped I suppose, but we all routinely ignored that rule and walked up and down it whenever they weren’t in sight. But! Recall that this was a kid I disliked! This meant that I suddenly became a vindictive stickler for the rules, and is why I shouted “you’re not allowed to run down the slippery-dip” at him… as snagged his feet from under him and tripped him.
So I agree with G Felis and latsot, it seems very likely to me that vindictiveness was the motivator here.
I hadn’t realised that Braasch was a contributor to the atheist movement, which of course she fucking was.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2018/05/statement-on-sarah-braasch/
latsot, I don’t know that the “of course” follows, since we see this pattern of behavior frequently from Christians, too. But…damn. Why can’t the atheist movement get its act together? Why do we attract so many assholes? We have no holy book telling is to be assholes for Jesus…
Of course, we also have no charismatic leaders telling us not to be assholes, either, and in fact, a number of self-appointed “leaders” telling us it is a violation of our free speech for someone to politely suggest we not be assholes.
So the take away message is that atheism is no better at Christianity in generating no-asshole behavior. The only difference is, the atheists try to pretend that behavior is predicted/condoned/permitted by science and reason. The Christians try to pretend that behavior is ordered/condoned by God.
@Inklast:
We see this pattern of behaviour from everyone but *fuck it* we’re supposed to be better.
I hold us to a higher standard than anyone else. That’s the point, isn’t it?
I think the attracting assholes thing has to do with the inherent iconoclasm of atheism in a world where godbothering is tightly linked to respectability. There are many thousands of dudes in the atheist “movement” who think they model themselves on Hitchens but don’t have a quarter of his wit or learning.
The proprietor of Daylight Atheism, Adam Lee, posted today that he will donate the money he makes from the blog during May to two civil rights charities. Here is his post – he has already donated US$125 to each of the charities.