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Lolade Siyonbola’s exasperated message to the campus police officers — and to the Yale University graduate student who’d summoned them to her dorm — was simple and consistent:
She didn’t have to do anything to prove that she was justified in being there, just because she happened to be black.
“I deserve to be here. I pay tuition like everybody else,” an annoyed Siyonbola told responding officers after they repeatedly asked her to hand over identification. “I’m not going to justify my existence here.”
It was part of a tense, racially tinged exchange that the African Studies student had this week with four police officers and the graduate student who called 911 after she found Siyonbola napping in the Hall of Graduate Studies’ 12th-floor common room.
The Monday encounter, broadcast by Siyonbola on Facebook Live, has roiled the campus community, sparking campus leaders to call for more conversations about inclusiveness. The nation is also engaged in a dialogue about disparate treatment of minorities in public places after black people who have not committed crimes have controversially had the police called on them at an Alabama Waffle House, Philadelphia Starbucks and Pennsylvania golf course.
And for anyone keeping score, it adds “napping” to the long and apparently still growing list of things it is unacceptable to do 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.
Part 2 – Sarah Braasch, Philosophy PhD student, called the cops on my friend a few months ago for getting lost in my building. Today she messed—again—with the wrong one.
Posted by Lolade Siyonbola on Monday, May 7, 2018
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.
[She wanted to criticize Black Lives Matter in a college speech. A protest shut her down.]
What followed was a racially tinged, police-involved dispute between neighbors that aired lived on Facebook — then spread.
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.”
“Continue,” Siyonbola said, then taunted her. “Get my good side.”
Instead, Braasch shut the door and Siyonbola waited for the police, who became the subject of her second live video.
“Once we verify that you belong here, we’ll be on our way,” an officer said. The officer told Siyonbola that he doesn’t know either woman, is simply trying to quickly sort out what’s going on and needs to check her identification.
Ultimately, but unhappily, Siyonbola relented. She did not immediately respond to Washington Post messages seeking comment.
As the police tried to sort out who she was (Siyonbola’s given name in a Yale database conflicted with her preferred name on the card, a spokesman said.), she told them Braasch had called police on her friend about three months ago “because he was in the stairwell and he was black.”
She claimed that she is facing the same kind of harassment, from Braasch and from the four police officers who responded to her non-crime.
Later, a supervising officer told Siyonbola that she wasn’t harassed, at least not by the officers.
“Every time there’s an interaction with police officers doesn’t mean there’s harassment,” the supervisor told her. Then the officers bid her good night.
“You have a good night,” she said. “I’m not going to have a good night after this.”
Braasch, a graduate philosophy student, could also not be reached for comment. She had reportedly deleted social media accounts or set them to private in the wake of the incident.
Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, Yale’s vice president for student life, said in an email to the university community that the officers admonished the student who called 911 and that “the other student had every right to be present.”
Goff-Crews said she had discussed the incident with other Yale leaders, trying to figure out “how we can work together to avoid such incidents in the future.” She said they were planning “listening sessions” with the Yale community and encouraged students to share their thoughts.
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.
“Folks done made it okay to be publicly racist, and do and say what they want,” a tearful Kimberly Houzah said after being kicked out of a Victoria’s Secret in 2016.
Black people who had tense conversations with police said they felt as if their race made them more likely to be treated with suspicion by the white people around them. In some instances, they felt as though celebrating their blackness was being treated as a crime.
[After calling Barbara Bush an ‘amazing racist,’ a professor taunts critics: ‘I will never be fired’]
Nafeesah Attah, who graduated too boisterously while black last week (she was shoved off a stage while trying to flash a sorority sign) told The Post that her incident “speaks to the bigger and larger issue of race relations in the United States at this time and making sure that black students feel comfortable at these universities.
“This is the time to highlight black excellence; instead we were treated like criminals at our very own commencement.”
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.
Read more:
‘I was just reading a book’: Canadian cops called on black man reading C.S. Lewis in his car
A teen spread a racist video of a black classmate eating chicken. Both face criminal charges.
Police say a black man was shot after pulling a blade on officers. A new video raises doubts.
Private school teens held an Instagram debate on the n-word. It went as well as you’d expect.
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MOUNT BENTAL, Golan Heights — The Israeli military said it had struck dozens of Iran-linked military targets in Syria on Thursday in response to rocket fire, marking a significant escalation in regional hostilities a little more than a day after the U.S. withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal.
Israel said the attacks followed a volley of rockets directed at Israeli positions in the Golan Heights, which caused no casualties.
The Israeli military blamed the attack on Iran’s Quds Force, a special forces unit affiliated with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and said this marked the first time that Iranian forces have fired directly on Israeli troops.
The rocket fire was followed by Israel’s largest intervention in neighboring Syria in decades. Jets headed for Syria screamed over northern Israel for more than four hours. and about 70 previously identified targets were hit, according to the Israeli military
In a statement carried by Syria’s state news agency, an unidentified Syrian Foreign Ministry official described Israel’s overnight attacks as a “new phase of aggression.”
“This was by far the largest strike we have done, but it was focused on Iranian sites,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman. Syrian anti-aircraft batteries were also targeted after they fired on Israeli planes, he added.
From a viewing point on Mount Bental on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, he pointed out where he said an Iranian rocket salvo was fired toward Israel just after midnight. Four of the 20 rockets were on target, he said, but were then intercepted, while the rest fell short.
“We saw it was very clear what the Iranians were doing, attacking Israel from Syrian soil,” he said.
Israel and Iran have been on an increasingly inevitable collision course in Syria in recent months, as Israel has vowed not to let Iran build a presence there and has escalated attacks against Iranian targets across the border. Iran threatened retaliation after seven of its soldiers were killed by an Israeli airstrike in April.
Israel officials have downplayed a link between the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and the immediate escalation in tensions, though Israelis on the Golan Heights were ordered to open their bomb shelters at the very moment Trump made his announcement.
Before the United States made its decision about the nuclear accord, Iran faced a “strategic uncertainty” over what would happen and did not want to take the risk of striking back, said Michael Horowitz, a senior analyst at Le Beck International, a Middle East-based geopolitical and security consultancy. “That encouraged Tehran to be careful.”
Israel, meanwhile, was searching for an opportunity to escalate its efforts at rolling back the entrenched Iranian presence in Syria, he said.
On Tuesday night, Israel had struck targets in Syria after detecting what Israeli officials said were suspicious military movements, reportedly killing a further eight Iranians.
Horowitz said Israel’s strategy is two-fold. In part, Israel wants to delay Iranian entrenchment in Syria as much as possible and make sure it comes at the highest cost possible. At the same time, Israel is trying to back up its diplomatic efforts aimed at getting Russia and the United States to rein in Iranian expansionism.
In Washington, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders condemned Iran’s “provocative rocket attacks from Syria against Israeli citizens” and supported Israel’s “right to act in self-defense.”
“The Iranian regime’s deployment into Syria of offensive rocket and missile systems aimed at Israel is an unacceptable and highly dangerous development for the entire Middle East,” Sanders said in a statement. “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) bears full responsibility for the consequences of its reckless actions.”
The statement called on Iran and its proxies “to take no further provocative steps.”
It was a sleepless night for residents of Damascus. “The intensity of the blasts and their repetition was stressful,” said one resident, who declined to be named for security reasons. He said he was not fearful, but many of those close to him were. “They said that a war with Israel would be much scarier than a war with other proxies,” he said.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a monitoring group based in Britain, said at least 23 people were killed in Thursday’s Israeli strikes across Syria. It said five Syrian soldiers and 18 allied militiamen died, without specifying whether any of the militiamen were Iranian. The Syrian army, however, said only three people died in the strikes and claimed that most of the Israeli missiles were intercepted.
Russia, meanwhile, issued its own analysis of the attack, saying it was carried out by 28 Israeli fighter jets firing 60 missiles and another 10 surface-to-surface missiles, with Syrian air defenses intercepting half of them.
There were no immediate statements from the Iranian government after the Israeli strikes. On Wednesday, however, Iran’s defense minister, Brig. Gen. Amir Hatami, pledged that Iran would continue to develop its missile capabilities. Hatami, speaking to officials in Tehran, made no direct mention of Israel or other nations, but cited pressures from “enemies of Iran,” according to Iran’s Fars News Agency.
Tehran’s strong support for Assad has allowed it to deepen its foothold across Syria, but Iranian media downplayed Tehran’s role in the violence, depicting the clashes instead as between Israel and Syria.
[The shadow war between Israel and Iran takes center stage]
Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said the strikes targeted “almost all of the Iranian infrastructure in Syria.”
An army spokesman, Brig. Gen. Ronen Menalis, said Israel could inflict much more damage if it deems further strikes necessary.
“What we did tonight is only the tip of the iceberg of the Israeli army’s capability,” he said Thursday morning on Israel Army Radio.
Among the targets that were hit were a logistics headquarters belonging to the Quds Force, a military logistics compound in Kiswah, an Iranian military compound north of Damascus, munition storage warehouses of the Quds Force at the Damascus International Airport, intelligence systems and posts associated with the Quds Force, observation and military posts and munitions in the buffer zone, the Israeli army said.
Speaking at the annual Herzliya Conference on Thursday morning, Liberman said his country’s position was clear: “We will not allow Iran to turn Syria into a front-line post against Israel.”
On the Golan Heights, captured by Israel from Syria half a century ago, air raid sirens sounded shortly after midnight on Thursday. Residents have been used to them sounding during errant fire in the civil war, but things were a little different this time said 33-year-old Maayan Ben Dor, a resident of Neve Ativ.
“It does make you stressed,” she said. “It’s not Hezbollah or Hamas, it’s something else.”
Eglash reported from Herzliya, Israel, and Loveluck from Beirut. Suzan Haidamous in Beirut, Erin Cunningham in Istanbul and Brian Murphy and John Wagner in Washington contributed to this report.
Read more
Regional tensions soar in Syria as Trump threatens and Iranians die in an attack
Despite blowback over Syrian strike, Israelis say more military action needed
Israel carries out ‘large-scale attack’ in Syria after jet crashes under fire
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