Over the past week, we at The Root have added hashtags to various incidents of racial bias that have crossed our radars. There was #MovingInWhileBlack, #BlackWhileAirBnBing and #CouponingWhileBlack. #DiningWhileBlack, frankly, has too many examples for us to enumerate, and just today, we ran a story about a couple being denied a money order—with cash in hand—while black.
Now, it looks like #NappingWhileBlack can be added to the list.
On Monday, a black graduate student at Yale was interrogated by police for 15 minutes after a white grad student reported her for napping in a common room.
As the Yale Daily News reports, Lolade Siyonbola says she was napping in a common room in the Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS) when she was confronted by a white female grad student who told her she couldn’t sleep there.
The white Yale student then called campus police.
Siyonbola captured a brief video showing the tail-end of her interaction with the white grad student.
After snapping a few photos of Siyonbola, the woman says“I have every right to call the police, you cannot sleep in that room.”
“Continue,” an exasperated-sounding Siyonbola says as she waits for an elevator. “Get my good side.”
Moments later, alone in the elevator with the video still running, Siyonbola says, “I’m going to start another video when the cops get here. Hopefully, they do come.”
In the Facebook post, Siyonbola says the white grad student had called the cops on a friend of hers earlier in the year for getting lost in her building.
A second video, this time of Siyonbola’s interaction with the cops, shows her opening the door to her dorm room to prove to campus police she lives in the building. Still, the police request her school identification card, which Siyonbola reluctantly gives. Because her name was entered incorrectly into a student database, it took more than 15 minutes to verify Siyonbola was a Yale student.
“We need to make sure you belong here,” one cop told her.
“I deserve to be here,” Siyonbola said. “I paid tuition like everybody else.”
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Source: A Black Yale Student Took a Nap in a Dorm Common Room. A White Classmate Called the Cops on Her
