White Yale Student Calls Cops on Black Student for Napping

A white graduate student at Yale called police on a black graduate student who'd fallen asleep in a common area of their campus residence—an episode that a dean said shows the need for efforts to make the Ivy League university a more inclusive place, Per the AP, Lolade Siyonbola posted two videos of Monday's encounter on her Facebook page, including part of a conversation with the white student who told her she was calling police after finding her on a couch in the room at Yale's Hall of Graduate Studies on the New Haven campus. After questioning Siyonbola for more than 15 minutes, police confirmed she was a Yale student who lived in the building and then left.

Police told Siyonbola the encounter was prolonged because her name wasn't spelled correctly in a database of student information. The videos show Siyonbola telling police the woman who called them suffered from mental illness and had called police several months ago on a friend who'd gotten lost in a stairwell of the building. Siyonbola didn't immediately respond to emails and messages on social media requesting comment, though she expressed gratitude Tuesday on her Facebook page for "the love, kind words, and prayers" she has received. "Black Yale community is beyond incredible and is taking good care of me," she wrote. "I know this incident is a drop in the bucket of trauma Black folk have endured since Day 1 America, and you all have stories."