Month: February 2019

“I mean I don’t feel sorry for this bitch if something happens to her. I hope it does because you deserve to die yeah I said it.”
Courtesy The Mob

Since my last article about Sarah Braasch, the Yale PhD candidate made famous by a viral video known as “napping while black,” I started thinking more about online mobbing.

I reached out to Sarah out of a concern for her mental status after she mentioned one of her brothers had schizophrenia and that at least one other brother committed suicide. (I’ll let her tell that story.)

Since I have personal experience with schizophrenia, I felt a kinship with her and some of her tweets were sounding a bit alarming to me. Also, as most people do know, you are at a higher risk for suicide if you have a family member or close friend who has died by suicide.

I just wanted her to know I was reading about her and studying her story and that I was concerned about the mobbing. We visited back and forth and I never did press her on the details of what happened at Yale other than what seemed to be publicly available. I recommended some nice women on Twitter that she might follow who I felt were sensible and rational, including one who had undergone a mobbing of her own.

Since that time, Sarah has decided to tell her story via a YouTube channel. I was brushing up on some of the interviews she was referring to in one of her videos when I ran across one that was particularly hateful in its content. (I have never reported a YouTube video before in my life but I decided to report this one and I archived it as well.)

Sarah Braasch, Portrayed as Racist Cop Caller at Yale, Debuts YouTube Channel

So here’s my thought experiment:

If you participate in an online mobbing, how do you separate yourself from the content below? I have done a cursory transcript without punctuation just so you can see what you’re standing beside when you “call out” someone in the name of social justice.

As you read it, you might think about this: Could this inspire violence in someone who is unstable? Could it feed into racial hatred from the alt-right? Is this what you want social justice to look like?

Transcript:

Sarah Braasch Is A Staunch RACIST, F#ck Your “WHITE B*TCH TEARS” Neanderthal KKK#nt!!!

So look at this picture and tell me what you see: this is the racist bitch who called the cops on that sister at Yale University campus

look at her right here she’s the bitch who try to start some shit

committed a hate crime by lying on a black woman for sleeping trying to call the cops and start trouble with the sister who was starting her studies and falls asleep

and these Caucasian supremacists
and these Jewish supremacists, so-called Jewish supremacists because they’re all the same to me

they have an agenda to keep the lie going so they can stay in power always and these bitches these pale skin monkey bitches they’re mother of Satan okay

this is Satan’s mother right here y’all want
to say the white man’s the devil

no I don’t fear the Caucasian male I fear
fear this bitch okay I fear the Caucasian female

she’s the mother of Satan okay
y’all keep thinking the devil is a man
no the devil is a Caucasian female okay

these Devils there’s nothing there’s
nothing there’s nothing loving about these bitches

they got white privilege

the real enemy is the Caucasian female
a lot of towns I’ve been to burnt the fuck down
bomb terrorized
destroyed burn to the fucking ground
with grenades and missiles and guns and
shit like that you know bottles of fire

towns have been burnt the fuck down because the racist bitch man hating bitch lied

remember racism came from Europe

the Caucasian female gets ultra jealous of her sister especially when she wears her hair natural and all very ethnic

I’m just telling y’all man I’m just so
sick and tired of these chicks crying their white tears and when they don’t get their fucking way they want to destroy shit and they want to call out some Caucasian supremacist male mangina bitch bitch ass motherfucker

let me say like this
when a Caucasian female cries her white tears because she didn’t get her fucking way she
will start some shit and she will go
tattle and and make up some lies and
bullshit and tell her Caucasian supremacist male counterparts John I’m a pussy beggar faggots white knights to do some
bullshit and she would demand that they do something for her

she’s racially profiling and she’s looking to get a black person killed this is this should
be a hate crime

so this bitch is racist and this proves her
racism right there

I know what she’s trying to do
she’s trying to get a lynching

fuckin bitch-ass coward
I hope this bitch die from cancer

You don’t know nothing about pain and
struggling oppression so shut the fuck
up you dumb ass bitch

I hope the bitch dies
I gotta watch what I say
I hope to hear from the news that she was found missing somewhere and they found her dead body somewhere
you know where I’m going with this
I hope she dies

well if not I hope she gets some terminal disease
Something happens to her family
I hope some bad happens to her kids
ugly shit but for her

I hope she gets a disease or something I
hope she get an STD and gets all
types of health problems and dies of a
painful death or seeing her children die
seeing her children get murdered I hope

Caucasian male kids or female students
shoots up a school and kills her child
murder her children yeah
I hope bad shit shit happens to these bitches or she gets fucked up and dies in a fucking car accident
yeah because these bitches can’t drive for shit

Anyway so I hope they die from a car at she dies from a car accident let me continue

now she can’t take it she is playing the
Victim

please no lectures no lectures from
white people regarding the subject as I
find you all to be quite annoying in
your clumsy attempts to get black people
out of feeling justified and not
being empathetic towards white
females who show me who they truly are

they need to suffer and they need to die

I would just love to hear you know
somebody just be victimized and suffer a painful death

because they need to I hope they die or
their life is taken
I love to hear that and see that because that’s well deserved

you’re not gonna get away with your racism and hatred no dear

you are the nucleus of racism and hatred
and Caucasian supremacy and help
maintaining white dollars y’all give
your males power and that’s a damn
that’s a fucking fact
she knew exactly what she was doing
it’s best to call the police rather than confront someone if you see
something you feel is wrong see that’s

like I’ve told you
racism is taught by them they are the
first teachers of the children they
teach their children racism they teach
your children’s hate

they’re the ones who keep it going
they’re the ones who gives birth to it
they’re the ones who teach it they’re
the first ones to teach it they’re not

they enable violence they encourage vows
so what bad shit happens to these
bitches that’s why I smile

and I’m glad she’s gonna catch hell and
I love to hear something tragically
happened to this bitch and bitches like

her yeah I said it
peace

In May of 2018, a Facebook Live video filmed by Yale student Lolade Siyonbola went viral. The incident, known as “Napping While Black,” became a subject of international attention. The video also featured fellow Yale student Sarah Braasch, who has decided to start a YouTube channel to tell her side of the story.

An excellent example of how this incident was portrayed to the public can be seen in an article titled “Why white people keep calling the cops on black Americans.” The article was published by Vox in May, 2018. The article, written by Vesla Mae Weaver, is subtitled “I study policing. White people call cops to remove black people because it often works.”

Per the article, “Vesla Mae Weaver is the Bloomberg distinguished associate professor of political science and sociology at Johns Hopkins University. She is the co-author of Arresting Citizenship: The Democratic Consequences of American Crime Control; Creating a New Racial Order: How Immigration, Multiracialism, Genomics; and The Young Can Remake Race in America.”

In this article, Weaver discusses incidents where encounters with police and black people go terribly wrong, and there is no doubt this happens far too often. Weaver has had “hundreds of conversations in communities across the country” and finds that the “gulf between how black America and white America experience the police is vast.”

Weaver then turns to the story of Braasch as a good example of “the reality that white people have the power to turn minor disputes, or their own anxiety, into interventions by the police (which is hardly news in the black community).”

Weaver makes a powerful and convincing case regarding the maltreatment of black Americans in encounters with the police. Her thesis is not in question.

What is in question is using Braasch as an example of how “white people use law enforcement to exert control over their fellow black Americans.” Weaver continues: “The use by a white student at Yale to evict a fellow black student from a common area in a dorm is notable for how the police responded to each student. The video shows plainly that the white caller was not questioned about her purpose in calling 911; she was not asked for ID, let alone detained. The police seemed wholly uninterested in her. They seemed oblivious to the possibility that she made a false report or was motivated by bias regarding who belonged in ‘her’ space.”

(Fact check: Sarah Braasch did not call 911—she called the non-emergency number for the campus police. Braasch was also required to present an I.D. and was questioned once for 11 minutes, and again for 7 minutes. This was approximately equal to the amount of time police spent with Siyoban.)

Weaver continues: “The Yale student was not, as far as we know, attempting to thwart police from discovering her own wrongdoing. But her enlistment of police was racially strategic, meant to marshal existing stereotypes of blacks to reconfigure her space and dispense with a black person. It fits a societal algorithm that blackness itself is suspect.”

But is Weaver using the Braasch incident as a stereotype herself? Is she placing Braasch in the stereotypical role of the white person trying to remove a black woman from her space?

We have no evidence this is true, although Siyoban states in an interview with Harvard Current dated May 11, 2018: “I know with absolute certainty that if I was white 1) the police would not have been called,” she said, “and that 2) if they were, I would not have been detained for nearly 20 [minutes] for absolutely no reason.”

Weaver even speculates that Braasch will become a serial cop caller now that she has had such success maintaining “control of white space, to retaliate against black people for violating unspoken racial codes.”

On May 29, 2018, Weaver added the following correction to her story:

“Update (5/29): Yale’s Director of Office of Public Affairs and Communications, Thomas Conroy, sent a police report to Vox that states that Yale police checked the caller’s ID and questioned her about the call. This piece interprets the police interaction based on the available video evidence, which was recorded and posted online by the napping student.”

This is an extremely important point as you follow Braasch on her YouTube channel. The sole evidence for the complex societal analysis presented by Vesla Mae Weaver is a video posted online.  

In light of the recent debacle featuring the students at Covington Catholic School, an edited video shared without context, it is time we become more skeptical of viral videos and the monstrous and destructive mobs that often follow.

Yale University Public Statements in Reply to Sarah Braasch Incident

Thought Experiment: Can you be part of a mob & profess social justice?