Sarah Brassch has some of her pieces pulled from Humanist for their controversial commentary on race and religion. (Facebook video screenshot)
The white woman who called police on a Black Yale graduate student for dozing off in the common room of their dormitory reportedly has a love for hate speech and detests hate crime legislation, according to old blogs posts dug up this week.
Sarah Braasch, who’s also a graduate student at the Ivy League institution, called police on fellow student Lolade Siyonbola on Tuesday after she fell asleep in the common room while working on her term paper. At least four officers showed up to the on-campus dorm, where they questioned Siyonbola in the hall for nearly 20 minutes trying to confirm her status as a student there.
Siyonbola, who recorded the incident via Facebook live, unlocked the door to her apartment to prove she lived there but officers still demanded her ID. The encounter dragged on until police were able to verify her status in the university’s database, which took a while seeing as her name was spelled wrong.
“I deserve to be here. I pay tuition like everyone else,” Siyonbola says in the video. “I am not going to justify my existence here. That’s not even a conversation.”
Apparently, this isn’t the first time Brassch, a human rights lawyer and women’s rights advocate, has called the police on an innocent person. Siyonbola claims she also called police on one of her friends three months ago “…because he was in the stairwell and he was Black.”
Old blog posts of Brassch’s that surfaced this week also reveal her online presence was teeming with controversial views on race, religion and human rights. In a 2010 post published on “Humanist,” the Ph.D. student recalled the time she had to argue in favor of slavery for a middle school debate assignment.
“I was placed on the pro-slavery side of the argument. I remember spending many an hour in the local public library poring over Time Life books,” Brassch wrote.
“And then I had a eureka moment,” she continued. “Some — not many, but some — of the slaves didn’t want to stop being slaves. A small number wanted to remain with their owners or even return after being freed. I knew I had just won the debate. And indeed, I did. I led our team to victory. Who are we to tell someone she has to be free, … that she has to be regarded fully as a human?”
Brassch, 43, also once advocated against hate crime laws and said she would support a ban on burqas in America, according to a 2011 article she wrote for Daylight Atheism.
“Hate crimes legislation is stupid. Seriously stupid,” she wrote. “Abominably stupid. I hate hate crimes legislation. But, I love hate speech. Hate crimes legislation has a chilling effect on free speech and freedom of association.”
In a separate blog post, Brassch called racism “silly” and even compared her time as a Jehovah’s witness to slavery.
“I was a slave who insisted that I had chosen slavery of my own free will, of my own free volition, as a conscious and educated choice,” she wrote. ” … Because, you see, I was a Jehovah’s Witness who had been brainwashed from birth to believe that God had created me subhuman — below man.”
