#NaptimeNancy Is The New #PermitPatty -- And She Works For Harvard

#NaptimeNancy is a Harvard employee who harassed a black child and her mother for being in the courtyard of their own apartment building

In the latest edition of “Who’s Harassing Black Children,” we have a woman the internet’s dubbed Naptime Nancy, a play on Permit Patty who went viral last month for threatening to call the cops on a black child for selling bottled water. Good ol’ Nancy is actually Theresa Lund, an employee of Harvard University. Or at least she was — all evidence of her employment with the university has been scrubbed from the internet overnight — while Harvard has yet to address Lund’s disgusting behavior publicly.

Let’s delve into this horrifying nonsense, shall we?

Mom Alyson Laliberte was outside with her daughter over the weekend enjoying the nice weather while the child played with sidewalk chalk. That is, until Lund decided the pair were being too loud and making it hard for her kids to nap. Because sure, the world should fall silent at 3:30 PM on a Saturday just because your children need to sleep. Luckily, Laliberte caught the woman’s appalling behavior on video where it’s since gone viral.

Yes. You just watched this vile person address a small child, telling her that her mom “isn’t being very nice” when all she did was stand up for herself and her daughter. Laliberte deserves an award for not raising her voice to this infuriating woman.

The mom writes that another “Permit Patty” is trying to get her kicked out of her own property because of her struggle to get her kids to nap. “I’m outside enjoying the afternoon with my daughter when this woman came downstairs and asked me if I would move so her kids can nap. Mind you it’s mid day and we weren’t even being loud at all drawing with chalk.”

Laliberte says that when she refused to move, Lund tried to get her information and apartment number, even following her around. Then, Lund showed her true colors. “When I wouldn’t tell her she proceeded to ask me if I lived in the ‘affordable apartments’ of the building for Cambridge residents or if I lived in one of the Harvard owned apartments (which is all the same building anyways),” Laliberte writes.

The mom (correctly) notes that Lund’s line of questioning was racist and explains that her child is biracial. “She wanted to know what apartment number I lived at so she can yell outside my window to see if I like it (real mature) as you hear her say in the video. This woman’s house is no bigger than mine even if she lives in one of the apartments that are owned by Harvard.”

Speaking of Harvard, that’s where Lund works (worked?) and her job title is a pretty ironic one considering she can’t even be civil in her literal own backyard. She’s the executive director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and in her now-deleted bio, the university claims her area of expertise involves “working to advance our understanding of complex global issues.”

But she can’t manage to solve the “complex” issue of not being a racist asshole to a woman and her child in broad daylight? She sounds very qualified.

Before her Facebook page disappeared, Lund posted an apology for the incident.

“I am terribly sorry about the exchange I had with my neighbor on Saturday. What I said was inappropriate and wrong….I want to be accountable for my actions in a situation where I fell far short of my values and what I expect of myself,” she writes.

In other words, “I’m very sorry I was being my racist self but this time, it was caught on video and my job and future are now in question.” There. Fixed it for her.

Can we please stop with this shit? Can white people please just calm the fuck down and stop harassing black kids? This child and her mom were minding their own business, in their own yard. If Lund wants an environment of perfect silence, she’d be better off in a house instead of a large apartment complex, as Laliberte points out, but we know the noise level of the courtyard is not the real issue here. It’s the fact that Lund felt angry enough by Laliberte and her daughter’s presence that she thought she was entitled to question Laliberte and to insinuate that she either didn’t live there or that she lived in the “affordable apartments.” It’s that she had no issue taking a tone with a child young enough to be playing with sidewalk chalk and to get testy with her mother for no reason at all.

It’s the Permit Pattys and Naptime Nancys of the world that need to be told to sit down and shut up, not the other way around.