There Will Always Be More Work
Sofia DeMartino writes about living as a Black woman in Iowa
This is the mid-week edition of Men Yell at Me, a newsletter about the places where our politics and personhood collide. This week, Sofia DeMartino wrote about what it’s like being Black in Iowa, a state that is 90 percent white. She also talks about the work she does and why she stays. Sofia is a writer and entrepreneur and you can read more of her writing here.
The room felt hollow, and I felt small in it, although the space itself was about the size of my office at work. The couch where I was perched was backed all the way up to the wall, anchored by a large plant on my right and a coffee table holding a box of tissues nearly touching my knees. I let my eyes wander the walls, the floor, the plant, the shoes that faced me, and finally the expectant face of the owner of these shoes.
“I’ll repeat the question,” she said brightly. “What has brought you in today?”
I swallowed my apprehension and explained to the second therapist in under a year why I had arrived on their couch: I was being abused in my home.
The first therapist I met with had regarded me with a mild disinterest. After our meeting, she scheduled some marriage counseling sessions with both of us and assigned The Five Love Languages for me to study between bouts of rage that ended in a patched wall behind the bathroom door, chipped tiles on the kitchen floor, and marks on my face and arms that I would send to my group chat in case he took my phone again.
I finished a brief recap for this new (Black) therapist and held my breath in the vacuum of time between my mouth closing and hers opening. How she found the air for that long inhale, I will never know. “So what you’re gonna need to do,” she began, “is get ahold of the local domestic violence agency and start a file with them as a client, even if you don’t think you need it financially. Because one day, you’re going to get to court, and if you don’t have any documentation that you have been going through this outside the texts you sent your friends, it is going to be that white man’s word against yours.”
This was the day I realized that I wasn’t out of my mind. Iowa promises a better way of life, but doesn’t specify for whom — that part is assumed. In the Midwest, we don’t say the quiet parts out loud.
*
Recently, I attended an event at the University of Iowa for local Black university students to connect with those in the business world. Printed below each student’s name and major on their nametag was where they were going after graduation; leaving this place felt like an expectation. An internationally renowned medical inventor and college freshman made her way to my table. I was starstruck — she had achieved great fame at 17 for the medical advancements she developed in high school, and she could have chosen any institution of higher learning.
“This is where I was able to accomplish my work so far, and I decided to stay and build on the relationships I already have,” she told me beaming.
She chose to stay when she could have gone anywhere.
What are we as a community doing to build the relationships that we already have with the bright young minds attached to Black and brown bodies ready to create the technology that will cure our ills, to design our future, to carry forward our nation?
I think about these questions in the other work I do in Iowa. In my time as (the first Black) member of the school board, I called to the attention of the administration and my peers the blatant absence of Black teachers and administrative staff. The photographic representations of Black people on the walls of elementary schools were limited to athletes. The digital educational materials my daughter was provided contained examples of bias that the superintendent eventually contacted the vendor to have removed. One morning, I contacted the administration about a class project gone awry. The project, displayed in a middle school hallway and posted on social media, broadcast the implicit message that Black features are ugly. Although the offending project was removed, no member of the administration ever felt it appropriate to apologize.
While discussing progress on two new middle schools, I suggested this as an opportune moment to actively work toward a more diverse staff. “I mean, sure,” said another member of the school board, “but we need to hire good candidates.”
My role on the school board was important to me not only because my own children spent every formative year in the district but because I understood the experience of growing up Black in predominantly white spaces. The conspicuous absence of representation was impacting students of color just as it had impacted me.
I grew up here. From an early age, I’ve seen the gap between the marketing of Midwestern values and reality. I was unceremoniously ejected from my Iowa high school when my son was born. I wasn’t the only pregnant girl in school; this was in the era when teenage pregnancy was a crisis across the nation, eventually resulting in an MTV show that loves to give itself credit for the subsequent retraction in teen parenthood. While I wasn’t the only pregnant girl in school, I was the Black pregnant girl in school, and as the principal explained to my mother , the school no longer felt that I would be successful within its walls. I graduated from a go-at-your-own-pace high school diploma program six months later and started college at 16.
The years since have offered many opportunities to both grow as a person and work to improve the place I call home. Within the nonprofit sector, where I do the lion’s share of my work, I have had the opportunity to collaborate with spectacular people who truly want to see an Iowa that lives up to its marketing strategy. Despite the danger in it, there is an ongoing effort to remove the shiny veneer of “Iowa Nice” that masks the bias and discrimination that are literally killing us under the pretense that talking about race is impolite. There are also those who — due to the same bias they have yet to acknowledge within themselves — are engaged in some diversity effort or another but missing the mark when it comes to building meaningful progress.
“Iowa promises a better way of life, but doesn’t specify for whom — that part is assumed. In the Midwest, we don’t say the quiet parts out loud.”
In a recent presentation to community leaders, a local government staffer described the myriad ways they had partnered with an organization to bring down barriers to employment by addressing issues with applicants like interviewing skills and apparel. I pressed for the ways they had worked with organizations to create spaces where these new employees were safe to work free from microaggressions, spaces where they felt valued for their contributions, spaces where there was pay equity and upward mobility, maybe even transparency in these metrics so that the organizations had the ability to monitor their own progress in achieving a sustainable workforce and not just a “diverse” one.
The presenter responded that many of the companies in our community “just aren’t ready.”
Instead of identifying changes that needed to be made at companies to create an environment that would foster a sustainable diverse workforce, the program was seeking to change Black people in our community to make them more acceptable to employers. This approach reveals an underlying sentiment — the problem isn’t the hiring managers impacted by systemic bias, it’s Black people.
I was, as is typical, the only one in the room. A room of community leaders — people with the ability to hire, fire, promote, include, exclude, connect, fund, greenlight, and shut down. In this space, there is both opportunity and opposition. And they were being told that our community’s solution to the lack of diversity in the workplace was grounded in the assumption that something was wrong with the applicants. This scenario plays out regularly in our community in the rooms where decisions that will impact minoritized populations are made. How to address this disconnect in a way that is productive? Be honest, but cautious. Not so transparent you have to hop on Indeed and take long weekends to interview in cities with El trains and international airports.
But I stay in those rooms, at those tables, asking those questions. There will be more people who find me too “aggressive.” There will be more explaining that I don’t want strangers to touch my hair. There will be more women at the park who tell me my children “speak so well.” There will be more of my former professors outing their true selves on social media when an unarmed Black person is killed by police and they protest the grandiosity of the memorial service his family provides him. There will be more questions about why I deserve to be at the table. Any table. There will be more.
*
Once every two weeks, I maintain a standing appointment with the therapist who believed me. It is a grounding experience; she refuses to allow me to stagnate or wallow in self-pity, and her lived experience as a Black woman and a professional in this environment offers her a perspective that eludes the vast majority of her colleagues.
These are telehealth sessions now, and I am grateful that she has chosen to stay. The work to change perspectives here is a long, slow, precarious trudge. It’s a balancing act: Be honest, but cautious. Innovate, but frame the projects in a way that praises Midwestern values and traditions. Be bold in your advocacy, but not so transparent that in order to continue on the journey to success you will need to join that ever-growing exodus of People Like Us to bigger cities where everybody does not know your name.
Family and friends from other places give me a slow side-eye when I visit. “So… you’re still living out that way?” Yes, I’m still here. This is the place where I have built my life. The place where I have raised my children. This is the place I call home. This is living in Iowa.
Thank you for reading Men Yell At Me! Subscribers are how I can pay Sofia and other writers like her a really good rate for their words and perspectives. If you find yourself always opening this email, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Thank you for elevating voices that we might not typically hear above the din of white people clamouring.
A powerful read. Thank you for continuing to reveal the Iowa "not so nice" out loud.
I often hear how we aren't, or something isn't "ready" for racial equity. Loud and clear is the fear of what would HAPPEN if we upset the white patriarchy.