"And they found themselves a brown scapegoat in me."

Something is rotten in the state of the Johnson Co. supervisors. That one may smile and smile and be a villain. Make it Make Sense 18.

The first debate between VP Kamala Harris and former president Trump went down last night. By most accounts it was an exercise in Harris repeatedly dunking on the man with a concept of a plan. One subtext that I think, unfortunately, most of have internalized and learned to expect, is that there is clearly a different set of expectations for the two candidates. The bar for Harris, a brown woman, was so high that one would have to create a new fosbury flop to clear it. Her negotiation skills, her decorum, her navigation of the lunacy on the opposite podium while being ever so mindful of how it would effect her Q score. It all had to be perfect. And the expectation for the old white guy? It felt like he was good as long as he didn’t drop one of two things; trou or a racial slur. Hell, its long been expected that he could rage and rage into his un-muted microphone, angrily spitting out whatever stream of consciousness lies come to his brain. It reminds me of something. This navigation that we people of color have to circumvent. A navigation of communicating your anger in hostile places. In places where supposed allies are waiting to pounce on any slight, or worse, strategizing against you…tallying these supposed slights and executing a power move worthy of a television drama. To be clear, I’m talking about the misuse of power that was the Johnson County Board of Supervisors firing of county executive director Guillermo Morales in an open session last week. Let’s make sense of this blight on our local political scene.

I first caught wind of the firing of Guillermo Morales from an email sent by the organization Escucha Mi Voz. They are an organization that advocates and actively fights for the rights of immigrant workers in the area. The email came the same day of the meeting and read:

Escucha Mi Voz Iowa members released a statement today questioning the potentially unjust firing of Johnson County Executive Director Guillermo Morales.

“This potentially wrongful termination appears to be a politically motivated retaliation against the first Latino director of the Board of Supervisors because he refused to be manipulated and fought to reform county government to work for everybody, not just well-connected establishment insiders,” said Escucha Mi Voz Iowa member Ninoska Campos.

Supervisors Jon Green and V Fixmer-Oraiz voted against the discharge. Supervisor Porter will leave the board at the end of the year, after losing a primary election to progressive candidate Mandi Remington last June. In his personal capacity, Mr. Morales campaigned for Ms. Remington.

It took a few hours for local media outlets to report on the incident. In the Des Moines register it relayed that the Board of Supervisors fired Morales in a 3-2 vote citing argumentative and disrespectful behavior. "...It appears in your regular critiques of other departments, departments which report to the board and not to and through you, you misunderstand your role and exceed your authority," Board Chair Rod Sullivan said in prepared comments directed toward Morales….Sullivan said Morales' "abrasive, corrosive" behavior has inspired other staff to act in a similar fashion because the supervisors "have let you get away with it."

Of being blind-sided with these accusations, and the accusations themselves, the Des Moines Register relayed that, Morales said, "I do think that it's retaliation, given how minor the accusations are in the context of what others have done and been able to maintain employment," Morales said. "I think it was a pretext for how they treated me."

Morales also said he felt like he was being discriminated against, believing other white employees have kept their jobs despite being accused of "manifestly more egregious" conduct than he. He said staff members have assaulted colleagues and are being investigated for financial malfeasance but remain employed.

Okay let’s pause here. Because I got to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. I have to be clear here that I do not personally know Mr. Morales and have minimal contact with the various members of the Johnson County Board of Supervisors. Mr. Morales sat in on a job interview for a position I applied for but did not get. (Also, it turns out, I’ve been Facebook friends with his partner, whom I didn’t realize was his partner— a testament to the small community that we find ourselves.) I’m aware of most of the members of the B.O.S., having followed local elections, and my work email, for better or worse, is subscribed to Supervisor Sullivan’s weekly newsletter, “Sullivan’s Salvos.” This is all to say that there is obviously a lot of information here that I am not privy to. When it comes to Sullivan’s prepared remarks and the vote against Morales based on the accusations of ‘harsh’ and ‘abrasive’ behavior I can not definitively say how it went down. For what it’s worth, I do have colleagues and acquaintances who are closer to the situation and they pretty much verified that there is something fishy going on. But again, I’m stressing that there is a lot of hearsay here when it comes to the allegations that I personally can’t speak on.

What I can base a stance on is the total abuse of power that was the approach to the meeting itself. It turns out, the details of the meeting were kept from Morales and other members of the supervisors. From this Gazette article, “Fixmer-Oraiz and Green said they didn’t know beforehand the purpose of Wednesday’s meeting. Green said he was “speechless” to see the agenda.

“...Given the bill of charges this morning, it seems to me that this is a cumulative thing, as opposed to one particular instance, and I think that this format would only be appropriate if there had been one egregious error,” Green said.

To circle back, here’s what this reminds me of. Because I got to talk about the positionality of it all. Of the fact that a white man got to prepare his comments on the “harsh and disrespectful” behavior of a brown man, specifically a Latino. Here is my question: who gets to decide what is considered disrespectful? Who gets to be angry? When, and how does this anger get leveraged against you? And who gets an opportunity to address this supposed evidence of “argumentative and insubordinate” behavior? Because let’s be clear that this opportunity to address or potentially improve this behavior was not afforded to Morales.

As a Latino man living in Iowa, I’m all too familiar with having to navigate white spaces that are afraid of my anger. Back in my DEI days, we were trained in Cultural Intelligence or CQ. One of the things CQ does is look at all the different ways that various cultures approach interpersonal relationships. Are you direct or indirect? Did you grow up in a family that was neutral/non-expressive or did you grow up in an affective/expressive upbringing? It was significant to me just how much tension and negative interactions in the workplace were a result of discrepancies on these cultural values. Let’s take that last example. Growing up in a big extended Mexican family we were loud and abrasive. If someone had a problem with someone else we would argue it out in front of other family members. Our tias could be yelling at each other then laughing and crying the next day. I remember how I felt like I had to squelch this part of myself when I entered the workforce. I didn’t know it at the time but I started to see how much supervisors revered those that were “cool, calm, and collected.” To be effected by things was to be unprofessional. To call something out was me being an angry or fiery Latino.

Some examples of these cultural values.

And during my time at the UI, time and time again, I’d come across other Latinos that felt like they were doing something wrong. That they had been accused of being harsh or disrespectful or angry. And many times these people felt like they had to change their behavior. That they had to navigate the workplace cultures that ultimately, centered one particular style of communication. This style being one of whiteness. I’ll end this post with some words from others that echo this same sentiment. First is a post from a community member that worked with Morales and speaks on their first-hand experience working in the environment that Morales was navigating.

And lastly is a statement from the local C.O.G.S. Grad Student organization sent to the Board of Supervisors. (As an aside, it really does strike me that both Escucha Mi Voz and COGS have came out with statements against this action. Talk about messing up big enough that you got two of the biggest advocates for change in our local community speaking out against you.)

I wanted to end this post with remarks from Morales that I’ve came across in the various articles I read. Because I don’t think the news outlets are treating some of his statements for the mic drop moments that they are. Because it’s clear that Morales understands what he is up against and feels a lot of the same push and pull we all do. He says it himself, “It may be that when this comes from a person of color, people have a hard time with it, right?” And he speaks of the role that members of the Board of Supervisors hold and the power that they wield. "(The supervisors) should recognize that they have a role as role models that they're not living up to," Morales said. "And they found themselves a brown scapegoat in me."

And then there’s this. I know I’ll be following along.

-C