How To Survive As The ‘Only One’ In The Office

Dakotah is your future CEO, hedge fund manager, influencer, model…y’all get the picture. He’s dope and you should get to know him. Dakotah and I met during freshman year while moving into our dorms (we lived on the same floor!). Once I met Dakotah, I knew I was either looking at the future CEO of a Fortune 500 company, a future senator, or future strategist for somebody’s winning campaign.

The point is that if you want to win (and have fun doing it!), you need Dakotah on your team. For our interview, I met Dakotah near the High Line in New York City to talk about his relationship with his health as well as being a Black man in the very White finance space.

This interview took place during July 2019 and has been edited for clarity and length.

Isabelle: Tell me a little bit about yourself, where you grew up and what you do now.

Dakotah: I am originally from Huntsville, Alabama. The home of the Space and Rocket Center and I lived there until I was about 13. Then, we moved to Atlanta and I lived in a suburb called Snellville, GA. I think in Alabama it felt like that show “Cheers.” Everyone knows your name. Then, moving to Atlanta, I moved during that middle school age and it felt like a whole new beast. There was a lot more diversity…race as well as other dimensions and it was a lot bigger. There was a lot more family there…on my mom’s side of the family so I got very connected with that. Growing up was full of family times and times of little bit of depression because I was overweight growing up when I moved there.

Now, I work at a hedge fund called Coatue. They are focused on investing in media and telecom. So, I look at companies publicly and privately and decide how to make investments.

Isabelle: How do you think that your community whether it is Alabama, Atlanta, or both, has affected your health emotionally, physically, or mentally?

Dakotah: I can start with physical. I think especially in the South and especially in Black communities there is not so much a focus on health. I also think that there are some elements of being under-resourced. I grew up being relatively middle, middle class. So, something like going to the gym was not a natural part of my health. I don’t think anybody was thinking about “Are we walking around?” So, I think the upbringing and the lax attention to nutrition. Whereas, in the Northeast, everyone thinks about it. “Kale! Let’s go walk around!” It’s a different type of pace.

Now, I’ve pivoted from that and I’ve brought health and wellness into my daily routine and I started to do that towards the end of high school. It’s been different. Emotionally, my childhood has been riddled with a lot of trauma. Like, my father died when I was three and I saw him die. He had a heart attack in front of me because he was living unhealthily so I guess physical health gets mixed in there too. And then, I was kind of forced out. I got outed to my whole family at the kitchen table. So, I had to grapple with being gay and not knowing what the means because information about it was not accessible around that time. So, mentally, that was kind of draining. I think I didn’t really get to loosen that up until I got to Brown. Once I was able to sit in a space and really find myself, I was able to come back home and then assert that in a way that became respected.

Isabelle: How do you feel like being a Black man affects your health and if you could pick one area that you feel like it affects the most…what would it be and why?

Dakotah: I think being Black affects my health…mostly, culturally and all this stuff that travels with me from my childhood. For example, mental health. There is this expectation that you need to be a rock for people and be “hard”…..feeling like you need to be this man. That definitely is the biggest way that my Black identity impacts my health. There is also this element….when one person kind of makes it to something, you start to feel this responsibility for all these other people. It’s helping out…it’s being the head of family and that’s being put on me at 25.

Isabelle: If you could think back to your community, what are some health initiatives you would input and why?

Dakotah: I think one would be around actual physical health and wellness. There are so many people who end up with conditions that could have been prevented like diabetes or high blood pressure. I think health and wellness would be an important one. Also, having people talk more about their emotions. I never really thought of emotional health as a type of health until my adulthood. I feel like if kids were more in tune with those issues while forming an identity then there would be a lot less people who feel that kind of trauma.

Isabelle: What do you think is the biggest health issue affecting you as a Black man?

Dakotah: The biggest one now is living in this world and all that it means for your safety. It has so many different dimensions. There are all the stereotypes that come along with being a Black man. When I am walking down the street or even when I am at work, it’s a lot. So, in my work environment for example, I am the only Black person who has been an investor at this place. One Black person works in a more back office function and one of them is the chef. So, what does that mean for my existence in this space? What happens when every conversation is about golf and everyone is taking helicopters to the Hamptons…where do I fit in? How do I make connections? Not in a racist way…but, I am different so there is more probing and that’s been a theme in my career.

Isabelle: What’s a win?

Dakotah: I have learned to be a lot more comfortable to be fully who I am in the interview space and the process onward. Not hiding parts of my identity. I think early on in my career I had to be really assimilated into whatever. Not that I am very far in my career per se…but I have done enough where I have a base of credentials where that can get me to a point. Like, when someone asks me what I did with my weekend…I tell them I went to the club, or I went to a Drake concert…it is what it is.

Isabelle: What is the improvement of health in your community?

Dakotah: When I think about myself as a kid, my sexuality or the way that religion is used to traumatize people. I had to rediscover my relationship with God after all the ways that it was used to when I was forced out. So, yeah, I think people need to be more open to all the different ways that Blackness, maleness, queerness can exist. I think that openness alone…that would completely shift the way that people develop in my community.