A Cape Coral mom combats racial stereotypes, disparities from her iPhone
June 28, 2024 | story by Lauren Brensel | illustration by Diego Perdomo
Happy birthday felt more nerve-racking than anything for Nicasha Martin. It wasn’t even her birthday — it was her sister’s. Still, Martin found it a notable November evening. She’d be introducing her pandemic-born twin babies to their godmother for the first time, and the outside patio of the Mediterranean eatery was one of the infants’ first outings.
Another first: breastfeeding in public.
She came to dinner prepared with a muslin blanket to cover herself. Big mistake.
The fabric stifled any breeze the Cape Coral night air might have offered, and her twins felt the heat. Martin, a naturally sweaty person, began to panic.
‘Maybe we could head to the car? But that wouldn’t work — we parked down the street. I’d have to pack me and the bag and them up and then excuse ourselves to go to the car. Someone would offer to come with us. I don’t want to inconvenience anyone else.’
Never again, she thought.
“If I was going to breastfeed in public, I was doing something wrong already. That’s how I was conditioned to feel,” she said. “‘If I’m gonna do it, I better have a blanket over me and the baby or people are going to be offended.’”
The next time Martin would breastfeed in public played out at Bunche Beach, Fort Myers, where the breeze wasn’t suffocated by a blanket or even her nerves. Instead, the only barrier between Martin’s babies, her breasts and the beach-goers was a pop-up tent that blocked the beams beating down from the sun.
Now, Martin, 32, openly details her nursing narratives and tales of motherhood to her combined 150,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok. “Nicasha Plus Three” consists of Martin, a single, Black mom, twin toddlers Nuri and Zuri and infant Omari. Beyond sponsorships, the trio’s page also challenges stereotypes about single, Black moms and advocates for racial equity among women who breastfeed — an issue that has plagued the U.S. for over 40 years.
Martin doubles as a long-term care coordinator for Sunshine Health, a statewide healthcare plan. She started posting about her twins on her Instagram account in January 2021, when the girls were six months old and constantly complimented on their cuteness. Martin eventually caved and began reaching out to companies for brand deals.
Her page spiraled, with companies soon approaching her first. It was surreal — she adopted the phrase “momfluencer,” but exclusively uses air quotes around the title, because social media isn’t her full-time job.
Since her social media origin, she slowly added in advocacy posts, mostly about breastfeeding, because she said that’s what made her fall in love with motherhood. Her journey getting there was rocky.
“Certain memories when you’re going to have a baby, you have an idea of what you think they’re gonna be,” she said. “Obviously, I thought about their dad driving me to the hospital and being in the room, and that just wasn’t my reality.”
Her reality went more like this:
She was eight months pregnant and riding Interstate 75. Knowing she’d soon go into labor and wouldn’t be able to style her hair for a while, Martin had ventured a two-and-a-half-hour drive to a Fort Lauderdale salon to have her hair braided with her sister.
Alligator Alley, the stretch of highway that intersects Fort Lauderdale and Naples, welcomed the women and their new plaits on their ride home. Then two certain someones threatened their welcome, too.
“We were 30 minutes in, and my water broke,” she said.
Martin’s coping mechanism for the situation was humor. She joked to her sister, “‘We might have to pull over and you’ll have to deliver them in the truck.’ I was completely kidding,” Martin said.
Her sister did not find that funny.
Back in Fort Myers, Martin’s mom rose to action, packing a hospital bag for when her daughters would return. In the meantime, Martin kept driving. Her sister offered, but Martin insisted. To distract herself from the contractions, she focused on the road. Her sister focused on keeping the conversation light.
Because Martin’s twins were born prematurely, they spent their first few days of life in the neonatal intensive care unit, where Martin noticed a lack of racial representation among the lactation consultants who help moms breastfeed.
The racial disparities extend past the consultants, though.
Premature Black and Native American babies are half as likely than babies of other races to be breastfed in almost every region of the U.S., despite the well-researched benefits that come with breastfeeding, like lowering the risk of obesity, diabetes and sudden infant death syndrome.
Martin’s pregnancy wasn’t just an introduction to her babies but to the racial divide in breastfeeding, which would soon inspire her to “momfluence” a change.
In the meantime, Martin’s family coming to her aid while in labor was a significant moment. It wouldn’t be the first or last time when, what she calls her “village,” would come to the rescue. There was no grand gesture, just clothes in a bag and an ear that lent itself to the simple, life-altering conversations a woman can only have while on the highway in labor.
But it was comforting.
Martin’s village, and the lack of one missing family member, in particular, is sometimes a sore subject on her page. It’s the family’s most frequently asked question: “Where is the father?”
According to one Nicasha Plus Three Instagram reel Martin posted, the answer may vary: “Let’s play. Cast your vote in the comments,” the caption reads.
Option one: “Married, but he’s leaving his wife.”
Option two: “In jail.”
Option three: “Minding himself and not us, unlike you.”
Martin receives comments every day asking about the kids’ father, but it doesn’t bother her. At times, she said she has to respond with satire because of the ridiculousness of the question.
“I try not to speak for another human being. He’s an adult,” she said. “I also personally decided to stay away from the stereotype of Black baby daddy, baby mama drama. I just don’t need to lend my voice to that.”
But Martin has experienced more microaggressions than from commenters alone.
In her three years on social media, Martin has partnered with a variety of companies, oftentimes backing brands that sell tools to make breastfeeding easier. At this point, she has her sponsorship routine down, including how she messages companies about potential partnerships.
But before she gets there, she first performs a quick scan of the brand’s page and asks herself whether it reflects the content she wants to endorse. It’s a step she learned the hard way after one brand denied her as a client but accepted a white mom with a similar page.
“In comparison, I was a little bit more established in terms of completing collaborations,” she said. “We were posting the same kind of content — the only difference was just the color of our skin.”
And Martin wasn’t the only one. She said she engages in an online mom group where other moms of color shared they had been rejected from the same brand, too.
“I got the same response that most of the other moms of color were getting: They’re not taking on new clients at this time,” she said. “If you looked at the company’s feed, the people that they featured on their page were predominantly white.”
Martin and the moms messaged the brand about the discrepancy, only to hear that it was not about race and that the brand had posted Black people on the social media accounts for Black History Month.
For Martin, this is common.
“I am aware that racism is still in full effect,” she said, “but to not even have the chance to have that opportunity simply because the person whose job it is to accept collabs doesn’t like someone who looks like me — just annoying.”
The lack of breastfeeding brand deals for moms of color isn’t surprising — this imbalanced dynamic reflects the racial disparities tied to the history of breastfeeding practices.
The roots of this disparity stem from colonial-era slavery, when Black babies were stripped from their mothers before they could be breastfed. Instead, enslaved Black women were forced to nurse the babies of their slave owners.
Author and infant health strategist Kimberly Seals Allers said the generational trauma from this bait and switch has lingered for Black women today.
“Our children were not our own and our milk was not ours to own,” Seals Allers said. “This began a corrupted and disrupted experience between infant feeding and began the narrative of Black infants being less healthy, because, if I’m feeding your children, there’s less milk for my own.”
To combat this disparity, Martin resorts to her regular platform for change-making: her social media. She posts every year during Black Breastfeeding Week, a movement founded by Seals Allers, starting Aug. 25, to encourage Black moms to feel comfortable nursing their babies.
Martin has hopes of becoming an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant (IBCLC) — the highest credential a lactation consultant can receive — to better the representation in the field. Becoming an IBCLC requires nearly 100 hours of lactation education and hundreds to a thousand hours worth of clinical experience, plus receiving a passing score on an IBCLC exam. It will take years, and Martin, who graduated from Syracuse University, may have to go back to school to take required college courses on nutrition and infant and child development.
But it will be worth it, she said, when she can coach moms, particularly moms of color, in person on the benefits of nursing babies.
Until then, Martin revels in her page, where she posts for her true target audience: her children.
“I never want my kids to look back and think that I was ashamed of having them,” she said. “I’m not going to change society’s view of a Black single mom, but I am here to show that there is joy and happiness to be had.”
