DeShawn Rivers
My name is Quinten DeShawn Rivers and I am of Filipino and Black descent. For most of my life, I have always been referred to as Quinten or Q. Growing up in Florida, I attended primarily black schools and classmates would often make jokes about my middle name by saying, “That’s where the black is.” At the time, I always laughed it off but later in life, especially in college, I always found myself feeling the need to prove my blackness and not feeling like I was a part of the wider black community. On the flip side, in the corporate working world, I had the issue where I often felt “too black” for the environment and needed to minimize myself to fit in. When I got involved with diversity initiatives, I would get the sense that I was being tokenized as the model black person at the company and that my efforts were to hit a number of black employees as opposed to promoting true diversity and inclusion. Now that I have chosen to claim the title of an artist, I have decided to exist in this space as DeShawn Rivers. It feels more authentic to who I am culturally and how I grew up. An interesting side effect of this is that it has created a dynamic where the closeness of my relationship with others will often show up in whether people call me Q or DeShawn.
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DeShawn Rivers*
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