Deidre Deculus Robert – “Don’t let the world tell you who you are.”

Despite her plethora of metropolitan career successes, Deidre Deculus Robert remains a country girl at heart, even when in the city. She and her husband James reside on their ranch in Glynn, Louisiana, with their two sons. Touchingly, she admits to being a tomboy through and through, both when growing up and still today. As she explains with a jocular candour, “Mamou is country. I didn’t wear shoes for a long time. I still have a hard time wearing shoes when I’m at home. We grew up on a farm with outside animals, farming equipment and large fields for as far as you could see. I was very much a tomboy and I still am. Hunting, fishing, gardening and the whole nine yards. I could do it all.” Conversely, she is well versed in classical civilization history, loves to zydeco dance and cook, and is always in pursuit of an epic travel adventure with family and friends.

A country girl at heart

An immensely successful Attorney and now recently appointed by the Biden administration to be the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Development State Director for Louisiana, with her myriad achievements in the legal and agricultural domains, Deidre Deculus Robert is well accustomed to inhabiting the highest echelons of power. Yet with a laudably adamantine resolve, she has, throughout her life consciously refused – and continues to refuse – to let others define her and dictate who she is and where she fits in. As she says sagely, “Don’t let the world tell you who you are!”

Such is the remarkably philosophical advice she proffers with heartfelt conviction – words redolent with emotion, sincerity and passion, and ones which are evidently drawn from a lifetime of challenging and perhaps even discombobulating experiences. There speaks someone who has perennially fought for the right to not be judged, defined and pigeonholed by other people’s erroneous perceptions of who she is, a black woman of Creole heritage.

Deidre and her siblings with their paternal grandparents Ashton and Ester Deculus

There is a strong, unwavering glint of steel in her hazel green eyes – eyes which today are warm, sensitive and alert behind her clear-rimmed spectacles, which effortlessly connote authority and professionalism. It is a glint which subtly hints at the inner strength and resilience she must possess in order to achieve what she has – be it as an Attorney and now in a presidentially appointed state agricultural role, despite the continual struggles she has mastered as a woman of colour.

In short, Deidre Deculus Robert is an exceptionally talented, highly motivated and formidably accomplished woman whose services the Biden administration is fortunate to have secured. She is a born “servant-leader”, imbued with a strong humanistic desire to ameliorate a lot of those who have been marginalised through no fault of their own. Her journey to success has been long and often arduous – and is one which speaks to the universal desire to belong, to be able to take pride in one’s heritage and to confound the limiting perceptions of others based solely on external appearance.

Upbringing

Resolutely proud of both her Creole heritage and her blackness, Deidre was raised by her mother and father as the youngest of five children in Mamou, Louisiana. With a lucid awareness of what it meant to be black and Creole, she explains warmly, “They raised us to know we were Black and Creole and exactly what Creole was. For us, Creole is a culture – it’s a way of life.” Steeped in Catholic faith and traditions, Deidre grew up on the family farm where her father and his brothers owned the largest black farming business in the community for many years. Food, music, family and faith were the foundation of her upbringing.

With ancestry comprising Cherokee Indian, Black, French, Spanish and Greek, she is both conscious – and indubitably proud – of being a product of such varied Creole métissage and equally of the linguistic benefits which being brought up in a French Creole-speaking household conferred. “Growing up, that’s all my parents and my grandparents spoke to each other.” She continues, “If you were fortunate enough to understand or speak the language, then you were in for a real treat because that’s how you knew what was going on in the family!” She spent copious amounts of time making coffee and sitting at the card table as she listened and learned life lessons from her elders. She managed to learn the language as well. Deidre has continued the tradition of raising her sons to know the language, recipes and traditions she grew up with. 

Deidre dancing with her father her first dance partner and a shared love of theirs

Her father, Louis Deculus, Sr., the seventh of ten children from a farming family, was raised in Mamou, Louisiana and despite his time in the military, returned to till the land, and serve his community. He duly served for thirteen years on the United States Department of Agriculture Farm Services Agency State Committee – the first black man in Louisiana to do so. He and his brothers farmed rice, soybeans and crawfish. After he retired from farming, he went to work for the Evangeline Parish Police Jury. Deidre recalls the excitement in her home when they received Christmas cards from the White House because of his service on the state committee. She speaks of him effusively in positively hagiographic terms. “My dad was a very smart man. He didn’t get to go to college or become an attorney like he wanted. Instead, I was blessed with that opportunity and privilege.”

She speaks of her mother, Mary Dianne Espree Deculus-Brewer, the oldest of five children, raised in Houston, Texas, by Louisiana natives who relocated from the Mamou area to Texas for better opportunities for their family. Her mother was a homemaker until Deidre started formative school. Thereafter, she started part-time with the United States Department of Agriculture. She retired from the Farm Services Agency after twenty-nine years of service. Deidre speaks of her mother with an equally touching devotion and reverence.

“She was the only black person who worked in her office for many, many years. During that time, she was faced with different types of bigotry. But she always handled it with grace and style and taught us how to overcome and how to manage those life situations.”

Education

Education was of the utmost importance in the Deculus household. With four siblings ahead of Deidre, who all excelled academically, there was an undeniable pressure to carry on the succession of excellence they set before her. 

And so, as with many from humble, rural backgrounds, education has played a major and decisive part in Deidre’s life trajectory and has undeniably been the catalyst for her becoming the spectacularly high-achieving woman she is today. However, she did not always particularly enjoy her school days, due chiefly to the manifold racism she experienced, ironically on account of her light complexion. One vivid memory she still has is of being in elementary school and a girl pulling her out of a line with black children waiting to swing, because she thought she was in the wrong line (i.e. for black children), and then later of being forcibly removed from another line of white children by a girl who thought she was black. This was her first experience where her external appearance was pitted against her true identity and upbringing.

Her parents wanted one of their offspring to have a Catholic-based education, so it was that Deidre transferred to a Catholic school during her sophomore year of high school. In fact, she was the first black female student to attend this school. As she reminisces stoically on her school days, “Initially, I didn’t fit in with anyone, which was fine with me. But by the time I graduated, I had life-long friends. I think that certainly added to my strength and taught me about the broader world and of what I would have to deal with.” Enduring racial epitaphs and many days feeling isolated, she rose about the turmoil her presence caused for some. This experience aided Deidre as she grew professionally, often times having the binary position of the only woman in the room and/or the only person of color in the room.

With the benefit of hindsight, she realizes that her parents’ decision for her to attend Catholic school left a tangible psychological impact upon her. Whereas at elementary school, she had deftly learnt to navigate the diametrically opposed (and often antagonistic) worlds of black and white, due to the colours of her two best friends. Now in an all-white school, she was torn from the knowledge of how to chart those often perilous racial seas. As a result, she was quite lonely. However, despite the loneliness, there was one intellectual upshot. “I just studied all the time, which was good.”

Law School graduation surrounded by her sisters and sister in law

While her parents and family certainly supported her academic pursuits, she also suffered from a lack of academic encouragement at school. As she relates with genuine sadness, “The guidance counselor was no help to me. When I asked her about taking the SAT, she told me I didn’t need to do that because I probably wouldn’t go to college or to a college that required that type of test score. I said, well, I think we should still register for it.” To this day, she feels that, while some of the teachers at the school were supportive, others blatantly were not, and she felt “they didn’t want me there.” She is, however, highly cognizant of the many opportunities she received that wouldn’t have come her way, had she remained in the public high school system. With copious gratitude, she adds, “I think that while I didn’t always feel fully supported, it still gave me other opportunities for scholarships and paths that may not have been available to me in the other space.” It is there that she developed her love for public speaking and competed in speech competitions, as well as grew to be a strong writer and lover of history while receiving a great education in people and academics.

Also, in terms of her thinking about race and identity, she readily acknowledges the tangible benefits attending Catholic school had on her future life chances. “I’m glad my parents made that sacrifice (to send me to Catholic school), because it changed the trajectory of my thinking and acceptance of myself.”

She also recognizes judiciously that “being put in that challenging situation made me a better person, because it made me adapt and it made me conquer the challenge. It made me figure out that I could still navigate this situation and make it a positive.” It is this ability to resolutely focus on learning outcomes and to still see the bigger picture, appreciating the glass half full, as it were, whatever the situation, which marks Deidre out as mentally resilient and an intellectually agile thinker, likely to be victorious, no matter the odds.

University

Deidre spent her undergraduate years at Louisiana State University at Eunice and Baton Rouge.  She started at LSUE with a scholarship. By the middle of her freshmen spring semester, she decided college was not for her.  Not sure of her major, she questioned her determination to go on. Taking a short break, she realized that her future was in her own hands and decided to return to the university during the summer. After recommitting herself to her studies, she graduated two years later with an associate degree in liberal arts and transferred to LSU at Baton Rouge where she graduated a year later with a bachelor of arts degree in History and Classical Civilizations.

Her initial experience in college engendered a strong sense of belonging, of meeting kindred spirits who looked like her and who shared her heritage, revelling in the joys of similitude, whilst all the while remaining conscious how the world at large perceived her. “There I met a group of people who looked like me, who came from families like mine. We were all Catholic. We would all go to church fairs and have cookouts. A lot of people spoke French. And so it opened up my network to folks who were like me and it gave me that sense of belonging.”

While at university, she and her friends founded the African American Student Alliance because there was a lack of representation and support for students of colour. The organization has since grown in its mission to support all people of colour. 

Law School graduation with James Jr

Her racial + Creole identity

Growing up as a light-skinned child with hazel eyes, the often perplexing and sometimes painful vagaries of her racial identity duly became apparent to her. The position of light skinned Creoles in Louisiana prompted much soul searching about who she was and how she was perceived by others, both white and black.

Whilst the quality of the education at the Catholic school itself was directly beneficial to her academic advancement, it being a practically all-white school came at a mental and social cost and had its own unique challenges, especially for one as light skinned as her. Sadly, because of her complexion, she was cruelly ostracised by her fellow students. Yet she realizes that “it made me keenly aware of who I was.” She recalls one instance when a student asked her if she was an exchange student. Laughingly, she said, “Not unless you think Mamou is a foreign country.” Tellingly, the vicissitudes she encountered at school in relation to her appearance ironically made her more resilient.

Recalling a formative incident illustrative of her predicament, when the only other black student at the school came up to her and asked her (what for him was) a pressing existential question, she recounts, “Deidre, what are you?“ And I said, “what do you mean?” He said, “Deidre, what are you? Are you high yellow?” And I looked at him and I said, “What’s high yellow?” He was like, “Well, you’re not black. You’re obviously not black.”

Deidre and her sons serve as ambassadors for their school

As is often the case in Creole communities (given the lottery of genetics), Deidre readily admits that there is a variety of different skin tones in her own family. “I’m the youngest of five, but all five of my siblings have a different complexion. None of us have the same skin tone. None of us have the same colour eyes. And so when people look at us, it’s kind of like, what’s going on?” In fact, she continues to elucidate – with great honesty, it must be said –  there exists a tripartite approach to blackness in her family – one which is undoubtedly mirrored in many Creole communities the world over. There are some branches of her family that have a fraught and deeply problematic relationship to blackness, seeing it as something at best to be ashamed of, and at worst, flatly denied. “We have family members who refuse to identify with being black or Creole and they simply tell people they’re white, period.” Others in her family actively embrace their Creole identity and assert their “in-between-ness”, advocating self-determination regarding racial epithets and definitions. “We have some who just say, I’m Creole. I’m not black. I’m not white. I’m not checking anything on the application.” Finally, she has other relations who ardently celebrate their blackness, both as an act of existential affirmation and of defiance in the face of an avowedly racist, judgmental society. She remarks, “And then you have some who just simply say, “I’m black. That’s what I am.”

Deidre herself advocates another, slightly different path – one of both acceptance and pride in who you are. “I think you need to identify with who you are, what you like, what you enjoy within the culture that you were raised in, as well as the broader global world.” In fact, that is what she has tried to teach her sons.

Deidre is conscious that contemporary Creole culture is a minefield of constructs, complexities and often confusion, rooted in the historical politics of shade and in different approaches to navigating liminality. One is left with the impression that Deidre feels Creoles today are both much misunderstood and maligned and subsequently deserve better, keen to be treated with consummate dignity, not pigeon-holed into someone else’s erroneous, invariably racist perception of who they are, what they are and where they belong in the great chain of being.

Louisiana Bar Association Diversity Committee

The powerful common sense with which Deidre views how others’ perceptions of one’s racial identity can negatively affect your passage through life is both humbling and also empowering. As she states defiantly while dispensing sagacious advice, especially apposite for those who have been forced to inhabit the racial hinterland due to their shade: “Don’t let the world tell you who you are. Don’t let the world dictate the space that you operate in for all of your life. Just embrace it. Be the best you of whatever you’re going to be.”

Now they be fighting words! They are in fact words of perspicacity and peerless wisdom which speak to mankind’s yearning to belong and to the crucial need to determine our own terrestrial narrative and to not let the myopic prejudices and preconceptions of others define, limit and ultimately stymie our development and negatively impact how we see ourselves. As Deidre continues, warming to the theme: “Because the world looks in and they see a narrative created around who they think people really are and they try to label you with that. And so I think it’s incumbent upon us to be true and authentic to our culture and to who we are and to what we are.”

Outstanding legal career

A history major at LSU with a passion for classical antiquity and African American history, she chose to study Law after university, a decision she cites as being influenced in large part by her father, an autodidact.

“Law was always in the back of my mind from listening to my dad. My dad loved to read – newspapers, books, anything and everything he could lay his hands on. He was always really interested in the law and was always talking about it. He would go and visit our family attorney, who was a white guy. So I think that seed was planted then.”

After leaving university, she worked for a year at the Louisiana Workers’ Compensation Corporation in Baton Rouge, then having taken the LSAT examination, she applied to Law School. For her, the politics of representation clearly matter. As Deidre explains, “Growing up, I didn’t see any female lawyers. I didn’t see any black lawyers. The only lawyers I ever knew were white men.” Yet undeterred by this glaring lacuna and inspired by her husband and conversations with Winston DeCuir, Sr., the only black attorney she knew, and Professor Donald Tate, a white law professor at Southern University Law Center who hailed from her small hometown of Mamou, she applied to Southern University Law School in Baton Rouge.

Although accepted by other law schools, she decided to go to Southern (the only Historically Black College and University System in the country), where she found its celebration of black consciousness and excellence exhilarating. “Prior to going to law school at Southern, I had never experienced that type of immersion in black culture and history. Just being on the campus was refreshing and invigorating.” She excelled in law school, serving on the student government board and moot court board.

However, her biggest motivation for pursuing a legal career was the desire to give back to a community which had hitherto been denied a voice. As she explains ruefully,

“I just believed that all people should have a voice, because I felt like for a long time that my folks didn’t have a voice. I saw a lot of situations where they were marginalized and not fully represented or respected. I wanted to be that voice and be able to offer that back to my people.”

Her legal career officially began in 2000 in the Baton Rouge City Prosecutors Office.  There she served as an Assistant City Prosecutor. During her eleven years with the Parish Attorney’s Office of City-Parish of East Baton Rouge, she rose through the ranks to become the first black female section chief. After several years of prosecuting, she was duly appointed as Special Assistant Parish Attorney in the Personnel Section of the Parish Attorney’s Office in Baton Rouge, where she served as defence counsel in the areas of Labor and Employment Litigation. Deidre worked in Labor and Employment law for eight years and held the position of Personnel Section Chief for two years prior to accepting an appointment with the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office in 2011.

During this time, Deidre and her husband had two sons. While pursuing a legal career, she was often seen with one or both sons at her side. Whether volunteering at their school as a room mother, lunch server, Advisory Council member or spotting them at her office doing homework after school, she kept an ever-present force in their lives. Ever hopeful one of them will one day take up the baton of law and service, her greatest desire is for them to have fulfilling and happy lives with careers that don’t feel like work but more like a passion. Much like she feels about her calling to public service.

At the Attorney General’s Office, she served as the Deputy Director of the Public Protection Division for four years, supervising the fight against consumer fraud, elder fraud, construction and charitable giving fraud, as well as anti-trust violations. Thereafter, she was named special litigation counsel assigned to defend the Louisiana Judiciary and handle specialized cases. Deidre then was promoted to Deputy Director of the Litigation Division wherein she managed all of the tort defense litigation for the State of Louisiana. Managing several external offices in the western area of Louisiana and multiple sections of coverage like general liability and medical malpractice, Deidre travelled throughout the state.

Having launched her career as public servant, Deidre also maintained a part-time private law practice in Louisiana. She built her thriving practice on evenings and weekends, with her sons spending many days doing homework at the conference room table after their assortment of practices.

One of many round table talks held in a Louisiana community

As her public service career continued to grow, she made the decision after sixteen years to shutter her brick-and-mortar private practice. She accepted a prestigious position as General Counsel of the Southern University and A&M College System. What was truly a full circle moment in her career, having attended the Southern University Law Center, this position was a convergence of many years of conquering various areas of law. Here she provided legal advice to the Board of Supervisors, System President, Campus Chancellors, executive staff and administrative staff while representing the institutions and system they made up in all legal and contractual matters.

Having built a legal career of professionalism and excellence, in January 2020, Deidre was named as Executive Counsel for the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD). In this role, her responsibilities included managing legislative affairs on the federal, state, and local levels, as well as providing legal counsel and representation to the Secretary and executive staff, leading the legal department and innovative procurement (mega projects) unit.

Looking back on her somewhat dizzying career ascent, she states in a matter-of-fact tone, “being a female attorney of colour has been a tremendous journey, one with many rewards and challenges.” By challenges, she is in part, referring to the legion of questions she routinely receives about her identity or how she got her seat at the table. Her retort to such enquiries is magisterial: “I can be there because my parents said we could be there. They created the path for us to be in those spaces and to be okay with who you are and what you look like.” She recognizes that she stands on the shoulders of giants in her family and profession. Her commitment to expanding those ranks and seats at the table is unwavering as shown through her years of mentorship. She does not pride herself on being the first but rather on ensuring she is not the last.

Prestigious new role

In March 2022, Deidre was appointed by the President of the United States to serve the Biden -Harris administration as the State Director for Rural Development in Louisiana. In fact, the agricultural community from which she hails and whose blood proudly courses through her veins could not have stood her in better stead (or been more apposite) for such a prestigious role, thus making her the perfect appointee, as it combined her extensive jurisprudence expertise with a profound knowledge of both rural affairs and crucially the ecosystem and infrastructure of country living.

Charged with “focusing on locally driven, community economic development strategies” to ameliorate the lot of rural communities throughout Louisiana, Deidre is most definitely up for the challenge of what is for her a dream role. She enthuses with a note of infectious ebullience in her voice, “I’m going to always be an attorney, but accepting this new role, bringing me back to rural development, back to the communities that I grew up in, back to agriculture, which is where I come from, is just incredible.”

Future aims in this role

Deidre is keen to use the opportunity afforded by her new, high profile role to affect positive change for those around her in rural communities. As she explains in a dynamic, relentlessly upbeat fashion,

“This position to me is an opportunity to be transformative in communities that need it the most. I grew up in a very small town, so I know the challenges there and I’ve seen those towns over the years dissipate because of lack of resources, because of lack of funding, and because of lack of education.”

Given Louisiana is 66% rustic and agrarian, and that the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 disproportionately impacted rural communities, depriving them of broadband, without which children were unable to learn and adults unable to work and thus earn, the role of spear-heading rural development with which Deidre Deidre has been tasked is exceedingly important. She is passionate about the task ahead, “it’s those communities that make us thrive and survive. And they are the communities that most of us come from, and yet end up here in the larger cities. So for me, it’s an opportunity to be able to help these communities be sustainable and grow.”

Deidre spells it out with great clarity and also moral zeal:

“These communities have been the backbone of our society and deserve to be sustained. And so it’s really important to me that we educate folks about the programs we have at rural development. Philosophically, I believe that people should be able to grow where they are planted either by circumstance or choice.” 

Deidre serving with the Junior League of Baton Rouge

Awards

In an illustrious legal career spanning more than two decades, Deidre’s gargantuan talents, tireless dedication to her community and selfless commitment to improving life chances for the less fortunate have been honoured several times. She has been the worthy recipient of notable awards, including most recently the 2019-2020 Committee on Diversity in the Legal Profession Award which recognizes a current member of the Diversity Committee who has gone above and beyond their role on the committee to address the needs of underrepresented groups. She also received the 2019 Distinguished Alumni Award from Southern University Law Center and was the recipient of the 2011 Outstanding Member and Service Award from the Louis A. Martinet Legal Society, Inc., Baton Rouge Chapter.

Giving back

An ardent believer in “giving back” to society and an individual with a strong humanitarian ethos, Deidre has focused her unquenchable passion for service with the Louisiana State Bar Association Diversity Committee, the Louisiana Bar Foundation which provides funding for free civil legal aid and where she will serve as the first black female president in 2023-24, Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, School Board for the Diocese of East Baton Rouge, Junior League of Baton Rouge, Arts Council of Greater Baton Rouge, Southern University System Foundation Board Trustee, as well as the Louis A. Martinet Legal Society wherein she started a reading program for head start students, National Bar Association wherein she served as the Region V Director and many more. Given the sheer range of charitable concerns which she regularly supports, it is a wonder where she finds the time to manage it all. But as she says, “We find time for those people and things we love.”

Deidre with a group of friends

Three wishes

Were she to have the proverbial three wishes, she would like her children “to be able to live joyful, productive and fulfilling lives.” The fact that her son was born with a limb difference has meant that diversity, equality, and inclusion are not merely facile buzzwords or efficacious political soundbites, but genuine, lived principles of real importance to her. Having served on (and chaired) the State Bar Association for Attorneys’ Diversity Committee, she says, in what is both a humbling and heartfelt explanation, “I always have an eye towards diversity and inclusion and, even more so with my son, inclusivity, not just in terms of race and gender, but also disability, in making sure that everyone has a seat at the table, is represented and has a voice.”

Her second wish – utopian, but nevertheless intensely laudable – and one which shows her over-arching philosophical macrocosmic vision, is “for humanity to be more inclusive and to close the gap on the division between superficial things”, not just in America, but globally. She expressly wishes that “we could see each other more for who we are – for our talents, for our experiences, for what we bring to the table, for what makes us unique, instead of what makes us different.”

Her third wish – reminiscent of the anthemic desire for a paternal dance which Luther Vandross so memorably articulated, would be the opportunity to sit down with her father who passed away suddenly in 2015 and “get his take on the world and what I’ve been doing and what I’m doing, because he was always that voice for me.”

left to right Jessica Jennifer Louis Deidre and Donna

Conclusion

Deidre Deculus Robert has spent both her rural Creole childhood and her entire professional, urban life endeavoring to challenge and throw off the burdensome shackles of limiting assumptions pertaining to her light skinned complexion and as to how her Creole heritage is perceived by others. By no means the “tragic mulatta” and the direct antithesis of Nella Larsen’s Passing protagonist, her journey, thus far packed full of high level legal and increasingly political accomplishments, is the victory of an indomitable spirit whose bona fide desire for the world to accept her – and everyone, for that matter – for who she is, not to judge her on what she is, is indicative of a wider national struggle, and of a broader narrative about human nature. As such, she is both the living embodiment of MLK’s vision for a fairer and more equitable America, and also for the global future of humanity (which is, of course, a variegated Creole future of métissage). It is this yearning, coupled with a dogged determination to strive for equality for all, which Deidre has intelligently channeled into her career and which has resulted in such tangible, high-profile successes and critical plaudits.

At a time when identity politics has come to the fore of the national conversation and is defining the zeitgeist, Deidre’s life experiences remind us both of what can be achieved when issues of colour, identity and belonging are happily reconciled, but also how far we as a society still need to travel, in order for all citizens to feel respected, included and valued, regardless of their skin shade or racial heritage.

Deidre’s life experiences on account of her lighter complexion and her Creole heritage are a sobering reminder of the fact that the much-vaunted “light-skinned idyll” is often not all it’s cracked up to be. Being routinely rejected by many white people (for effectively being black) and being routinely denigrated by many black people (for not “being black enough”), Deidre knows only too well that the politics of shade are cruel, complex, and invariably unfathomable to those without the lived experience, and are rooted, as in her case, in the nefarious historical exigencies of Louisiana’s history of slavery.

Today, even though it has taken time, Deidre is supremely confident and very much “at ease in her own skin,” arguably the greatest accolade one can give to someone with an ethnically ambiguous phenotype. As such, today Deidre stands tall, an inspirational agent of societal change, currently bestriding the fields of Law and Agriculture in Louisiana like a colossus. With no less than a presidential mandate, but also very much an agent of the people, she is an eloquent, powerful and determined voice for the marginalized and those who, through no fault of their own, feel truly welcome in no space.

Without a doubt, not only Louisiana, with its turbulent and complex racial history, but the world at large needs more people like Deidre – people who can encourage us “to thine own self be true”, to unashamedly embrace the joys of liminality and to unapologetically celebrate the rainbow coalition of humanity in all its shades, all whilst achieving great things for the benefit and uplift of their communities.

Deidre Deculus Robert