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When former African American studies Prof. Debra Thompson first accepted an offer a few years ago to become a political science professor at Montreal’s McGill University, she experienced mixed emotions about returning to her home country of Canada. She said she felt relief at leaving the U.S. during a turbulent political moment but also a sadness at “escaping” America — just as her enslaved ancestors did via the Underground Railroad.
That unease inspired Thompson to publish an essay in The Globe and Mail about racism and migration in the U.S. and Canada in June 2020. The essay formed the basis for her new book “The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging,” a hybrid memoir-nonfiction published Sept. 6 interweaving her personal experiences with scholarship on historical Black migration. The Daily spoke with Thompson about her book, the writing process and her time at Northwestern.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: What is the importance of roads and migration in Black history?
Thompson: (Canadian activist) Harsha Walia wrote a book called “Border and Rule” on migration politics, and one of the points she makes is the freedom to move and the right to stay are really at the heart of democratic politics. And people of African descent are a freedom-seeking people. Geography intersects with our understandings of freedom. Canada and the U.S. both had essentially white-only immigration policies for a really long time. And yet Black people, we’ve always been on the move. You can think about the origins of the trans-Atlantic slave trade as being about coerced, violent movement and the ways in which Africa-descended people have always sought freedom by moving to new places and trying to find sanctuary and peace and belonging.
The Daily: How did you balance personal memoir and academic research in “The Long Road Home”?
Thompson: It was quite hard. I’m trained as a political scientist, and in political science we are often told, “It’s research, not me-search,” and so the idea of having this personal narrative really goes against many of the norms of my discipline. The reason why I came around to incorporating more of the personal was twofold. The first reason is because storytelling is one of the strategies I’ve always used in my teaching, and it works really well. The second reason is because centering ourselves in our stories has long been part of what we’ve seen as being necessary to Black studies, in part because there are so many forces that seek to dehumanize us. I’m trying to honor that tradition in many ways by including myself in the narrative, even as I’m still deeply, deeply uncomfortable with it.
The Daily: Did your time at Northwestern influence this book in any way?
Thompson: I have a chapter on my time in Chicago. I worked at Northwestern from 2015 to 2017, so it was brief, but those years were quite momentous, both in terms of politics and in terms of my life. I tell this story of how I taught this first-year seminar on Black Lives Matter. Social movements isn’t my area of research, and so my students and I were learning at the same time. And by the end of the quarter, we all came to the same conclusion: abolition is really the only way forward. The criminal punishment system is so corrupt. It needs to be destroyed. We need something completely different. And I write in the book about how it was my students who made that more radical turn possible. I love that chapter in the book. It’s quite important to me.
The Daily: What are your next steps after this book?
Thompson: I’m interested in the ways in which Black people and other people of color have bumped up against the state. I have a friend here in Montreal who’s of Nigerian descent, and he had a baby last year. I remember talking to him and I was like, “Hey, what’s going on?” And he was like, “Deb, I still do not have a birth certificate for this child because the Quebec bureaucracy just cannot handle Nigerian surnames.” And you cannot do anything here without a birth certificate. You can’t sign your kid up for daycare, you can’t get health care, you need that piece of paper to do anything. And I’ve heard so many stories like this, where Black people interact with the state, some kind of paperwork goes wrong and then interacting with the state becomes impossible. I think I might work on those kinds of projects in the future.
Email: [email protected]
Twitter: @rjleung7
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