September 13, 2022
The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, by Debra Thompson
Debra Thompson’s The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging is an excellent and bracing work of memoir and social science, providing a Canadian lens on topics explored in the works of Isabel Wilkerson and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Thompson writes about being a Black Canadian and her relationship to America, the land from which her once enslaved ancestors had escaped for Canada, which makes it a curious kind of homeland. And then about what kind of “escape” Canada offered after all, Canada’s own legacy of enslavement and racism seemingly muted in contrast to its southern neighbours, but that legacy lives. Growing up in Oshawa, ON, during the 1980s, Thompson was so often the only Black person, “[which] didn’t make me feel particularly unique or successful or special. It made me think that there was something inherently wrong with Black people and that I had to fight against it every day to defy what the fates had in store for us.”
After completing her doctorate (with experiences in academia rife with anti-Black racism), Thompson arrives at Harvard on a post-doctoral fellowship in 2010, just as the hopefulness of America’s first Black president was beginning to crest, and the story of her decade to follow traces a powerful trajectory in American history and politics, particularly in regards to race. She writes of her own ambivalence towards notions of American democracy, an ideal that has forever failed to live up to its potential and was imagined for the white men who have long been its beneficiaries, a process in which “African Americans are perpetual losers.” Her connection to American is further complicated as she moves on to teach in a town in rural Ohio, then in Chicago, and finally Oregon, as American moves from Obama to the election of Donald Trump, and then the “reckoning” of Black Lives Matter throughout the entire decade and public demonstrations following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. (She wonders if racial justice, for many white liberals, wasn’t just another Covid hobby to cut through the boredom, up there with Tiger King and sourdough.)
n 2020, Thompson moves—with her American partner and their children—back to Canada, to Montreal, which offers a whole additional layer of complexity to her lens, as she takes on notions of Blackness in the very specific context of Quebec. And throughout all of this she’s mindful of her place on Indigenous lands, with teachings by Indigenous scholars such as Eve Tuck and Leanne Betasamoske Simpson underlining her approaches to political science and being a human in the world.
The Long Road Home is a sparkling and engaging work, and also a demanding one, for white readers. Not that it’s difficult to read (see previous sentence on “sparkling and engaging”; I read it in two days) but that it’s literally demanding something of us, white readers—our discomfort, our willingness to see the white supremacy inherent in our systems, to wake up to the realities of racial injustice and begin to imagine a better, fairer world.
