About the Author

Debra Thompson is an associate professor of political science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She is an internationally recognized, award-winning scholar of the politics of race and holds a Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies. She completed her PhD at the University of Toronto, held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, and taught in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University before moving to the University of Oregon to help build its Black Studies program. She is the author of The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census, which received three major awards from the American Political Science Association. She has published numerous articles in scholarly journals and is a regular commentator in print and on television on the state of race and racism in Canada and the United States. Connect with her on Twitter @DebThompsonPhD.

Reviews

"A meaningful contribution to the understanding of racism."
-- Publishers Weekly

"Writing with such power and such vulnerability, Prof. Thompson takes us with her on a ten-year journey through what she rightly describes as the 'predatory inclusion' and savage racism of academia, the dystopia of the Trump administration, and the murder of George Floyd. Lest we think that Thompson was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, she uses her skills as a political scientist to show that there is no right place or right time to be Black in the U.S. Rather than seeking the 'shallow belonging' of North American nation-states, she asks how we can make our real home between worlds a space for liberation."
-- REBECCA HALL, JD, PhD, Author of Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts

"An essential testament to the enduring power of Black life. Movingly written, it offers a wealth of vital insights on generational struggles, institutional cynicism, and the urgent task of imagining 'home' and 'belonging' against the entwined violence of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. Debra Thompson is a writer and scholar of enormous importance."
-- DAVID CHARIANDY, award-winning author of Brother

"This powerful chronicle of race and belonging slides between political analysis and personal truths with clarity, purpose, and heart. Thompson has crafted a testimony of, and a love letter to, the contemporary Black experience in Canada and the USA."
-- KAMAL AL-SOLAYLEE, award-winning author of Brown and Return

"An important contribution to the politics of race in Canada. Debra Thompson deftly weaves the personal through a broader arc of historical and contemporary narratives on the meaning of place and belonging across national borders."
-- ROBYN MAYNARD, bestselling author of Policing Black Lives and coauthor of Rehearsals for Living

"[A] compelling personal essay about Blackness, racism, and the courage to live with dignity and to forge a sense of belonging in Ontario, Massachusetts, Ohio, Illinois, Oregon, and Quebec. Thompson draws upon an admirable range of experience and analysis as she stitches together narratives of injustice that straddle two countries and two languages. Essential reading for those who seek to understand the lives of Black people in both Canada and the United States."
-- LAWRENCE HILL, bestselling author of The Book of Negroes and The Illegal

"With the dual scalpels of academic training and personal experience, Debra Thompson cuts through the veneer of nationalistic self-delusion to produce an honest and uncompromising account of how racism slips and mutates across borders. But in this act of necessary excavation, Thompson also finds so many wellsprings of community, bonding, and joy."
-- OMAR EL AKKAD, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning author of What Strange Paradise