Debra Thompson

The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging Debra Thompson

From a leading scholar on the politics of race comes a work of family history, memoir, and insight gained from a unique journey across the continent, on what it is to be Black in North America.

When Debra Thompson moved to the United States in 2010, she felt like she was returning to the land of her ancestors, those who had escaped to Canada via the Underground Railroad. For them, Canada was The Promised Land, a refuge from American slavery, a chance to make lives for themselves and their children. For Debra, the United States was the birthplace of the struggle against racism, the geographic core of Black cultural identity, and the originator of a blood debt owed to her kinfolk for generations of bondage. The truth about both nations would reveal itself over a century and a half.

In The Long Road Home, Thompson follows the roots of Black identities in North America and the routes taken by those who have crisscrossed the world's longest undefended border in search of freedom and belonging. She begins in Shrewsbury, Ontario, one of the termini of the Underground Railroad and the place where the formerly enslaved, including members of her own family, found freedom. More than a century later, Thompson is the embodiment of her ancestors' dreams. Yet she describes the confusion she felt and the racism she experienced growing up the Only One--the only Black person in so many white spaces--in a country that perpetuates the national mythology of multiculturalism.

Then she revisits her four American homes, each of which reveals something peculiar about the relationship between American racism and democracy: Boston, Massachusetts, the birthplace of the American Revolution; Athens, Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachia, where the white working class and the white liberal meet; Chicago, Illinois, the great Black metropolis; and Eugene, Oregon, the western frontier. Throughout her decade in the United States, she describes the emergence of Black Lives Matter, the racial backlash that shaped the 2016 US Election, and the racial politics of the Trump era, before transiting across the US-Canada border during a global pandemic, uprisings against police brutality, and the curtailment of many forms of legal immigration to the United States. She then settles in Montreal, a unique city with a long history of transnational Black activism, but one that does not easily accept the unfamiliar and the foreign into the fold. Her journey, through time and place, asks: where is home, and what is belonging?

The Long Road Home is a moving personal story comprising family history and memoir and also a vital examination of the peculiar nuances of racism in the United States and Canada. Above all, it is about the power of freedom and the dreams that link and inspire Black people across national borders from the perspective of one who has deep ties and loyalties to, critiques of and hope for, both countries.