Dr. Debra Thompson is the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University and a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race. Debs teaching and research interests focus on the relationships among race, the state, and inequality in democratic societies. She has taught at the University of Oregon, Northwestern University, Ohio University, and held a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard.
Tari Ajadi is a PhD candidate in Political Science at Dalhousie University and a Black Studies Pre-doctoral fellow at Queen’s University. A British-Nigerian immigrant to Canada, Tari aims to produce research that supports and engages with Black communities across the country. He is a co-founder of the Nova Scotia Policing Policy Working Group, a member of the Board of Directors of the Health Association of African Canadians, as well as a Board Member with the East Coast Prison Justice Society.
Sally El Sayed: You’ve written articles together and developed intellectual projects that speak to each other in such interesting ways. I would love it if we could start this conversation off with you talking about how you first met or encountered each other’s work.
Tari Ajadi: Cool, alright, the thing is, in the funny kind of pandemic way, how we met is really boring. It was on Zoom! Just like everyone else in 2020! We spoke a bit on Twitter first though. From my end, the more interesting story for me is how I got to know about … [Deb’s] work, which was actually at the start of my Master’s degree. I came into Dalhousie, and I think I wanted to do something about voting behaviour in African Diaspora communities, between different generations, and it's really cool research but it’s not what I’m inclined to do. For voting behaviour stuff, you need to be very good at statistics...and I’m not! [laughs] So I knew that wasn’t quite the route for me to go down.
Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census
I came across Deb’s book [The Schematic State], and I think it was maybe late September of 2017. I read The Schematic State, cover to cover, and it blew my mind. It named a lot of things that I’ve kind of seen because I used to work in the government where I was working ⎼ it was embedded kind of within a health department ⎼ for a politician. And I saw all the ways that data will be used, that data will be mobilized, I saw all of the ways that people make particular kinds of populations more legible, or not, based on the kind of ideas that came from looking at the census or looking at different kinds of descriptive health statistics that Statistics Canada would have. I watched that process happen, but I couldn't name it. I couldn't give you any kind of political analysis based on it. I just thought, okay, well, this is the thing that's happening. This is politics.
Reading Deb's book just blew my mind. It made me realize that it was connected to this far deeper process of kind of embedding, transforming, and translating these racial ideas into the everyday stuff that makes the whole state go, right, and that was so incredible to me.
Between that and the fact that, at the time, Ontario was just releasing its anti-racism act. There was this discussion there about race-based data collection. And whether this was a good thing or not. This is when I think Doug Ford was on the scene, but he wasn't elected yet. So, all of this stuff is happening at the same time.
I literally switched my entire master's degree topic, because of reading The Schematic State. So that's how I met Deb when Deb did not know who I was, or where I was, or whoever I was. But I think that's an interesting conversation, at least, to start. I don't know if I've actually told you that story before.
Deb Thomas: You have never told me that story and that’s so nice. You're like, the other person who read my book, I've now met like four people. So that's really good for an academic book, that's incredible. So, I knew Tari’s dissertation advisor. We kind of overlapped in our Phds, like we're kind of in the same world. Look, Canadian Political Science is small. This is super important, Canada's small and Canadian Political Science is also small. Chances are, there are six degrees of separation, not even six degrees, there's like two degrees of separation between everyone. So, Tari’s advisor, Kristen, had mentioned him to me, first of all.
The Two Pandemics of Anti-Black Racism and COVID-19
I knew that I wanted to write something for the Globe and Mail on the anniversary of George Floyd's murder. I knew that there'd be a lot of thought pieces coming out and I really wanted to write something that had a Canadian focus. That took 2020 in retrospect - both as the year of COVID, and the year of these mass global uprisings.
Tari and I were Twitter friends, as you know all Black people are. Then, I think we might have been on, like, a panel together, or possibly the same kind of workshop. Then I emailed you and asked: “Hey! Do you want to write this op-ed in the Globe and Mail with me?”
Tari, understatedly, was like “Absolutely!” Then, we ended up writing together and it was so, so great, you know, it was such a great collaboration. In part because, I think that we wrote something really good, to be honest. We wrote an article called “The Two Pandemics” that was published on the one year anniversary of George Floyd's murder, it was in the national newspaper, and got a lot of traction…it got a lot of hate, but it got a lot of traction. I think that it was important to kind of have those thoughts out in the world, in that particular outlet. Of course, the Globe and Mail is known as “Canada's National Newspaper” but, like, doesn't publish much on race, you know, really, in any kind of critical way.
Now, we're friends in real life, and Tari is joining my department at McGill shortly. And it's very, very exciting for all of us.
Tari: Yeah, it's a pretty exciting thing for me as well, I say ‘pretty’ because you know, as Daniel is aware, the classic British affect is to play down the things that you're actually incredibly excited about. So I'm a very enthusiastic person. And I'm constantly like, in this weird, linguistic way, tamping things down, to try not to, like, show this boundless, like bunny rabbit enthusiasm. But yeah, I'm thrilled about it. And I'm thrilled that we're friends in real life, because it also, you know, it's cool to be friends with people that you admire. So that's a great
Deb: Are you going to be this complimentary for the entire podcast...Because it makes me deeply uncomfortable when people say nice things about me.
Tari: I'll try, I'll try not to be! I'll try, I'll try to roast you a little bit, just to balance things out!
Alador: it's so nice to hear how you both met and how you both inspired each other's work. Specifically, your joint piece “The Two Pandemics.” Would you both like to touch a little bit about the inspiration behind that? What went into crafting it and how did it feel to release such a powerful piece?
Deb: Yeah, let me start! Thinking back to this, because you know, now it was two years ago. It’s been the 2nd anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. I was thinking for a while about, you know, the global uprisings that happened in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, and why? Two years later..we don’t have a coherent narrative. Why it was that this kind of singular act of cruelty, ignited the mass uprisings, not just in Minneapolis which was kind of poised to boil over, but everywhere.
I was thinking, to me, it seems like COVID actually had a lot to do with it. The fact that these uprisings happened in the middle of this global pandemic, wasn't coincidental. I hadn't seen a lot of work that took those two phenomena seriously and took them together, you know. The two phenomena “anti-Black racism” on the one hand, and “COVID-19”, on the other, looked at the ways in which they intersect.
I've seen various bits of data - we know that COVID-19 disproportionately affected Black folks, we know Black people are more likely to die, to be infected in the workplaces and there are all these socio-economic indicators that made Black people more susceptible to catching the virus and succumbing to it. But I hadn't seen a lot of work that really thought deeply, carefully, and diligently about COVID-19 and anti-Black racism.
The ways in which the responses to COVID-19 ended up reifying at best - and exacerbating at worst - the police state. The ways in which being under lockdown gave these astronomical powers to the police - to ticket, to surveil, to control. And given more powers to public health. As many Black people know, it is not a source of emancipation for so many of us. It is in fact, coercive and punitive to engage with public health officials in this country and others. Tari’s work really speaks to a lot of the ways that Black people experience these more coercive and punitive arms of the state. So we're able to kind of draw from this as a deep well of information that Tari already had in engaging with. The way both the police and public health are kind of performing the same function..they act in very similar ways. I don't think people see them both as being coercive. And yet, they're so frequently experienced as being coercive. We wanted to really tie these two phenomena together.
You know, I've co-authored with some other people, but it was just so fun and easy to co-author with Tari. There’s a saying like, never be roommates with your best friend. Also if you're in academia, don't write with your best friend. But it worked really, really well. Like, thankfully. Tari, what do you think about it all?
Tari: Yeah, for me, it was very similar. I think to go into policing, public health, there were these two areas where the actors, by which I mean, the state, has unique and specific control over a person's body. That kind of control and that ability to control us manifests itself in kind of distinct ways in terms of power. I think that COVID and the uprising, at the same time help to illustrate quite clearly the ways that the state was willing to use its power to coerce primarily to harm Black people, right. And this is around the world, this phenomenon happens again, and again, and again and again. So when Deb approached me to write the piece in a lot of ways, having lived through that time, there was still this feeling of mourning that was happening. I think that's because there was this heaviness that was sitting suddenly on my heart, about the harms and the horrors of that time. There was, I think, a moment where there was maybe a hope that we could push beyond. I wanted to write, at that tension.
I think we did a really good job of that. We wanted to articulate the ways that experiencing such horrors can allow us to maybe dream of a different possibility. Maybe we can build that? Maybe, if we choose to do differently, then we can discard some of these things altogether. We can discard the surveillance, we can discard this distorted responsiveness where it feels like the state by policing and via public health is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It's everywhere you don't want it to be, it's nowhere you need it to be.
It's those kinds of themes that we wanted to bring out. We wanted to make sure that it was rooted in this country, because, as many of us might remember, but some might forget, two days after George Floyd was killed, Regis Korchinski-Paquet was killed. A week after that Chantel Moore was killed. A week after that Rodney Levi was killed. There's this cascading series of crises that are never-ending. Of course, I'm saying this right now, when we know I think it was yesterday, or the day before that someone was killed in Scarborough for holding a BB gun. I think it was this past week that someone was killed in Montreal, for having shoplifted. This is a series of crises that just manifest over and over and over and I think we wanted to write directly to that. To name it, in the ways that these horrors were overlapping, at the same time, there was a promise, however slim, of disrupting them. So I think that's kind of where we're coming from with the piece.
Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era
Daniel McNeil: In many of our conversations about what a Black Studies Program at Queen’s might look like and feel like, we’ve cited and engaged with Richard Iton’s work about what it means to go in search of promising futures and the Black Fantastic. And when I hear you talking about the links between public health and policing ⎼ [Deb holds up a copy of Richard Iton’s In Search of the Black Fantastic] Yeah, exactly! ⎼ I’m reminded of Richard's work on prophylactic states and duppy states. When you’re talking about George Floyd ⎼ and about how the violence of the initial act of the murder is extended and perpetuated through the circulation of social media and video ⎼ and then I'm hearing Tari speak about how we make hope and optimism practical, I'm also thinking about one of the quotes on the jacket cover of Richard’s book. That is to say, I’m reflecting on Paul Gilroy’s comment that there are stimulating arguments on every page of Richard’s book, and that it is a tremendously important text for anyone who wants to seriously examine the political aspirations and achievements of Black Atlantic people.
When I recently had a conversation with Paul about his life and work for a book that I’m writing on soul rebels and Black Atlantic intellectuals, he talked about how he wouldn't watch the video of George Floyd’s murder. He consciously sought to prevent that pain or to limit that violence from inflicting harm on him. But in the same conversation, he also reflected on his life-changing experiences with music and how he still kept the ticket from the Bob Marley concert he went to in London when he was a young soul rebel in the 1970s. And in a similar way to people prolonging the pain of George Floyd's death on video – often for political reasons, activist reasons, or to foster and support social movements, my sense was that Paul held on to the ticket of Bob Marley's concert to prolong the concert’s pleasure and to connect it to the types of politically infused acts of pleasure that were so important to his intellectual development and his activism in the 1970s and 80s.
I'm wondering ⎼ I know, Tari, that you've been engaging with Little Simz and other creative artists ⎼ I'm wondering if you and Deb could talk a little bit about, you know, not just how your work is intervening to think about the prolonging of pain and suffering, but also how we might think about the circulation of politically infused acts of pleasure.
Tari: I would love to speak to this, Daniel. Thank you so much for weaving those threads together. Of course, bringing in Paul Gilroy's voice, that's exactly how I think about these things, particularly through the lens of music. Music for me is incredibly cathartic, but it's also this way of grounding myself in this kind of aesthetic, call to action, so to speak.
When I'm listening to Little Simz, for example - it's funny, because when you mentioned Little Simz as well, in some of our previous comments, it was so edifying because I felt an attachment to these artists. They inspire me, they carry me through that like angels. My hope is that one day, I'll create something that might motivate someone the same way these things motivate me.
Specifically to Little Simz – and I could go on about a whole bunch of other artists as well – but specifically to her. Her creativity and her ability to reflect on this kind of life experience that I know intimately is so inspiring. She's able to be herself in the fullness of her own humanity, right. So she is a British Nigerian woman with a complex past and an uncertain future. She’s able to articulate all of that, without seeing any of those words. So when she's in the song ‘point and keel’ speaking in pidgin, but it's like, kind of awkward kind of halting pidgin. I'm like, Yeah, I know that because that's how I sound. I don't sound good [laughs] whereas I'm a little bit self-conscious about it, she's defiant and unapologetic about the ways that she articulates herself.
She's writing on the back of this okada, which is the motorcycle [taxi] and you'll see these Aunties in their galley dancing, and it's this kind of abstracted visual, but at the same time, it's so real, it's so vivid, and it's so true to me, and it helps me to go forward in the work that I do, not only in terms of my academic work but also work in the community, knowing that I can bring myself and the wholeness of myself into whatever it is that I'm doing.
It’s incredible work. And for me, I think, to Paul's point, you have to touch on these things - you have to go back to them, you have to remind yourself of them every time you walk into spaces of difficulty because for me it's the battle armour so to speak. That's why I wanted to choose that song. It's the battle armour that helps to weather some of the storms so I really appreciated that
Black Life and Livingness
Deb: Yeah, I mean, I love…Thank you so much Daniel for mentioning Richard. So, Richard, as Tari knows, Richard was on my dissertation committee. And I love Richard, you know, he was so dear to me. For those of you who have never had the pleasure of meeting him, let me say, he was so cool. You know, he was like, such a gentle, like, kind. And so brilliant, you know, such a thoughtful, brilliant, brilliant person.
A lot of Richard's work has guided what I've done. Not because I'm interested in pop culture–I am interested in pop culture in the way that like, most people are interested in pop culture because we are what we consume, it's part of our, the ether in which we move— but mostly because Richard, the very opening of his book, and such as the Black fantastic starts with, he calls it “the familiar dilemma,” How do those who have been excluded from the dominant order, like, engage nevertheless, right? And his answer is pop culture, you know, this is a way in which, you know, Black people have been locked out of the halls of power in so many ways. We have created these counter-publics for artistic expression and community formation, and that has been our political.
That question of, how do those who have been excluded from power exist? How do we form a community? How do we belong? – It's just a central question.
One of the lessons that I take from Richard's work that connects to, you know, what Paul Gilroy said about George Floyd and the video of his murder, which I haven't watched, either, to be honest, is the way in which it seems like so much of our work is actually about the forces that hasten Black death. But what we actually do in Black Studies is study Black livingness and Black life, you know. Katherine McKittrick, of course, is so central to these ideas.
We're not, studying death and domination..we're studying resilience and resistance. You know, reckonings and all the ways in which like, in spite of, you know, these massive centuries-long efforts to exterminate us, we're still here, we're still doing this. And we do this in ways that might not make sense to people, we're looking from the outside. Maybe pop culture doesn't seem political..but it is to us. That’s where the value is.
The last thing I'd like to emphasize, Richard was a brilliant scholar, but he was also very moral in all of his dealings. If given the choice to invest in institutions or people, he chose people, you know. If you look at what he did at the places where he worked at Northwestern University and the University of Toronto they provide a moral compass to how we as scholars of Black Studies can kind of live and be in the world, and really practice what we preach.
Black Studies and the University
Daniel: The line in Richard’s work that haunts me, I guess – or forms part of a living memory for helping me to examine and explore the politics of recognition – is the line that talks about how it makes sense, and is understandable, that racialized groups and other groups that have been despised and stigmatized by the state may still wish to receive rewards and protection from it. But at the same time – as Deb was commenting on in regard to Richard, as someone who was always holding ideas in tension and comfortable with ambiguity – when I read In Search of the Black Fantastic, I’m also mindful that that comment, about groups acknowledging and working towards rewards and protection from the state, is rounded out and completed with a line about the limits to the politics of recognition. And, while I'm thankful for everything that you’re sharing about counter-publics and thinking about popular cultures, I'm also wondering if we could more directly address that question around the politics of recognition – particularly how it relates to our work in university settings and your engagement with liberal public spheres, such as national newspapers like the Globe and Mail. I’m wondering, more specifically, if you can speak about the strategies, the approaches, [and] the tactics that you use to smuggle moments of dissidence into liberal public spheres.
Tari: I think that's a great question. It's one that I'm constantly asking myself. How can I, given the various institutional structures given the various constellation of actors who are comfortable in a particular kind of mode an aspect? How can I disrupt that in a way that allows us to move to a different possibility, while at the same time recognizing that it's okay, sometimes for people to have that effect? I think about this a lot, as it relates to Black community organizations, and a kind of hierarchical structure of leadership that often emerges, that especially in the Canadian context, speaks quite forcefully to a liberal affect in its politics, oftentimes in universities, but outside of it as well.
I asked myself, well, what are the ways that I can, with love and care and respect, ask people to maybe decide to ask a different question of themselves? Ask a question about what the community and communities that they represent, actually demand and what it is that they're giving? So strategically speaking, oftentimes, it comes in the form of panels, right. So I was on a panel, maybe it might have been a week or week and a half ago.. where we were discussing data collection, and someone asked a question about hate crimes, and they said:
Well, you know, that this increase in hate crimes that comes from, you know, this hatred in the United States. And curious, I'm curious as to how we can act as a bulwark against this hate.
I sat there, someone else answered before me, and this is this thing that's happened a few times, it's a university space, it's one of these liberal public spheres, and I'm sitting there and I'm tapping my foot. That's always if you want to know when I'm about to go left, it's, it's when I start tapping my foot, notice, I'm thinking and I'm thinking and I'm like, well, how am I going to answer this in such a way that, that while still adhering to some of the norms of the space, absolutely discard the other norms? So, my response was, I can understand why you would feel like these things are new, but in fact, the first race riot in North America happened in Shelburne, Nova Scotia in 1792 and, in fact, before them, we have the systematic genocide and land theft of indigenous peoples that has been going on since European arrivals in turtle Island, so perhaps in order to act as a bulwark against hate crimes, maybe we need to reflect on the things that we've been doing for a few 100 years, and maybe shift some of the dynamics in the space. And it was a bit of awkward silence, because, you know, I don't think in a room full of university presidents people often talk about land theft. But at the same time, I think that it's important to illustrate to people that they're implicated in the things that they like to pontificate about. And in fact, we can have a different conversation if we just try a little bit to acknowledge what is inconvenient, but what is staring us right in the face, right? And so it's about gently, but firmly nudging us to a different conversation or space in some moments. I hope that makes sense.
Deb: Yeah, I like that Tari. I think a lot about the university as I’ve been working in these places for a long time. I think that universities are a lot of things, they report to be these places where ideas are debated. Many people see universities as the manifestations of liberalism, and the way that I see universities, it’s a structure of domination. Not unlike other structures of domination. It is a formidable one because it’s wrapped up in all these other ideas, of what universities are, who they serve, and their function in an educated free democratic society. And Yet, they are very clearly the protectors of white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity.
For me, the question of being in this University, and trying to be subversive in being in this space, is quite important. I do a couple of things. There’s a great article that Robin Kelley published in the Boston Review years ago. It was when Black Lives Matter activists on campus first started agitating for changes in universities in North America. One of the things he wrote is not seek love from institutions that are incapable of loving you back, really.
I think about that a lot because so much of what we do as academics is about gaining value and prestige and recognition in these systems which were designed to exclude us. I’m not particularly invested in gaining those accolades. I do not love my institution, I’m glad I have a job, I’m not grateful I have a job, but I’m glad I have one. I refuse to be tricked into loving white supremacy in that way. What that means for me, in thinking about ways to be subversive in the structure abomination, thinking as Moten and Harney wrote [in The Undercommons], being as fugitives, within the university, I often find myself in the position of creating not a parallel, but shadow institutions. To create what I want, what I find important. A quick example, in my department, which is about to be Tari's department, we have a formal mentorship program, where senior faculty members mentor junior faculty members. I emailed my chair and I said:
I’m going to mentor Tari and this other incoming professor but don’t put me as their mentor. Because I’m going to do it, but I don’t want you to know about it, I don’t want to be held accountable to your standards, I’m going to do it my way.
I do that a lot. I have these parallel shadow institutions. One of which is actually called the subversive academy. I have a fugitive reading group, where anyone can come and learn about abolition as politics, but it is not part of or sanctioned by the university and yet operates alongside these institutions. A part of the reason why I see that as necessary is that I don’t see these institutions as fundamentally changing. 1) Because institutions are hard to change… they’re sticky. They’re more likely to stay the same. It’s really hard to enact meaningful, substantial change. 2) Because there are a lot of people invested in making sure they don’t change. That’s because of a lot of white dudes named John, that are happy with institutions working exactly as they work! 3) I feel like I can enact the kind of values, and change that I want to see in my students, my colleagues, friends, and the community, without the University being in my business.
To be clear, I can do all of this because I have tenure. I am a CRC [Canada Research Chair]. I have the positional power to now work outside of those structures and that's I think is really, really important. That is key. I did not have this freedom when I was a junior faculty when I was much more insecure. But now that I have that power, I am absolutely going to use it to, like, destroy white supremacy. If I happen to destroy the institutions that support white supremacy like our universities, that's OK with me, I'm willing to go along with that. That's fine.
Daniel: More than fine, really [laughs]. Thanks so much for sharing ideas to help us think about mentorship and philosophies of mentorship as well as teaching. Since you're inviting us to think about what it is to be within the university, as well as beyond and outside it, I’m wondering if you might be open to speaking a little bit about your forthcoming book, Deb, and your interest in working with a publisher that isn’t a university press? And, maybe, Tari, would you be open to speaking about how you’re addressing these questions in relation to your socially engaged research? Or, put a bit differently, how you’re pursuing the process of socially engaged research while also pursuing academic credentials and successfully defending dissertation? Or, maybe, you can talk about it more generally in relation to the ways in which you're navigating the challenges and also the opportunities that universities offer?
Blackness and Belonging
Deb: I mean great questions, Daniel. Let me start, I'm trying to make this story kind of as brief as I can, 'cause this is actually quite a long story of how this book came to be, so I have my forthcoming book is called The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging, and it's coming out in September. Tari’s nodding because he’s read it.
Tari: Go buy it! Go buy it! Sorry to interrupt but you gotta go pick it up. Go buy this book. Okay, I’m being quiet again.
Deb: Thanks, sorry that's so sweet. I mean, it's a bit of a story about how it came to be, but the short version is that I had an article come out – in the Globe and Mail actually – and it was published just after George Floyd was murdered. It was already coming out, to be clear. The article is called “The Long Road Home.” I knew I was moving back to Canada. I had lived in the US for 10 years, and I had a lot of feelings about coming back to Canada. In part because, you know, I'm Black, I'm Canadian, I grew up outside Toronto. My dad's family is descended from the refugees from American slavery so you know my grandfather’s grandfather escaped slavery in the US and came to Canada through the Underground Railroad and stayed in southwestern Ontario and so when I moved to the US, I was like, I'm going home. You know, this is where I'm from. You know, these are my people, like African Americans. Like, that's really where I'm from because, in part, as anyone who grew up Black in Canada knows, Canada has not been particularly welcoming to Black folks.
And when I decided to move back to Canada after having lived in the US for 10 years, I had a lot of complicated feelings about it. I had friends and family who were very much like, aren't you so happy to be moving back to Canada? You know, because it's so racist in the US. I moved back when Trump was still president. You know, and you know Trump was a lot of things and I was kind of like, I don't know. Kind of, I guess? Not in the way that those well meaning white people thought of being happy to move back.
And so I wrote this article in the Globe and Mail and the opinion editor – whose name is Mark Medley, he's a lovely person and he's actually we went to high school together, kind of randomly – he was the one who was like, Deb, you know I think this is a book. And I was like, no, no! No one is going to read a book on, like, my experiences. That's ridiculous, and he was kind of, like, I actually, you know, I really think it is. Like, let me introduce you to my agent. And so I got an agent and I wrote this proposal and it was kind of sold at auction and a lot of presses were actually very, very interested in it. Part of this was like a particular moment in time, right? Remember, this is like during this moment of racial reckoning, so there was a lot of interest in the book you know.
So it begins outside of Toronto, where I grew up and then it kind of moves to the four places I lived in the US, each of which has this really interesting kind of history of racism and interesting relationship to race and democracy. So you know, I lived in Boston for a year, which of course is the “birthplace of American freedom”, quote unquote. And then I lived in Athens, OH, which is in Appalachia where there's a lot of concern about the white working class, you know. JD Vance’s very famous Hillbilly Elegy was written about a town not unlike the one where I was living. And then I moved to Chicago and, like, was finally in a Black community. It was, like, the era of when Black Lives Matter first emerged. And then I moved out to Oregon, a super interesting, really interesting state. It was literally founded as a white ethnostate. You know, like literally, Black people were not allowed to move into the state and it still features, like, these really violent clashes between anti-fascists and fascists.
And then I moved across the border and settled in Montreal, which, you know, for any listeners who are not in Quebec, Quebec politics are very interesting and are often not commented on by the rest of Canada. Like so much of what happens here, I don't, you know, it's just like unnoticed by the rest of Canada. And Montreal in particular has this wild history of transnational Black activism really, you know. Like, Marcus Garvey was here. Malcolm X's parents met here, and, you know, there was like the 1968 Congress of Black Writers. You know, there are these really interesting histories which, like, David Austin has written about, Sean Mills has written about, and yet today you know there is also a huge kind of portion of like my white Francophone colleagues who think that they should be able to say the n-word in their classrooms right? And so, like, there are really interesting things happening around, like blackness and race.
So, I wrote this book and it's meant for a general audience. My editors have always called it a memoir and I've always pushed back against that because I'm deeply, deeply uncomfortable with the idea that people are going to read this who can know things about me. It keeps me awake at night and yet, like my experience being a decent teacher, is that the more concrete you could make these experiences for people, like, the more understanding and the more resonance it has. I actually let all of my students in my honours seminar – they were so instrumental in helping me think through things, that I sent them all the manuscript when I finished it. And, like, so many of the students of colour wrote back to me and were, like, this speaks to me in such deep ways, that I'm hopeful. I think it doesn't suck is, like, what I think. I think people will find it useful.
I think it brings a lot of the insights of Black Studies to a broad audience, which is what it was intended to do, particularly because – and like I don't mean to throw any shade at all – but there is a version of Black Studies in which the writing is particularly opaque and inaccessible. And like, I talked about how much I love Richard Iton, but I have read this book [In Search of the Black Fantastic] twenty times, and there’s parts of it that I’m, like, “I don’t know what you’re saying Richard!” There are parts that I still don’t understand. And so, I think that one of the strengths of the book is that it translates a huge body of work into terms that people can pick up. It will resonate with them. Well, talk to me again in a few months when it comes out…we’ll see. It could be a giant flop, you don’t know.
Autoethnography and Socially Engaged Research
Tari: Well, I said I’m not going to gas you up again on this podcast since I did at the start. It doesn't suck! Having read it, yeah, it doesn't suck is a bit of an understatement. So you know we're repeating the message. Go pick up your copy! Do yourself a favour! I think that you’re speaking to this kind of profoundly political act – which is sometimes, especially, I think in moments that are contentious – we need to speak directly and clearly towards a group of people that are willing to hear, right? And so I think that, like, I've been thinking through that as I'm writing my dissertation right and my dissertation is autoethnographic in nature, which means that I'm reflecting on myself and my experiences and so in some ways what Deb is writing and what I'm writing they don't look the same, but they have some echoes of each other. A bit of a resonance so to speak. Part of the reason I’m choosing that approach is because I want to make these dynamics and these stories as clear as possible because they’ve helped to shape me and they’ve helped to shape, I think, a profoundly important political kind of orientation.
And so I focus on Black self-determination, and the reason I focus on Black self-determination is that I'm incredibly invested in the idea that we can collectively – through solidarity across our differences – build communities where Black people can – wherever they're coming from, Black people with all of their disparate histories, Black people without flattening those disparate histories or discarding parts of the different histories – we can build communities of interdependence and care. But I think that in order to identify how that works, I have to talk about who is in those communities, what are they doing? What does it feel like? What does that community look like? What does the air smell like? Like, what's resonating here and so when I'm talking about – you know, Daniel asked about socially engaged research – the research is profoundly shaped by, inspired by, crafted by, the community members that have made me who I am, right? So, I'm speaking from my perspective, but I'm always thinking about the ideas of reciprocity. So, what can I give back? And one of the things that I’m going to produce out of this work is a document – and I’ve said this from the beginning, my project isn’t complete until I do this – I’m going to finish my dissertation, going to publish it, we’re also going to publish a document of best practices that I've learned throughout collecting this data in my dissertation. And I'm going to publish that under Creative Commons licensing and give that to different community organizations and folks that are organizing in Halifax, and further afield of course. But the reason for that is that this knowledge is not mine. I've been fortunate enough to engage with it. I've been fortunate enough to be graced by people. I've been fortunate enough to be in the spaces where people trust me enough to talk to me, but I don't own that. And if I'm not giving back, if I don't give a piece of myself both in terms of what I'm actually articulating in this dissertation, and in material support, to creating those communities, then I'm not really doing anything at all. So that to me, is a key piece of how I’m shaping my work and it’s a key piece of how I’ve been working so far.
I guess it was earlier this year myself and some colleagues published a report around defunding the police in Halifax and that work is implicated in my dissertation, but it's not my dissertation. I didn’t pursue that as a means of research, I pursued that because this is my community and I want to work to make it better. If my research can help that, then that's great. If it doesn’t, that’s fine. But the point is, that’s what the main thing is. When I think about socially engaged research, it's about keeping the main thing the main thing, which is, for me, helping to create these communities of Black thriving and Black flourishing.
The Black List: Rhythms, Rest and Resistance
Daniel: One of the goals of the podcast is to think about and cultivate intergenerational communication. And another ambition that we have is addressing the point that not all academics are intellectuals, and not all intellectuals are academics. So, we’re interested in intellectual work outside as well as inside of academia. And opening up space to consider how many people who are esteemed as academics are not just academics, right, if we’re to think about their humanistic praxis. perhaps, also thinking about the idea that academics are rarely just academics, right? So Richard is a DJ as well as a professor. Paul Gilroy is a music critic as well as a distinguished professor. Sylvia Wynter’s training as a dancer informs her writing and humanistic praxis as well. And one of the questions we like to end with to address the personal as well as the professional, the sense in which those categories of personal and professional are complex and always contested, is with addressing a question or sharing a question that Richard often liked to ask his friends and colleagues. That is to say, we like to end the podcast by asking our guests, what are you currently listening to? And, I think, given that the conversation today has been as much about reading and rereading as carefully listening, perhaps we could end by talking about what are you currently listening to and also what you are currently reading and/or rereading.
Tari: Deb, do you want to take that?
Deb: I do, but my answer is going to ruin the conversation a bit. Actually, that might be good because Tari you can bring us back up. So what I'm currently listening to. I've been listening, actually for the past couple of years, to this amazing artist called Karim Ouellet. You know, he's from Montreal. But he actually passed away a few months ago and I just thought I loved his music so much.
The fact that he died and he died young is actually quite related to what I want to say about what I'm reading, which is that I'm reading nothing right now. The reason I’m reading nothing is because I’ve been quite ill for the past six months, and I don’t have the energy to put the same amount of time into my work as when I was working on the manuscript. I just kind of wanted to mention while we’re talking about Black Studies and we’ve talked about Richard, and about the kind of working in universities, being in these structures of white supremacy, like, for me, it’s not a coincidence that so many of us die early. Richard was 51, bell hooks was, what, 69, Charles Mills was 70, Lee Ann Fujii, who was also a friend of mine at the University of Toronto, is 50. It’s not a coincidence, like, there’s a weight to racism, and there’s a weight to doing this work that affects our bodies in ways that you don’t realize until you are in a health crisis like I have been. So I just want to kind of throw it out there. I wish I was reading something but I don’t have the capacity to do it right now, and if there are any, especially graduate students listening – because in grad school the hustle, the grind, is part of the mentality – and, like, I want to tell you all to, like, stop, you know. Part of the trick of capitalism is, like, the conflation of our identities and our work. Like, our work is still important but, at the end of the day, this is a job. And it’s important to treat it as such.
If you have commitments outside of this job, that’s good, and that’s important. Make sure it gives you life instead of taking. I told you it was a downer.
Tari: Well, it's actually a downer, but it's actually kind of connected to what I've been listening to weirdly. So, I mean, outside of the new Kendrick Lamar album, which kind of disappointed me in some ways, so I don't want to talk about it. It's almost, like, kind of passé to talk about it because I talk about Kendrick all the time. I feel like it disappointed me, but maybe it's 'cause I'm not thinking about it deeply enough.
Moving right past that, there’s this artist from Chicago. His name is Saba. And he is, I think, the same age as me. And his work has always been really focused on evoking this kind of, like, very pointed kind of beauty. Musically he's a rapper, but he's got this kind of sonic sensibility of a kind of jazz artist. I’m not talking about your fusion artist that is way off the map. He's almost, like, a kind of cool jazz artist. His compositions are really tight, they're really succinct. They were these kind of really gentle and, what's the word, bucolic beats, he's making.
He has this album that came out in 2018 called “Care for me” that was talking about death. His cousin got killed and he has this song called “Fighter.” It’s the kind of recursive loop he's talking about with these fights that happened. So there’s a scrap he has with some friends outside, and he was fighting with his spouse because he speaks over her and she says, well, you, you don't hear me out and I feel muted. Then he goes, well, that’s my fault. But then he kind of talks about fighting his family and fighting himself to get out of bed and that tiredness of not wanting to keep going. I have been listening to that song a lot recently and I’m thinking about the ways that these past couple years have been a lot of grief. Like, I’ve been blessed, and I’m very thankful for all of the wonderful things that have happened, but I’ve also been doing a lot of grieving. I sing along and some days I don’t want to get out of bed and it’s okay to feel that way, and I think his music helps me to realize that. So, you know, check Saba out, because I think his music is really great. His most recent album, kind of, takes an uptick from that and speaks about joy in more considered ways. You should definitely go and listen to his music, it’s really fun.
As for what I’ve been reading. I’ve been reading a book by Adam Elliott-Cooper called Black Resistance to British Policing. It’s incredible. I don't know if you saw this during the Trump era, but there was a reporter who was working on a story for years and years and he tweeted – because I think Trump had just, like, said he’d done something – I've been working on this for two years and you've just tweeted it out! But it's just, like, I mean, I feel that way when I read this book. Because I’m, like, I’ve been working on this dissertation for two years and you’ve just published it! Like, I mean that in the most complimentary sense, as in, I’ve never read something that on every single page, I’m like, oh my gosh, I wish I had written this. Oh, this is perfect, and he's just tracing this genealogy of this resistance so perfectly. He weaves in the history into every single chapter. He names all of the things that I'm, like, well, I want to name this. I want to name the role that gender is playing in these resistance movements and why it is that Black women are so often at the forefront of these movements, but also the tax that that takes on them and on their sense of self, right. He so artfully weaves in the voices of the different community members that he’s interviewed. It’s an incredible book. I recommend it to anybody. You know I also had that feeling with Deb’s book but we're not going to go there. Because, again, I'm not gassing her up anymore! She's told me I'm not allowed to compliment her on her book anymore, so I won't do it. But go pick it up when it comes out in September, or pre-order it beforehand! But, yeah, that's why I've been reading and listening to.
Daniel: Thanks. Thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure to dream with you, conspire with you, and imagine possibilities, right. And, why I’m so grateful for this conversation is that it speaks to so many of the things that we’ve been thinking about in the Black Studies Program as well. There’s that sense of feeling that our ideas, our ambitions, our dreams are not solely, er, individual or idiosyncratic or completely in leftfield, but that the things that we’re often feeling on our own or in silos are shared by others who are working and struggling for similar cultural and intellectual projects. So, I’m reminded that Katherine and I were talking the other today about whether we should start every meeting we have in Black Studies with a reflection from the Nap Ministry about Rest is Resistance, and also about how caring for each other not only helps us to navigate the university but also provides us with space, with time, with support networks to imagine and build a world with a more human face.
Tari: I love that.
Deb: Yeah, me too. Thanks so much for having us. This was super fun.