Dr. Debra Thompson is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. She is a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race and a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Her research, teaching, and public scholarship seek to analyze the complex historic and contemporary relationships among race, the state, and inequality in Canada and other democratic societies. Dr. Thompson’s multiple award-winning first book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. Her best-selling second book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (Scribner Canada, 2022) is equal parts a personal meditation, penetrating analysis, and pointed social critique of the dynamics of race and belonging over time and across the Canadian-U.S. border. The Long Road Home was one of Indigo’s top 100 books, CBC’s best non-fiction of 2022, the Hill Times top 100 books of 2022, the winner of the Canadian Political Science Association’s Donald Smiley Prize for the best book on Canadian politics and government and a finalist for the prestigious Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. Dr. Thompson is a frequent commentator in print media, radio, podcasts, and television. She appeared in the 2022 documentary Black Ice, is a contributing opinion columnist at the Globe and Mail, and, in collaboration with the Institute for Research on Public Policy, produces and hosts the In/Equality, a special series of the Policy Options podcast on the many facets of inequality in Canadian society. She is currently working on several projects that extract and examine the mechanics of systemic racism in Canada.