Student AffairsTranscript from Edward Thomas’ Interview with Rukevwe Inikori
Research interests: intersections of institutional power, collective memory, cultural narratives, and historiography, with a particular focus on the narrative discursive structures that serve these dynamics.
Q1: Background & Research Interests: Your academic journey is quite unique. You started in engineering and are now a PhD researcher in cultural studies. What inspired this transition, and how has your background shaped the way you approach your current work?
Edward: I was a full-time newspaper journalist for seven years before I returned to school and trained as a research engineer (and later joined Queen's staff as a research administrator). Much like the PhD project, I kind of stumbled into journalism by enrolling in a course at Loyalist College after struggling to find employment during the mid-90's recession. I hadn't planned on journalism, but I was good at it, and I quickly built a career as a writer and editor. Those years honed my critical thinking reflexes, and the engineering work added to my toolkit for making sense out of complexity.
Q2: Impact: Uncovering the 1918 Ban: You are well known for uncovering the 1918 ban on Black medical students at Queen's-something that had largely been erased from the institution's memory. Can you take us back to the moment you first discovered it? What was that realization like? What were your expectations compared to the work Queen's is currently doing to address this ban?
Edward: I'm often given credit for uncovering the ban, but in truth, it was an international scandal when it happened, and it had been revisited by several scholars before I ever looked at it. But, of course, the story of the ban prior to my work was only a brief, episodic tale, told with a kind of boilerplate institutional exculpation narrative with concomitant erasure of Black historical subjects as actual historical agents:
There were Black medical students in 1918, but the outsider patients were so racist that we could no longer train them, so we expelled them, and who could possibly know what happened after that?
I suppose I was the first scholar to make sense of the ban to the extent of addressing its actual causes and consequences. So while a particular story about ban had always been there (recounted incorrectly as a summary mass-expulsion) - that story's functional result was to legitimize and perpetuate historical silences rather than expand knowledge.
I started digging into the ban after attending a town hall on racism at Queen's in 2017. Once again, a student had "done a costume-party racism" and the discussion about what to do was kind of orbiting an poorly historicized notion of a generalized institutional cultural deficit.
Being a journalist and an engineer, my problem-solving style is biased to first-principles approaches and tangible objects of investigation, so I naturally asked myself: "well, if we're struggling to define the scope of anti-Black racism as a social problem at Queen's ... what is the best thing that ever happened and what was the worst thing that ever happened?" Already knowing the details of Robert Sutherland historical role, thanks, especially, to the work of Greg Frankson and Judith Brown in reacquainting Queen's with its long-underappreciated hero (Judith passed last year after an incredibly well-lived and enormously influential life - her advocacy for Robert's memory is only a drop in the bucket of her work to expand engagement with Black history in Kingston). So I went home and turned to the Queen's Encyclopedia and searched "Black students" and immediately landed on the entry detailing the ban. So there I am - a well-trained and experienced journalist reading a remarkably dodgy institutional account of events, so l asked questions.
The first question I asked myself was "who were the Black students and what happened to them?" Ethelbert Bartholomew, M.D.'s name came up pretty quickly. His uncle had asked the Dean of Medicine in 1978 why his nephew had been ousted 60 years earlier, and this inquiry had been duly reported in a 2012 student paper submitted to Ted Christou's Introduction to Teaching History and a 2014 paper by medical historian Jacqueline Duffin. Both of these papers pointed to multiple medical school photos of Black students prior to the ban, and Duffin indicated that she had counted registration cards of at least 53 Black students who had attended prior to the ban. So I figured, why not firmly identify every Black student that had attended the medical school and further determine what they did after leaving Queen's? Starting with students enrolled in 1918, it took me about three days of online search through genealogical archives (travel records and border crossings provide excellent identification data), to piece together evidence that several Black students had remained at Queen's after the so-called expulsions - and I very quickly learned that Black medical alumni from Queen's were kind of a big deal, historically speaking. I more or less overturned the existing narrative with three nights' worth of web browsing. After a few more weeks of this, it was my wife Ingrid Gagnon who first suggested that I might want to pursue a PhD to lend structure to what I'm doing. I resisted the idea for a while, but I eventually found myself in Barrington Walker's office trying to figure out how a post-grad trained engineer would approach a part-time career as a humanities and social sciences scholar.
The documented evidence I catalogued made a compelling case that Queen's rationale for the ban had more to do with aligning itself to the policies of the American Medical Association in 1918, than appeasing the racial prejudice of convalescent soldiers. I expected Queen's to officially reverse the Senate policy enabling the ban, and - over time - amend the story it told itself about this part of the past. I hoped Queen's would make an effort to apologize for the harm it did to the students affected. I was happily surprised to see it move past surface-level efforts with Black medical student recruitment and see it pivot beyond initially clumsy efforts to build a real network of engaged partnerships.
I was surprised by how many hundreds of people have engaged with this work - but perhaps I should not have been. As a Black man who's spent his career in various forms of institutional life, and even as an ex-journalist who's seen more than his share of ironic injustice, I was quite shaken by the contrast of the 1900-1923 students' institutional narration as incidental actors and the facts of their actual contributions in the world: a co-founder of Canada's Black Battalion in the First World War and a medial hero of the Halifax Explosion; a premier of Barbados lionized for his legislative reforms and support for British Caribbean unity – and everywhere, catalytic engagements of these students with some of the 20th Century's leading Black intellectuals, political leaders, and financiers. More than learning that a ban existed, the historical importance of the Black historical actors militates against a century of "received wisdom" about Blackness in medicine in Canada. Knowing this past prefigures an expanded view of what is possible in the future.
Q3: Challenges: Navigating Resistance & Institutional Power: Have there been any defining challenges in your academic journey-whether in transitioning fields, conducting this research, or addressing institutional responses?
Edward: This is perhaps a bit particular to my circumstances and desires, but I have found it both challenging and rewarding to balance engagement as a public intellectual with a need to maintain a bit of detachment to allow for actual intellectual work. The necessities of doing all this on a strictly part-time basis actually has steered me into some really good habits, I think.
- I share the "raw ingredients" of my work and invite comment, critique and challenge ... I think this is an exciting model for academia
- I keep my distance. We live in an era where good-faith intellectuals quickly devolve into performative professional wrestling characters as they engage with the degrading business logics of the attention economy. l've been pretty careful about the ways in which I engage publicly - and in return, l've trusted people to make use of my research in good faith without my micro-management of every little detail. I think of myself as a conduit, rather than an owner of this research - so I don't need to be at the centre of the research conversation at all times in order for the research to accomplish beneficial impact.
- Institutional responses require many pairs of hands. There are scores of people inside and outside of the institution who were critical to the scope and effectiveness of Queen's response to my work. I'm going to have a multi-page acknowledgements section in my thesis when it's all said and done, but today, I'm very much thinking about the recent efforts of Prof. Oyedeji Ayorinde who has really elevated Queen's response toward a sustainable reclamation of its old role as an important centre of Black physician training in Canada. Very little of the good work that has been motivated by my work can be attributed to me - my principal role is intellectual catalysis.
Q4: Advice: For the Next Generation of Black Researchers: For young Black scholars, what advice would you give them to stay motivated when dealing with histories of exclusion and systemic barriers?
Edward: Real motivation that actually accomplishes things in the world has to be scaffolded in a sense of what might be possible - so the scope of your motivation is always going to be limited by what you know. So I would encourage you to learn Black history with the intention of situating your own work within Black history's larger project of epistemological and phenomenological emancipation. Why do I say this? Because the corpora of Black history is radically distinguishable by its unflinching pursuit of truth, its openness to multiplicities of knowledge, and its capacity to navigate vexing contradictions and antagonisms without capitulation into intellectual decadence. It repeatedly and reliably coheres around a critical rejection of temporal inevitability - it considers not only what has been, but might what has been and what might yet be. It is par excellence, a vehicle through which the veil of institutionalized received wisdom is pierced, and the germinal shoots of raw insight might be cultivated. Black history is profoundly intellectually generative in the domain of human affairs. You'll find the imprint of Black history's critical tenacity widely dispersed among the most relevant and clear-eyed scholarship of the last 100 years. No other sphere of historical approach has yielded as much intellectual ferment (e.g., consider the role of diasporic Black history in the intellectual contributions of W. E. B. Dubois, Alioune Diop, William Arthur Lewis, CLR James, Franz Fanon, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and closer to home, Katherine McKittrick, Rinaldo Walcott and Afua Cooper - nevermind a much longer list of applied-knowledge public intellectuals in journalism, politics, law, advocacy).
Approaching any given February as "time once again to make space for Black peoples' stories" is to miss the point entirely. We live in a moment where human civilization faces near-term existential risks, from a truly lethal pandemic, to nuclear warfare, and at least a century of already-dialled-in climate heating. These risks are neither scientifically or technologically insurmountable - the barriers between us and our own survival are problems of humanity. And while our survival depends on knowledge of society, Euro-Atlantic hegemonic power is spiralling into an intellectual collapse. Increasingly our political leaders, business oligarchs, and their loyal followers live in terror of any historical accounts that cannot feed their nostalgic yearning for an imagined past. They cannot bear to navigate the contradictions that arise from the basic fact of human differences in identification, ideology or intent, so they seek to seal themselves off from the Other entirely. And yet, no matter how unchallenged and how isolated they make themselves, they will persist in arranging the dispossession, displacement and despair of the weakest among them in the hopes that the re-enactment of the past's
"inevitable and necessary" cruelties will conjure a return of a "progress" they imagine as both birthright and legitimation. This is, by the way, exactly the same pattern of epistemological and ontological error anthropologists once disparaged as magical cargo-cult thinking. If you care to avoid fearful superstition as your way of life, Black history can help you build the critical resources that will keep your mind your own - and perhaps even save your soul, depending on how you frame it.
Q5: Next Steps: Looking ahead, what do you hope to achieve in the next five years? Are there specific projects or areas of research you're particularly excited about?
Edward: My own intellectual contributions adapt some of the key theories advanced by the late British Cultural Studies scholar Stuart Hall, and use these to address decades-long problems in historiography. How does history matter in society? If history is a kind of constructed story about the past, then to whom does it matter and why? What does history actually do in the world in terms of ideology - how does this happen, if it happens at all? The micro-historiography of the Queen's ban is the case study I've been using to develop new methods to answer these questions in a way that is commensurable across multiple historical texts and the social contexts in which they are written and disseminated.
Beyond the many historiographical interventions that I imagine my new method will enable, I am also fleshing out a longer-term project to write the micro-to macrohistory of the Black medical students at Queen's between 1900 and 1923. I'm in the middle of transcribing a hand-written autobiography of one of the students (it's taking a while ... physician's handwriting is truly painful).