“I don’t want to do time,I want to save it”: Carcerality of time and Black temporal resistance

Abstract

The criminalization of Blackness has led to premature death, high incarceration rates, and psychological stress, all of which impact Black people’s temporal horizons. Working in conversation with scholars who empirically documented how Blackness is criminalized and time is racialized, this work explores the degree in which carceral understandings of time provide a framework to better comprehend Black people’s temporal experiences. Data for this study include in-depth interviews with six students and 16 graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across six universities in the southern United States and 22 months of observations at a HBCU in southeastern United States. The results indicate that the respondents experience temporal traps that restrict the temporal possibilities of Black people and temporal stasis as they feel trapped within an ongoing history of anti-Black violence. They narrate a desire to “take their time” and “save time” to resist the dominant temporal order. The operative “take” signifies the creating of temporal possibility through uncoupling time’s relation to racial structures and “save” signifies freeing time from the structural demands of white supremacy.

Keywords

temporality carceral racism Blackness

Introduction

“A lot of our Black community members are doing time, while we get to be here outside, theorizing the world,” Tae says towards the end of a class discussion at our Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Tae appropriates the idiom “doing time” to speak about imprisonment and contends that Black college students are outside of this spatial sphere and are allowed different opportunity structures. While we may initially want to read this statement metaphorically, in this paper I suggest it is more sociologically productive to read Tae’s statement literally and engage the insights that can be drawn from thinking about what it means to be outside of doing time or time itself.

John Streamas (2010) describes Colored People’s Time (CPT), which is often understood as a sardonic rationalization for lateness, as people of color using a relaxed orientation towards movement to subvert white-capitalist structures that demand people to always be doing something productive with time. Black Americans have moved at rhythms that push back against this capitalist demand (Adeyemi 2019), held time for people and ideas that mainstream society has dismissed as unruly (Bruce 2017), and challenged narratives that recall the past through a white-centric lens (Shaw 2015). Black people work to undermine racism through (re)envisioning and contesting the way mainstream conceptions of time and pace, that are organized around whiteness, structure their everyday lives. I offer a sociological interpretation of this process by viewing the ways Black HBCU students and graduates narrate their racialized experiences with time and how they navigate structural demands that steal their time.

Rahsaan Mahadeo (2019: 186) problematizes the taken for granted-ness of the question “what time is it,” and contends that it is more theoretically appropriate to ask “whose time is it,” as this latter question points to a structural assemblage of power relations that denies and steals time from people of color. If time is calibrated and recalled through white logics (Hunter 2018), based on white methods undergirded by quantification and intolerance for ambiguity (Zuberi et al., 2008; Mahadeo 2019), and has an intimate compatibility with whiteness (Mahadeo 2019); then to be outside of time points to moments when Black people attempt to escape the racial temporal disadvantage that is organized within the social structure.

Carceral and Flaherty’s (2021) work on prison-time demonstrates how the sensory dimensions of prisons produce temporal disorientation where time stretches irrationally in all directions, especially in length. Lengthy sentences, mundane routines, and state agents controlling one’s time produces the feeling that one’s life has no forward momentum. The condemnation of Blackness positions Black people within and outside of prisons in carceral geographies organized around logics of policing, surveillance, and containment (Muhammad 2019; Shabazz 2015). This article seeks to examine how the temporal logics and processes that structure the criminal legal system, in similar and different ways, organize Black American’s relationship to racialized structures more broadly. This is not to suggest that Black Americans experience time as those incarcerated. Rather this works rest on the notion that the logics of carcerality impact the lives of criminalized groups in complicated ways and aims to see if a carceral frame can offer any explanatory power in conceptualizing Black people’s experience with time.

Black people have sought out spaces that affirm the ways they often move against the grain of mainstream conceptions of time, specifically HBCUs. Black students attend HBCUs to learn about the past and chart Black futures in ways that are not overdetermined by whiteness (Williams et al., 2021; Kennedy 2012). HBCUs are key cites of temporal possibility and their students and graduates also provide unique insights on carcerality. Higher education levels are linked to lower incarceration rates; however, the participants in my research problematize this picture by narrating the various ways the logics of carcerality show up in their day-to-day lives in complex ways to steal, and deny them, time.

To subvert carceral temporal demands, or what Carceral and Flaherty (2021) call “time work,” they labor to customize their temporal experience. Through ethnographic observation at an HBCU and interviews with Black Americans who are currently enrolled or graduated from an HBCU, I examine how Black people’s temporal orientations have impacted the language they use to make sense of their positioning on the temporal spectrum and the time work they do in response to this. I focus specifically on those who identify as Black American to make claims about the experience of Blackness in the United States (U.S.). Working in conversation with scholars who have empirically documented the ways Blackness is criminalized and time is racialized (Muhammad 2019; Mahadeo 2019), I ask what strategies do Black people employ to avoid doing time as set forth by mainstream institutions?

Black interviewees referenced taking their time and saving time as ways to subvert the temporal traps of racialized structures. Temporal traps allude to ways the organization of U.S. society confines the temporal possibilities of Black people and how they feel trapped within an ongoing history of anti-Black violence. Like those incarcerated, the respondents experience a form of temporal stasis due to feeling that time has not moved because of the persistence of anti-Blackness. Black people aim to take their time back from the structures that steal their time and save time from racial-capitalist logics that produce timelines that constrain Black people with economic demands and premature death. This is not a grand theory of temporality, but rather uses carcerality and its relation to Blackness to make sense of racialized temporal structures.

Background: Carceral logics of time

The construction of the modern world relied on a racialized conception of time. Barnor Hesse (2007) contends that, to justify European expansion through slavery and colonialism, whiteness was marked as a symbol of progress and future oriented and Blackness as ahistorical with no temporal capacity. To be racialized as white empowered a collective with the ability to determine the future, decide what parts of the past would be carried forward, and how time should be used in the present. Alia Al-Saji (2013) suggests that being racialized as Black meant “coming too late” to a world that was always already there and overdetermined. In this way, the normative temporal reality of the U.S. is built around racist-capitalist logics or, as La Marr Jurelle Bruce (2017: 4) suggests, “white heteronormative, capitalist, and rationalist clock-bound conceptions of time.” Racism temporally positions racial actors dissimilarly by compromising temporal horizons, writing people out of time, and bringing groups into time at various points along society’s imagined timeline of progress because racist institutions cannot exist without objectifying and racializing time in complex ways (Warren 2016). Situating Black people with no history, nor any capacity to be future oriented, is part of the racial logics of time that justify structural orderings that commit temporal and material violence.

The structural and spatial organization of prisons is aimed at undermining temporal autonomy (Carceral and Flaherty 2021: 1–2). Carceral studies scholars have documented how the logic and social processes that underpin the organization of prisons and policing organize Black neighborhoods, schools, housing projects, welfare visits, and other so-called “Black spaces” (Shabazz 2015; Roberts 2002; Wacquant 2001; Wun 2018). The organizing ideological principle of carceral processes is that those who are suspicious, criminal, or understood as other warrant having their time stolen, denied, and even terminated if the state is so compelled. Michele Foucault (1975) conceptualizes this through the notion of carceral archipelago which is the proliferation of power relations through a continuum of carceral spaces and logics beyond prison walls to the entire social geography. Renisa Mawani (2014) shows how time is owned and used by the U.S. state through constitutions, statues, and precedent to form imagined pasts to stake claim to Indigenous lands and Black labor. Statements such as “get over slavery” are part of what Charles Mills (2014) calls the “white temporal imaginary,” that works to police time by inscribing discontinuities between the past and present to uphold various ways white Americans benefit from controlling Black people’s temporal memory and possibilities.

The carceral logics within time, not only aim to police how we understand the racial-past but work along racial lines in determining how present-time can be used. For instance, pre-trial detention and mandatory minimum prison sentences in the U.S. exacerbate racial temporal disadvantage through disproportionately forcing racial-minorities to do more time, which has a reverberating affect by compromising life-chances post-release (Martinez et al. 2020). This process compromises Black children’s temporal horizons too, as they deal with the weight/wait of the passage of time without parents (Nesmith and Ruhland 2008). Using carceral processes to steal and imprison the time of Black people occurs beyond the formal confines of the criminal legal system. Black children are denied educational hours due to disparities in school suspension rates (Bell 2021), Black mothers face high levels of at-home monitoring making them most at risk of losing time with their children due to child removal (Roberts 2002), and Black neighborhoods lose time to engage in pro-social community building activity due to hyper-surveillance and policing (Brunson and Miller 2006).

Recognizing temporality as a site of racial disadvantage, Black people have pushed back against the carceral nature of time through what Mahadeo (2022) calls “funking the clock.” To funk the clock Black people have moved to a different rhythm than what is demanded by mainstream conceptions of time, often through using what Kemi Adeyemi (2019) refers to as “slowness.” To be able to change pace, Black people have sought out spaces that affirm the ways they often move against the grain of mainstream conceptions of time. To avoid having their day-to-day experiences overdetermined by white logics of time, Black people have pursued education at HBCUs in hopes the environment will be more attuned to their racialized experiences (Johnson 2017). Black students attend HBCUs to connect with a version of the Black past that is often erased at historically white colleges and to build a future in community with Black people (Williams et al., 2021; Kennedy 2012). HBCUs are thus important sites of temporal possibility for Black students.

In grounding my engagement with time in the Black radical tradition, turning to HBCU students and graduates—which is distinct from HBCUs as institutions—is historically generative in that they have played an important role in developing Black thought and pushing back against mainstream ideological conventions (Rogers 2012). The voices of HBCU students and graduates are engaged as relational sites to explore how Black people make sense of societal temporal orderings and the ways they live with and resist this structure. Their statements point to attempts at moments of what Kara Keeling (2009) calls “temporal disruption,” where Black people step outside or away from the temporal violence of the racial order. HBCUs as institutions are not disconnected from the racist-capitalist-patriarchal organization of America, but the voices of those who attend them have historically helped to better conceptualize Black people’s relationship with racialized structures and processes.

Data and methods

This research is based on 22 months of ethnographic observations at a mid-size HBCU in southeastern United States where I worked as an Assistant Professor in the Sociology department. Conversations with students, in-class exchanges, and pedagogical changes I made to meet temporal requests all inform the ideas in this paper. Although this research is informed by my work at one particular HBCU, the data for this study primarily comes from formal interviews conducted with 22 Black HBCU students and graduates that represent six HBCUS. All 22 HBCU students and graduates self-identified as Black, with 19 being African-American and three being Caribbean-American. HBCU students are those who were enrolled at an HBCU at the time of the study and graduates are people who had already graduated from an HBCU at the time of the study. Six of the participants were students and 16 were graduates. The HBCUs represented are Hampton University, Morgan State University, Morehouse College, Clark Atlanta University, Xavier University of Louisiana, and Johnson C. Smith University.

I served as an HBCU faculty member during the time of data collection, but my positionality is also informed by me being a Black HBCU graduate. My location on the insider–outsider continuum allowed me to pull from my lived experience and ethnographic observations to shape the type of questions I asked in interview sessions. In various ways, I am positioned close to the participants, but our ontological relationship to the themes in this research were often divergent because this project is centered on experiences of temporality that extend beyond the HBCU experience. An important epistemological assumption from my positionality is that HBCU students’ and graduates’ lives are largely informed by structural forces beyond HBCUs, and those experiences can serve as important analytical sites to make sense of the social world.

Interviews ranged from one hour to 1 hour and 45 min, with most averaging about one and a half hours. With permission from each person, all interviews were video recorded except for one, which was audio recorded. Video was used because body language and facial expressions help capture meaning that voices alone cannot convey. The interview schedule contained a series of questions related to (1) perceptions of time; (2) Blackness; (3) HBCU experience; and (4) life course goals. Participants did not receive any compensation. The sample composed of 12 women and 10 men ranging from ages 20–43. Eight of the participants held full-time jobs, six were in graduate school, six were enrolled in undergraduate studies, one worked full-time at their own company, and one was unemployed at the time of the interview. The participants were recruited via social media, professional networks, and listservs that served HBCUs.

I used jottings (Spradley 2016) from my in-class experiences and conversations to revamp my pedagogical style to meet student needs that were typically caused by structural issues beyond the university. These notes informed the project’s research questions. I transcribed each interview myself to take note of participants’ voice inflections and cadence at specific junctures of the interview. Each interview was transcribed verbatim, leaving grammar uncorrected to privilege what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “rhetorical incoherence” that occurs when discussing race and racism (2013:117–19). Analysis took place in three stages. First, I conducted extensive line-by-line open coding, searching for themes. Second, I compared the emergent patterns with my ethnographic notes. Last, I conducted a second round of focused coding on how participants understood temporal control and temporal resistance. In this stage I thematically categorized the notes into “carceral time,” “taking your time,” and “saving time.”

White logic, “context in which White supremacy has defined the techniques and processes of reasoning about social facts” (Zuberi et al., 2008: 17), would have us assume that studying white people from historically white universities offer generalizable data, but studying Black people from Black universities is too narrow of a frame to offer anything important beyond an understanding of Black universities. Flaherty’s (2003) pivotal work that advanced the notion of “time work,” which is individual and relational attempts at constructing types of temporal experiences, used mainly white student experiences from white universities to make claims about human experience with time. I want to extend this conceptualization by suggesting that time work is a racialized process. Black students often attend HBCUs to experience a Black centered institution prior to going into what they imagine will be a white-centric work force (Kennedy 2012). The universalistic logic and language around college, such as holding commencement, suggest that university transitions you into a new journey. HBCU students undermine this dominant temporal understanding of educational trajectory as they believe college completion transitions them back into an anti-Black economic order.

The methodological choice to center Black HBCU students and graduates rest on the notion that choosing to attend an HBCU over a historically white institution is itself a temporal choice. HBCUs are understood as providing a break from dominant societal norms and logic and I am concerned with the temporal orientation of Black Americans who sought to spend time this way. This work is also attuned to the idea that Black Americans at historically white institutions and outside the academy may have temporal orientations that will overlap (and diverge) with these since anti-Blackness is a defining feature of the U.S.’s structure. Furthermore, this research is focused on examining the degree to which a carceral frame provides explanatory power in understanding Black American’s temporal orientation and this strategic focus does not deny the intersectional dimension to Blackness and the ways that Black American experiences overlap with others disadvantaged by white-capitalistic systems.

Findings

Carcerality of time

Carceral geographers such as Dominique Moran (2012) have explained incarceration as simultaneously a temporal and spatial experience arguing that being fixed to a specific spatial locality organizes how time is experienced in the present and one’s relationship to the past and future. While carceral studies scholars (e.g., Cope 2003) have focused on time in carceral space, Black HBCU students and graduates discussed time itself as functioning under similar carceral logics. In line with Khalil Gibram Muhammad’s (2019) contention that racial disparities in crime rates are interpreted as a sign of Black behavior and their misuse of time, the participants point to the ways that the criminalization of Blackness is not only a form of racialization, but also temporalization.

The key assumption of carcerality is that those who are criminal need to have their time stolen and imprisoned. The participants suggest that racist-capitalistic structures work under a similar logic in that they are organized to confine and steal the time of Black people. Below is part of my conversation with Jon, a Black HBCU graduate who works at a non-profit centered on diversity and equity. Jon chuckles after I ask him, “how do you feel about time,” and follows up with:

Jon: Folks say this a lot, but it’s definitely a tool of white supremacy. Just the perceived urgency of work. A lot of stuff isn’t worth me working all night long, getting up early in the morning and working on weekends, ignoring the other parts of myself. But I’m always thinking like, gosh, don't be the Black guy who's late or not prepared, I think that's always in the back of my head.

Jon did not go into detail about how time is wielded as a tool of white supremacy, and this may be explained by the matter-of-factness in his voice that suggested he assumed that most would agree with his statement. He talks about the demand for time to be used in service of work, while suggesting this demand is not experienced equally as Black people must struggle against assumptions about Black timeliness. The feeling that Black people do not have the privilege to challenge capitalist demands of their time was reflected by others in both their personal and familial narratives. When I asked Jess, a 32 year-old Black woman lawyer searching for work, “what are some things you would want to achieve over your life course,” she responds:

Jess: In high school I went to this magnet school [public school with a specialized curricular focus] in Palm Beach County [Florida] with wealthy kids. I wanted my kids to be as privileged as these kids. Being a Black adult, I stopped saying I need a house on Palm Beach and need my kids to go to an exclusive school because I realized things are stacked against us and it would take so much to get my kids there. I have to spend so much more of my time than these other people do, trying to achieve the same things. Not just the abstract of “you have to work two times as hard to get half as much,” but when calculating what that means I realized it’s not healthy.

Jess, a recipient of a privileged educational experience from her elite high school, felt her ability to provide her children with the same opportunity was compromised by temporal inequality built into capitalist accumulation. While Jess does not face the same level of economic precarity as the average Black person in America, her statement unveils the provocativeness of Mahadeo’s (2019) question “whose time it?” Progress narratives on race assume that each generation of Black people will have a little more than the past, but Jess’s concerns indicate that this is not inherently true as racism impacts temporal possibility.

Similarly, Joy felt as if she didn’t own her time when she explains why she is thinking about powering through her graduate school program, even though she has the funding to stay for another year:

Joy: Taking your own time is viewed different because of your race, based on stereotypes. I think when you’re a person of color, particularly Black people, and trying to control and take your own time, you are either looked at as lazy, unreasonable, or insubordinate depending on what context you’re trying to take that time.

Joy feels forced to forgo her extra year of funding to share a sense of parity in her department due to stereotypes about Black women. These “controlling images” (Collins 1991) serve as ideological justifications for intersecting forms of exploitation. Joy aims to power through her PhD to avoid seeming weary or lazy because of how controlling imaginaries centered on Black women temporalize race. Time work has been presented as a relatively neutral process (Flaherty 2003), but Joy reveals that the overlapping disadvantage of gender and race create social, cultural, and material boundaries and limitations on actualizing time work.

The participants’ narratives about time were often concerned with lived and experiential time. These narratives often intersected with empirical material previously produced from qualitative data on experiences in prison (e.g., Walker 2016). While no participant specifically stated that they felt like they were trapped in a prison, their experiences speak to a similar set of social processes that organize carceral systems. One form of temporal violence experienced by those incarcerated is temporal stasis, where time does not flow because no vital changes happen (Moran 2012). A piece of my conversation with Mike, a Black graduate student, reflects racial temporal stasis in his lived experience as a Black person:

Mike: Time is a mystery to an extent. Seeing so much violence against Black people, I no longer think of the past as the past. I remember waking up early in June of 2020 to go to the lake with my friends. I got on Twitter, which I need to get off. And I remember scrolling through and I saw this video of a Black man in the middle of the woods, and he was surrounded by four white men. Scary white men. They were mid-process about to lynch this man until the hikers who recorded it intervened. I said to myself, we have been here before as a people, and I am part of that story.

I quote Mike at length to attempt to capture his understanding of the relational lived experience of time. Attending to the minutiae of narratives such as his, helped me think through the carcerality of time. For Mike, when thinking about racial progress, time feels as if it has not changed. In Mike’s understanding, extralegal physical violence against Black people is the moment we are trapped in. Many incarcerated people contend that during prison-time nothing happens because every day is the same thing (Cope 2003). For Mike and others, racism produces a temporal stability where nothing really changes because racism is a constant in the Black American experience.

Participants felt society discouraged them from making these connections between historical and contemporary forms of anti-Black racism. Jess articulated that she believes Black people are policed into having a strict linear conception of time where the past is discontinuous with the present.

Jess: They don’t want us to talk about the past. Like how we rarely see colored photos of the civil rights movement, to give the illusion that the past is further away than it is. They don’t want us to talk about slavery or who we were before slavery.

Jess uses the proverbial “they” to speak broadly about white power structures as she believes that there is an attempt to limit discussion about past racial injustice to distance current experiences of race from historical violence. Jess is asserting that strategies of policing and memory regulation are used to “temporalize race” (Mahadeo 2019) or fix race within time. Time, in part, has been structured around carceral logics as Black people feel confined within and regulated by socially constructed timelines in ways that harm us in benefit of state solidity. This is not to downplay the legitimate ways individual’s temporal horizons are compromised while formally under correctional watch but take seriously the breadth of the relational processes that structure the criminal legal system and how its reach extends beyond physical prisons.

The potential violence of time was not only narrated descriptively, but in the ways, participants spoke to divorcing their self from time and/or changing their relationship with it. During my conversation with Joy, she diverts the conversation away from the high demands of graduate school when she says:

Joy: So this is kind of a tangent, but a lot of things enslaved people did was resisting the time structure of white people. So when they wasn’t working fast, they wasn’t being lazy; they were undercutting the system.

Author: Yea, slowness doesn’t mean we don’t value time.

Joy: Because Black people have less time as a group, so we do care. We just have to subvert time to survive.

Joy’s response forecloses idioms such as “time heals all,” as she calls into question the redemptive ability of time by her contention that it needs to be subverted. Joy identifies how “Blackness is the product of temporal domination” (Warren 2016), by showing a historical pattern of resisting and undermining temporal structures. This point is made more plainly in Mike’s response to my asking, “Do you think you can accomplish everything you would like to?”

Mike: I have relinquished my obsession with time.

In an ambitious attempt to not be as burdened by the violence of time, Mike’s response speaks to not centering imposed or self-created timelines in his understanding of his life course. Participants’ intentions to not obsess over and to subvert time is likely because they “don’t wanna time travel no mo” (Shaw 2015), invest in time in a society where temporality is oriented toward an unattainable future based on racial progress myths. Time in the U.S. is, in part, socially constructed around racist-capitalist production and moral linearity where things progressively get better, and the participants were attempting to change their ontological relationship to time. The participants show that practicing slowness (Adeyemi 2019) is not physical, but also mental and emotive work. To do time differently they engaged in what I am conceptualizing as “taking your time,” which is attempts at escaping racialized physical and mental temporal demands.

Taking your time

For most of the participants, the idea of not doing time as determined by racial structures was aspirational given the inevitability of working on some form of racist-capitalist schedule, and most were doubtful about the possibility of Black freedom in their lifetime. While they felt trapped within specific modes of temporal constraint, taking their time, whether moving slow, wasting time, or using time in service of their self, was an important form of resistance to the dominate temporal structure. Mike went into detail about what is at stake when taking your time:

Author: Do you ever take moments to yourself? What is taking your time for you?

Mike: The question answers itself. Taking is the operative word, I have to take my time. That means it wasn’t mine in the first place. To have to take something, automatically introduces it into a conflict. Like it’s different from a borrow, its different from a give. But to take time is something that operates, I think with the particular level of agency and force that signifies something on the other side of that taking.

Author: What’s on that other side?

Mike: Those forces are certainly economic and institutional, that do take our time, that do take and extract our time in our lives. It’s the conditions we live.

Working through the implications of the idiom “take your time,” Mike is complicating American lexicon by shifting our understanding of taking one’s time from a personal act to a relational one. For Mike, taking one’s time involves a degree of individual agency, but this agency is enacted upon or used in resistance to structural orderings. This response suggests that time is owned and controlled by institutional power. To take one’s time is an attempt to step outside of the racial orderings that have compromised Black people’s temporal horizon.

When discussing ways they take their time, respondents cited more than a desire to pushback against the capitalist restraints on how their time should be used, and articulated attempts to change their experiential relationship with time. In my conversation with Lisa, an HBCU senior [final year undergraduate], on how she wished her days were structured she contends that an important part of feeling fulfilled is reclaiming her time from imposed demands:

Lisa: It’s more than just self-care. I don’t want to always do mental and emotional labor that comes with being a Black woman. Always, making others comfortable.

Author: So, you want to use your energy for yourself?

Lisa: I know it sounds like a contradiction, but when I take my time, I want to use it for stuff that excites me. It doesn't have to relax me, but I guess it can be relaxing. It’s ironic, because for me when I’m taking time, I’m still doing stuff.

Lisa feels that taking her time is a redirection of who benefits from her labor. “Taking your time” didn’t mean reducing the degree and frequency of her activity to a point where she felt relaxed, but rather it alluded to a transformation in who/what was stimulated by her labor. Here, Lisa is pushing back against the temporal demands that capitalist structures place on all workers. However, other participants point to how “taking your time” is a racialized process where power differentials influence one’s capacity to take their time.

Jaz, a Black woman who works in education, discusses the various temporal constraints that Black women face when trying to take their time. Jaz finds it ironic that schools that boast about equity reproduce the various forms of oppression that they teach about. Talking about her experiences with trying to take her time she says:

Jaz: I remember I left work 5 minutes early because I had a doctor’s appointment and my boss got mad. I know I was only there a month, but I'm grown and a professional. This older white man leaves whenever, but Black people never get the benefit of the doubt.

Author: Do you feel your job is stricter on Black women’s time?

Jaz: Not just about staying the whole time, but the real burden is that every issue about race they want you to be the expert. The Black students be needing an outlet and they come to you, and I want to be there for them. Black women in education don’t really have the same time as everyone else.

Jaz is articulating various ways race is temporalized in the workforce. Black women are not assumed to be competent, so in Jaz’s case their time use is policed stricter than others. Jaz believes her racial responsibility to Black students compromised her ability to take time for herself forcing her to invest more time and emotional labor than others.

The interviewees acknowledged racial temporal constraints and understood taking their time as a form of resistant to these temporal inequalities. For example, Tod a Black male doctoral student, situated taking time within a Black historical tradition of refashioning temporal relationships to institutions. When discussing how he understands taking time Tod says:

Tod: I've never had a white person tell me ‘take your time.’ I think of Black churches, when somebody stands up and gives a testimony and everyone yells out ‘take your time.’ In this context taking your time is a very Black idea.

Author: What do Black people mean when they say it at church or in general?

Tod: It’s the ability to slow down or speed up. You can sort of be intentional and not so robotic or automatic about how you use your time. A spiritual, mental, emotional and laissez faire, use of time. You are finding ways to reclaim and care about yourself.

Tod builds on his personal anecdotal experience of never hearing “take your time” from a white person and speaks about the prevalence of the phrase in Black churches. He leans on his Christian foundation to use “take your time” as a shorthand for the moments that Black people find spiritual and emotional relief from the perceived urgency of time. The operative “take” signifies the creating of temporal possibility through uncoupling time’s relation to racial structures to use and feel time differently.

Black HBCU students and graduates thought about taking their time in racial terms, specifically with attending their respective HBCU as an example of it. At the start of my conversation with Lisa we discussed why she selected an HBCU.

Lisa: I felt like I didn’t want to have to navigate white people. I picked an HBCU because I wanted to learn as much as I could before I had to be in the white world.

Author: Is there any benefit to going to a historically white university?

Lisa: Some might think since they have to live in a white world they might as well go to a white school to develop skills to get adjusted to it. That may work for them, but for me I wanted to take this time to protect my peace by avoiding racist incidents.

In Lisa’s estimation, the working world is a white centered space and going to an HBCU provided her with an arena to learn uninhibited by whiteness. Even though HBCUs are tied to larger societal orderings, for Lisa they provide spaces of relief from direct contact with the white world. While Lisa sees some benefit to historically white universities, attending an HBCU for her was taking a moment of her life to live in a way that felt sincere. Naming the world “white” points to the inescapabilty of structural racism (Bonilla-Silva 2013) and going to an HBCU was an opportunity to take 4 years of her life back from that system.

Am I wasting time or saving time?

The HBCU students and graduates thought about their resistance to time and challenging socially constructed clock-time demands as an inherently racial process. In many instances, their attempts to challenge imposed time constraints worked from the notion that race is temporalized. Take, for example, an exchange during midterm week at the HBCU I worked.

Around 11:00am. I walk into a full classroom and see distressed, tired, and indifferent faces. “How is everyone feeling today,” I ask to gauge what the vibe is like. About six students begrudgingly say “good,” as I scan the room. “Are y’all really good or are you just saying that” I ask. “It’s midterm week, and all y’all giving us a bunch of assignments at the same time,” a young woman responds. “Y’all working us like slaves,” a young man follows up in support of her response. “I completely understand your pain,” I say to attempt to sympathize with their struggle while also thinking about my part in sustaining it.

The students are expressing a common concern about the time demands of midterm week where faculty all strategically give assignments that hold the most weight towards students’ final grade at the same time. One of my students was contesting the clock-time structural demands of midterm week by likening it to slavery. Comparisons to slavery often miss the totality of the system and key principles of the event being compared are often lost. However, my student was attempting to work through the ways notions of time and productivity are racialized. My student was pushing against what Mark Smith (1996: 143) refers to as the “time clock-conscious capitalist impulses of antebellum slavery,” where capitalist notions of productivity were constructed along racial logics that assumed Black bodies were fit for in/extensive labor.

Those incarcerated have used the concept of “losing track of time” to undermine lengthy sentences (Carceral and Flaherty 2021: 2), and in a similar vein the interviewees narrated a complicated relationship with the notion of wasting time. If time is supposed to be in support of some form of institutional productivity, participants felt when time was not used in support of maintaining this structure then they would be viewed as wasting time. Wasting time, used strategically, was a way to subvert dominant temporal structures. My conversation with Kev, a current graduate student, sets a foundation to think about the social significance of wasting time:

Author: Are there moments you wish you could get back, like you felt you wasted time?

Kev: I don’t know. A waste of time assumes that there is some assumed productivity of time or something time is inherently supposed to go towards.

For Kev, wasting time implies that time has a determination and to use time in service of things outside the scope of that purpose is improvident. Within this relational understanding of temporality, time is assumed to be a resource. While many of the participants believe that time is racialized and is a white-capitalist tool, they still feel invested in temporal projects. Black people don’t underestimate or make light of how time is a key organizing principle of their day-to-day lives but work to build relationships with time that are often foreclosed by mainstream conceptions of temporality.

Many of the participants thought that dominate conceptions of time made them feel that time well spent was time dedicated to labor productivity. Rather than divest completely from notions of using time productively, participants attempted to reorient what they understand as worthy of their productivity. Here is a piece of my conversation with Lisa as we discussed the racial components of time.

Lisa: You know we have colored people time (CPT), because Black people understand time different from whites. And it’s not just us showing up late to everything.

Author: What does being on CPT mean for you?

Lisa: Society gives us this pressure to always be doing something, like there is no time to waste. For Black people we don’t see taking extra time to make sure we look ok or just spending time with friends as wasting time because we don’t get to chill and be ourselves often.

In Lisa’s narration of CPT, she works from the assumption that race is temporalized, which has led Black people to understand time in ways that are distinct from white people. If wasting time occurs when time is spent on things that detract from one’s larger goal, Lisa’s argument assumes that Black and white people’s temporal orientations differ because of diverse ontological experiences of race. For Lisa it is not that Black people don’t respect time, but that they have different temporal horizons and demands. In a society where Blackness is dreadful and expelled from legitimate humanness (Smalls 2021), taking extra time to look presentable and holding time to care for oneself is a valid use of time.

“Taking their time” and “wasting time” were strategic moves for Black people to contest racialized institutional temporal constraints and they also expressed a desire to “save” time. The day-to-day lexical use of saving time often alludes to finding an efficient way to cut back on how much clock-time is needed to complete a task. The participants expressed a more complicated understanding. In my conversation with Kate, an HBCU senior, she suggested that since Black people have longer wait times, they are forced to think deeply about time use. Here is my response to her:

Author: How do you make sense of this lost time?

Kate: I don’t think Black people have control over time or can get time back. The best we can do is save time, like we try to save everything else.

Author: What does saving time mean for you?

Kate: Saving time is essentially letting go of something toxic that steals your time. It’s also holding on to a little bit more time than before.

Kate positions saving time as a collective process as she situates it into a broader experience of Black struggle. For Kate, saving time is a dynamic process of both subverting the structural constraints that steals time and claiming time that was not meant for Black people. Saving time is less about being more efficient within a white-capitalist temporal structure, but more about liberating time from that structure.

Tod’s discussion of Black premature death in the U.S. helps make sense of the racial implications of saving time. I ask, “How do you feel about Black folks and time?”

Tod: I know time works at whims of straight appearing white men. That’s why we been waiting 400 years for racial justice.

Author: I feel you!

Tod: I think of figures like Eric Garner and George Floyd saying, ‘I can't breathe’. I think about those as petitions, literal petitions for more time. I can see myself running out of moments like that because Black folks have the worse mortality metrics. Black life is fleeting, so we try to preserve time.

Tod is suggesting that time is controlled by, and benefits, white men. Not only has time not brought racial equity, but Black people’s temporal horizons are severely inhibited. Tod’s conception of “petition for time” and “preserve time” helps make sense of Black people’s attempt to save time, while not trying to do time. Eric Garner and George Floyd’s petitions for more time were pushing against temporal inequalities structured within American society that cause premature Black death, rather than demands to be placed back into timelines that racial structures prescribe to Black people. Neither man wanted to do time, but rather wanted to rescue time from the temporal traps of racialized structures that compromise temporal horizons. “Temporal trap” alludes to how the structural processes of society imprisons the temporal possibilities of Black people and how they are trapped within an ongoing history of racial violence. Saving time is about freeing time from being fixed within the temporal demands of racialized structures.

For the participants, attempts at temporal agency were calculated attempts to live freer while being attuned to their structural reality. Rose is a Black woman college professor whose responses were often family centered. After suggesting that Black people don’t have the luxury to take their time because we must work harder to be as successful as whites, she pauses and tells a story about her grandfather to suggest that taking time can save our life:

Rose: I’m thinking about my grandfather and how he had a stroke in his thirties. So, taking time is important because part of the reason he had a stroke, as my mom tells it, is they were at a football game, and somebody stole their car. He panicked because he had to get to work, and it caused the stroke. He was disabled for the rest of his life, and I learned it takes you a little longer to walk to the door. He would still try to rush, even with his cane, because he didn’t want us waiting on him.

Rose uses the night of her grandfather’s stroke to push back against her belief that Black people should strictly follow dominant clock-time to be successful in a world where there are racial roadblocks. For Rose, her grandfather taking his time is him adjusting to the ways his temporal horizons are compromised. Realizing it takes a little longer for another to walk to the door is to take into consideration that our journeys are different, and we need to broaden our temporal orientation. Rose’s grandfather attempted to save his family’s temporal horizons from being inhibited by his circumstances, so he often rushed to accommodate them. Saving time is a communal and relational process, where Black people attempt to live beyond their temporal constraints. Saving and taking time escapes binaries such as lazy or productive and creates space to work through how temporal orientations are products of institutional orderings.

Conclusion

In this article, I centered Black HBCU student’s and graduate’s perceptions of time to highlight the role of temporal inequality in how Black people make sense of structural racism. The participants were in contention with the temporal traps of racialized structures that limited their temporal possibilities and experienced racial temporal stasis due to do the belief that no substantial racial progress has occurred in the U.S. The participants viewed time as one of the many resources that racialized structures dominate and wield against Black people to maintain white supremacy. This opens space to think about time itself as a conceptual carceral site, that Black people feel confined within and policed by to maintain the social order.

Participants saw wasting time as a way of subverting racist-capitalist structures. When they were not laboring to be the prototypical productive person in a capitalist society they felt as if they were wasting time. Black people strove to be comfortable in wasting time and not living up to capitalistic assumptions about time use was an attempt to regain ownership of their time. Saving time is unhinging it from racialized structures that intersect with and produce varying temporal inequalities across gender, class, sexuality, and nationality differences. The impetus to save time is not a desire to rescue a cite of carcerality, but rather to save time from time itself—the ways it is overdetermined by white-capitalist logic. It is the process of sitting in time while remaining open to and striving for a radical break from the past. For Black Americans saving time is less of an investment in the current temporal order, but one in the notion that time is socially constructed and Black people’s ability to reorient their social world.

This paper’s strategic focus on Black Americans in no way means temporal violence is exclusive to them. Previous conceptions of time work (Flaherty 2003) have been grounded largely in the taken-granted experiences of white people, and centering Black Americans highlights how creating and subverting specific temporal experiences can’t be understood outside of the racialized context in which it occurs. The temporal logics that organize the U.S. work along racial lines and one’s racial structural position creates varied temporal stakes, possibilities, and desires. Time work can’t be neutral because the conditions in which we experience time isn’t. Given the U.S.’s huge ideological and material investment in racialized policing it makes sense that the participants point to the ways that the carceral nature of time flows through the racialized character of capitalism, what Cedric Robinson (2000) calls “racial capitalism.” To this end, it is likely that Black experiences often overlap and intersect with other racialized groups. Given the centrality of carceral logics to the structure of the U.S., it is likely that all criminalized and/or racialized groups in the U.S. feel policed by time. While this feeling may be similar across racial groups, they are products of diverse racialized histories and formations. This is an invitation for quantitative and qualitative work that examines the ways carceral nuances matter under an array of racialized contexts and produce diverse material and ontological differences across racial categories.

Black HBCU students and graduates’ voices reinforce that time is racialized and race is temporalized. When time is taken, we should ask from where, from whom, and under what circumstances. Black people can never fully get back what is owed or lost but pulling and holding on to time is an attempt at living more sincerely in the face of structures that swindle them out of time. Racialized time work is an attempt at living freer within racialized structures.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Corey J Miles

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