Why Is the Time Always Right for White and Wrong For Us? How Racialized Youth Make Sense of Whiteness and Temporal Inequality

“They Got All the Time in the World”: How Racialized Youth View White Youth’s Temporality

Without having been fully immersed in a white habitus, ⁷ racialized youth at Run-a-Way were poised to speak about what they perceived as disparate temporalities between themselves and their white counterparts. Why should credence be given to racialized youth’s perceptions about the time use of their white counterparts? I am not seeking to validate youth’s perceptions according to empirical standards. What I am calling for, though, is an acknowledgment and appreciation of the time and energy exhausted by racialized subjects who must maintain a unique vantage point based on their multiply marginalized status relative to whiteness. In the spirit of Du Bois’s (1903) “double consciousness,” August Wilson (1988) explained why it is imperative for black people to maintain a “second sight”: “Blacks know more about whites in white culture and white life than whites know about blacks. We have to know because our survival depends on it. White people’s survival does not depend on knowing blacks.” ⁸

Wilson’s remarks capture the cognitive labor associated with being black in the United States. To assert that black people’s survival depends on their understanding of “white culture and white life” is not hyperbole. The legacy of slavery and its afterlife (Hartman 2007), in the form of contemporary social death (Cacho 2012; Patterson 1982) makes survival paramount for black people. Without making any attempt to quantify oppression, it is important to also acknowledge other racially marginalized groups and Indigenous peoples who must also know and understand white culture, for varying levels of survival. For nonwhite people, though, knowledge of whiteness or white culture does not entail formal study. The oppressive ubiquity of whiteness makes it the most common educational default that racialized subjects have no other choice but to learn. In this crash course, some nonwhite people choose to appease whiteness. Some inhabit it. Others challenge or resist whiteness. In my research, I observed racialized youth relating to whiteness in all these ways, while also redefining the terms of this relationship. To operationalize this relationship, I explored youth’s perceptions of how their life chances and opportunities differed from those of their white counterparts and how those experiences shaped their perceptions of time. Below is part of my conversation with Tanisha, a 17-year-old girl who identifies as African American and Native. Before I could finish my sentence and ask whether she had more or less time than white youth, Tanisha interjected with this:

Although the extent of Tanisha’s contact with “rich” white youth is unknown, she speaks with confidence about what she envisions their life worlds to look like. With opportunity structures already established in their favor, white youth, according to Tanisha, hold significant levels of privilege. Enhanced life chances were not solely linked to institutional (e.g., employment, education) opportunity structures but also social and familial ones. The intergenerational transmission of wealth led many racialized youth at Run-a-Way to believe that white youth benefited from the luxury of time, while they and others like them remained in a race against time. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that they were also a race against (white) time.

When I asked 16-year-old Dominique about differences in time use between white youth and racialized youth, the presented a picture of disparate schedules for both groups.

Dominique unveils a budding sociological imagination by exposing the social constructedness of time. Dominique also answers an orienting question of this research: whose time is it? According to Dominique, time is “manmade.” In their opinion, time is not only “manmade” but white-manmade. ⁹ White people, according to Dominique, seem to have a better relationship to time and in their words are more “set to the system.” To further explore the racialization of time, I asked Dominique about other differences in time perspectives:

Notice how Dominique immediately links time, when marked as white, to education. This reflects Dominique’s earlier point that time is manmade. White space (Moore 2008) is inextricably linked to white time. Both white space and white time present a threat to Dominique’s identity as black and trans. The temporal constraints of whiteness force Dominique and other black youth into more than a race against time: they are also racing to survive. In imagining the possibility of a “nocturnal” existence, Dominique invokes important connections between time and marginality.

Jack Halberstam’s (2005) In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives details the ways trans people queer time through “nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity” (p. 5). Queer time reflects the heterogeneity of time and serves as a response to what Halberstam conceived of as “family time”: “the normative scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing” (p. 5). Multiplicative forms of marginalization make adherence to such “normative scheduling” an anomalous virtue and virtually anomalous to queer and trans nonwhite people. Coping with racial homophobia and transphobia requires an inordinate amount of time that queer and trans nonwhite people do not have. Like racialization and racism, racialized homophobia and transphobia steal time by forcing queer and trans subjects to process multiplicative forms of violence. Healing from cumulative forms of racial and sexual violence sometimes requires new spaces of sociality where, in Dominique’s words, “the party doesn’t end.” This may take the form of actual parties or social gatherings that occur when most people are asleep. Queer racialized subjects also perform various forms of labor that lie outside of the logic of capital accumulation and “bourgeois time.” In a critique of David Harvey’s description of the gender politics of time/space, Halberstam asserted,

All kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive family time as well as on the edges of labor and production. By doing so, they also often live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed. Perhaps such people could be productively called ‘queer subjects’ in terms of the ways they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned, and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains that other people assign to privacy and family. (p. 10)

In marking time as white, Dominique’s provides a racial critique missing from Halberstam’s (2005) work. Living outside of “reproductive family time” is qualitatively different than perceiving time as white and, consequently, a threat to life. Each additional murder of a trans woman of color gives Dominique legitimate reason to feel as though time were robbing them of life.

Where does time go once it is stolen? Racialized youth at Run-a-Way were acutely aware of the benefits conferred by whiteness, including accrued time. When asked whether she has more or less time than her white counterparts, 16-year-old Shanté, who also identifies African American and Native, said,

Shanté’s response helps answer Erykah Badu’s question when she sings, “Time to save the world / Where in the world is all the time?” ¹⁰ Like Tanisha and Dominique, Shanté views white youth as endowed with proprietary rights over time. Shanté identifies several structured advantages characteristic of a “possessive investment in whiteness” (Lipsitz 2006), while extending Lipsitz’s conceptualization by showing how an investment in whiteness subsidizes temporal capital. In other words, a “possessive investment in whiteness” reflects a possessive investment in time. Among the many privileges conferred by whiteness, time may be conceived of as material and immaterial capital maintaining the “settled expectations” (Harris 1993) of whites. Shanté reveals how these “settled expectations” mutually reinforce the unsettled and tormented experiences of her and other black youth. In other words, white youth “got all the time in the world” because white people have taken all the time in the world (Marx [1867] 1976) by amassing tremendous amounts of wealth through global capitalism, slavery, conquest, genocide, displacement, dispossession, and environmental degradation, leaving many others at a temporal deficit. Shanté’s allusion to whites’ having higher credit scores suggests that she and many of her counterparts are beginning their journey to adulthood from unequal starting points.

Less Time to Work Twice as Hard to be Half as Good: Temporal Inequalities and Life Chances

A familiar aphorism to many African Americans is “You have to work twice as hard to be half as good.” If this saying is accurate and black people must work twice as hard as their white counterparts, does this mean that they have half the time to accomplish the same goal? Most youth I interviewed expressed feeling greater temporal constraints compared with what they saw as relaxed timetables for development among white youth. Loss of time was explained as a product of increased labor, both physical and mental/emotional.

How did perceived temporal inequalities linked to whiteness inform youth’s calculations for success? Youth’s protracted estimates for accomplishing conventional benchmarks for success suggest that they were aware that the paths toward such life-course transitions were filled with roadblocks and detours that limited their life chances. Remy is a 16-year-old “gender-non-binary” youth who identifies as African American, Native, and queer. Having not yet attended college, Remy is still able to project what they believe to be a likely length of time based on the experiences of relatives.

According to strict conceptions of linear and progressive time, a ten-year college career makes Remy’s aunt a “nontraditional” student. However, it should not be assumed that the Remy’s aunt’s intermittent education reflects a lack of effort or academic preparedness. Instead, Remy describes several contextual factors that consumed so much of her aunt’s time, including anxiety induced by whiteness and white privilege. This anxiety led Remy’s aunt to describe her educational experience as a “race.” In other conversations with Remy, they expressed similar anxiety about school because of a heightened self-awareness in relation to whiteness and white students, in particular. Having to constantly think in such relational terms is, according to Remy, like “doing two jobs at once” and hence a waste of time. The thought of working twice as hard to achieve goals similar to those of white youth is so appalling that Remy likens it to slavery. A sense of enslavement can only exist in relation to the beneficiaries of this “peculiar institution.” In the following narrative, 16-year-old Rahim explains why he feels he has to do more with less (time):

Rahim feels forced to work 100 percent harder to achieve some sort of parity with white youth. Working 100 percent harder may not always mean that you are working twice as hard as another. In some cases, youth like Rahim may already be working significantly harder than his white counterparts. Hence, when he works 100 percent harder, he may be working at least twice as hard as his white counterparts to achieve similar goals. In claiming that white youth are “always ahead,” Rahim is describing how race is temporalized or positioned within time (Fabian 1983; Freeman 2005; Holland 2012). In this case, he positions white youth ahead of him and other black youth in time. According to Rahim, he has “less time to do more,” which suggests a need to compensate for material deficits produced by structural inequalities. Speaking with Miguel, a 17-year-old boy identifying as “Hispanic,” we see how these material deficits manifest and the implications on youth’s time use:

In addition to school, Miguel is one of many students who holds down a part-time job while still earning a high school degree. Compared with depictions of racialized youth in urban space as incapable of planning or thinking long term, Miguel has a well-structured routine built around his school-work life. Miguel sees his circumstances as unique compared with most of his white counterparts. Instead of taking public transportation, white youth, according to Miguel, have the luxury of private modes of transportation. Miguel also alludes to an intergenerational transmission of privilege and among the privileges bequeathed to white youth is time itself.

“White People—Do You Believe in Black Privilege?”: Interrogating Whiteness and White Time

To youth at Run-a-Way, whiteness, white identity, and white culture were synonymous. In some cases, youth found ways to resist whiteness, white identity, white culture, and white time simultaneously. Take for example an exchange during a shift-change meeting in the Emergency Shelter Program. Around 3:30 p.m. every day, staff members and youth gather in the program’s living room to recount the day’s events and run down the evening agenda. Staff members usually begin the discussion with the “question of the day,” such as “What is your favorite color?” or “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” As youth begrudgingly answer the questions, most staff members awkwardly wait for the ordeal to end. After one particular shift change, Remy immediately asked, “Can we talk about race?” The three staff members looked sheepishly at one another, not knowing what to say. Eventually, one halfheartedly said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” Remy proceeded by asking, “White people—Do you believe in black privilege?” The looks on the faces of the white staff person conveyed regret for their invitation. Their best defense was to ask, “What do you mean by black privilege?” Remy then explained the problem of whites’ claims of “reverse racism” in the wake of accomplishments by an “exceptional” group of black people. They went on to disabuse any believers in black privilege of the absurdity of such claims by reminding them of systems of institutionalized racism keeping many black people locked into the criminal legal system and locked out of educational and employment opportunities. Remy concluded by describing “black privilege” is a contradiction in terms when violence against black people is not contingent on any transgression, but it is gratuitous (Wilderson 2014:7).

Although not explicitly naming it, Remy was conceptualizing whiteness as a normalizing orientation of the world and its way of functioning. If whiteness is, as Lipsitz (2011:37) asserted, “a condition,” then Remy was questioning what they believe is a symptom of that condition: the entertainment of “black privilege.” The question was not simply an attempt to disabuse whites of “black privilege” but also an acknowledgment that some white people still subscribe to such absurdity. This illustrates Remy’s use of their “double consciousness” or, more precisely, their “multiple consciousness” (King 1988).

What seems most instructive about Remy’s conceptualizations of whiteness is that they are interrogating its egocentric character, allowing many whites to use white culture and white identity as a reference category for all social life. Remy also makes an important rhetorical move, by questioning the links between whiteness, modernity/modern time, rationality, and enlightenment. In their opinion, claims of “black privilege” are utterly absurd and backward. In my research, I looked at how other racialized youth made similar moves to invert terms and conditions that determined who was capable of keeping pace with time.

The Wackness of Whiteness: Youth Resistance Strategies for Making White Time “Late”

“But what on earth is whiteness that one should desire it? Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”

—W.E.B. Du Bois (1995:454), The Souls of White Folk

W.E.B. Du Bois was one of many black scholars who used the power of inversion to creatively mock systems of oppression and individual oppressors. By turning the fundamental principles of whiteness on their head, black scholars reconfigured the terms and conditions of modernity. Although not new, I am interested in how this trend has evolved over time and how it has been repurposed within youth culture, particularly the tastes, styles, and sensibilities of racialized youth in urban space. As youth revise the terms and conditions that grant people access to modernity and progressive time, they also reposition themselves on the temporal spectrum. In this section I highlight some of the strategies racialized youth use to not only “keep up with the times” but also ensure that no matter what they do, they are always “on time” or “up to date” and that their sociality is never late. ¹¹

Although whiteness has historically been linked to modernity (Alexander 2005; Bhabha 2009; Fanon 1963; Ferguson 2004; Halberstam 2005; Lawler 2012; Mawani 2014; McClintock 1995; Nanibush 2016; Said 1979) and future orientations (De Vos 1975; Perry 2001), racialized youth at Run-a-Way found a way to invert whose culture was “up to date.” Youth viewed their white counterparts as well as white culture as behind time, lame, ¹² or just plain “wack” (uncool). ¹³ Fashion trends, musical tastes, social media content (e.g., Twitter trends, memes, Vinez) were (temporal) status symbols, with time and temporality inscribed on material and immaterial culture (Pugh 2009). The following fieldnotes help illustrate the wackness of whiteness:

While in the case management office with Steve, a white male in his late forties to early fifties, Melissa, 16-year old black girl, stops by and asks, “When are you going to stop wearing those sandals?” Steve is wearing a pair of black Birkenstock sandals with white socks. “I wear these from April ’til October” he replied. “Uugghhhh!” Melissa replies with exasperation. (Fieldnote from July 16, 2015)

After dinner, we return to the floor. Steve informs the youth that they can participate in one of two activities: (1) mini-golf (2) trip to the park to play ultimate Frisbee. When the youth ask Steve if he was coming, they mentioned that he can’t leave wearing his Birkenstock sandals, implying the potential for being embarrassed by his attire. (Fieldnote from July 24, 2015)

Attending to the minutiae of youth sociality helped me interpret what they deemed most relevant and up to date. Racialized youth tend to know the latest fashion trends, and according to their footwear index, Steve’s Birkenstocks were not up to date. Birkenstocks are not typically sold in or marketed to poor communities of color, and despite their expensive cost, the sandals hold little weight in the consumer culture of racialized youth. Similar to the way nonwhite people are relegated to anterior time when in predominantly white institutions, Steve and his footwear are rendered illegible within the spacetime of racialized youth at Run-a-Way. Whiteness was tantamount to wackness in other space racialized youth inhabited at Run-a-Way, including the “dance floor” of the basement conference room.

We gather in the basement conference room for the evening activity. Youth are expected to play Nintendo Wii Fit as their physical activity for the day. Among the many games to choose from, the most popular seemed to be “Dance, Dance Revolution.” Before beginning the game, Lisa, a middle-aged white staff person, tells youth she has been warned not to participate. When someone asks why, Gerard [16-year-old who identifies as Native and African American] interjects saying, “White people can’t dance.” (Fieldnote from July 28, 2015)

The stereotype that “white people can’t dance” is reminiscent of the 1992 film White Men Can’t Jump. It is an allusion to stereotypical representations of white people as having less physical prowess than nonwhites generally and black people in particular. Gerard’s comments could be easily interpreted as simply mocking white people and whiteness, though such interpretations diminish the importance of understanding when and where whiteness is (Ahmed 2007; Wright 2004). Although Gerard may acknowledge that white people occupy the same dimensions of time and space, he also locates them outside a realm of what is most relevant and up to date. In mocking the white people’s inability to keep pace with the latest dance trends, Gerard is also temporalizing whiteness behind what he considers most modern. Placing Gerard’s comments within the context of the racialization of black people reveals an interesting racial-temporal inversion. Black people and many racialized persons are typically seen as behind time or “premodern” (Alexander 2005; Bhabha 2009; Ferguson 2004; Glassner 1982; Halberstam 2005; McClintock 1995; Said 1979; Wright 2004). However, both Melissa and Gerard undermine the connections between whiteness and modernity, by describing white people’s difficulty keeping up with the latest and timeliest trends as a product of white ineptitude.

Inverting the relationship between whiteness and modernity, 14-year-old Shanice suggests what is most inept is for white people to emulate those they view as “stupid”:

Shanice takes immense pride in her cultural past while also resisting what Joe Feagin (2013) described as the “white racial frame.” Resistance to whiteness came in multiple forms, including what Feagin called “counter-framing.” According to Feagin, counter-frames “were initially developed for survival purposes, and over time they have added critical elements that have strengthened their understandings of institutionalized racism and the strategies of everyday resistance to that racism” (p. 21). Shanice presents a counter-frame to whiteness by exposing the buffoonery coopting culture that is consistently debased. The tactics of blackness and those used by other nonwhite youth made clear the wackness of whiteness.