Notes

Introduction

1. Denise Ferreira da Silva uses this term to describe the production of the racial within post-Enlightenment theories of the racial “other” and their placement within the category of the human. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xviii.

2. I use “urbanized” rather than “urban” to attend to the ongoing construction of space. There exists a mutually constitutive relationship between urbanized space and suburbanized space. In other words, the suburbs cannot exist without the many ghettos across the globe. It is worth noting that “urban space” is just a few letters short of “suburban space.” “Urban areas” ignores the ongoing and processual character of urbanization. The reification of “urban communities” as such obscures the systematic construction of the ghetto and suburbs through white suburbanization, blockbusting, block bombings, restrictive covenants, redlining, zoning laws, and “urban renewal,” or what James Baldwin calls “Negro removal.” In short, a compost of institutional artifice, private actions, and racialized policy catering to a white public yields arable terrain for the co-construction of white habitus within white habitats and suffering in majority-nonwhite space. James Baldwin, interviewed by Kenneth Clark, “Urban Renewal … Means Negro Removal—James Baldwin (1963),” posted June 3, 2015, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8Abhj17kYU.

3. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3.

4. L. H. Stallings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015), xvi.

5. Stallings, Funk the Erotic, xvi.

6. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 132.

7. It is possible that Dominique intended to self-identify as “gender fluid,” a more commonly accepted identity along the gender spectrum. This should not, however, diminish the applicability of “gender fluent.” While less conventional among gender scholars, “gender fluent” conveys a sense that one is fluent in gender discourse, especially when it comes to articulating their own gender identity.

8. Barry Glassner, “An Essay on Iterative Social Time,” American Sociological Review 30, no. 4 (1982): 668–81, and Elliott Jaques, The Form of Time (London: Heinemann, 1982), are two examples of social scientists engaging with time’s iterative and nonlinear character.

9. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 309.

10. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 309.

11. Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I. Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (1994): 68.

12. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Being/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 318.

13. Stallings, Funk the Erotic, 6.

14. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 20.

15. I would be remiss not to note my reservations regarding “criminalized.” I believe “criminalized,” “criminalization,” etc., remain complicit in the reproduction of solecism. Each of these concepts requires the existence and production of an always already racialized “criminal.” Who then is the criminal? To what extent does the presence of a “criminal” legitimate the existence of and need for the criminal legal system and the prison-industrial complex? What are the limitations of a discourse of “criminalization” within the context of abolition? While language may be limited, developing more precise terminology and liberatory discourse is key to measuring what we intend to measure, and perhaps abolishing what we intend to abolish.

16. To the extent that Black youth are interpellated within the temporal context of school, they are, according to Ann Arnett Ferguson, “tagged with futures: ‘He’s on the fast track to San Quentin Prison,’ and ‘That one has a jail-cell with his name on it.’” Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 95–96. Zero-tolerance policies and racialized discipline ensure that Black students will be not only consistently held back, left back, and expelled from school, but suspended in time.

17. In their study exploring whether Black youths are afforded similar protections of the category of “childhood” as their non-Black counterparts, Goff et al. find that Black youths are consistently seen as older, less innocent than their peers, and thus less worthy of the protections that accompany the ontological status of “child.” According to the authors, “The perceived innocence of Black children aged 10–13 was equivalent to that of non-Black children aged 14–17, and the perceived innocence of Black children aged 14–17 was equivalent to that of non-Black adults aged 18–21.” Philip A. Goff et al., “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 529.

18. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 3.

19. Edelman, No Future, 2.

20. Edelman, No Future, 28.

21. I would be remiss to not push back against Edelman’s pessimistic claim by acknowledging the many ways in which queer and trans people form families outside the heteronormative logics of reproductive futurisms. Heteronormative logics, Edelman argues, render queer and trans people incapable of being active participants in reproductive futurisms; still, this should not ignore the many ways in which queer and trans people form families, through kinship, care, choice, and childbearing, without reproducing hegemonic heteronormativity.

22. Frank Wilderson describes Black youth as an ontological impossibility because “Black and Child cannot be reconciled” (emphasis in the original). Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 331.

23. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality.”

24. Outside sociology, anthropologists have explored how time is objectified in the lives of youth in several countries, including the Philippines, Brazil, Romania, Uganda, Nepal, Denmark, Georgia, Cameroon, and the United States. There is still little attention paid to the temporal perspectives of racialized youth in poor, urbanized space in the US. In their edited volume based on transnational comparisons of youth temporality, Dalsgård et al. seek to understand “what an anthropology of youth has to offer to wider anthropological theorizing on time.” Anne Line Dalsgård et al., Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality: Time Objectified (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2014), 4. In the only comparative case in the anthology to include the US, Jennifer Johnson-Hanks explores how college-educated American women “make a living and meaningful life” under uncertain prospects for the future. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, “Waiting for the Start: Flexibility and the Question of Convergence,” in Dalsgård et al., Ethnographies of Youth and Temporality, 25.

25. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 74.

26. My decision to use strikethrough here is not simply a writing style but also a site of critical thinking. In several chapters of this book, I describe what it means for Black youth to use time that doesn’t belong to them. Hence, I use strikethrough to make clear that even though we’d like to believe that Black youth have ownership over their time, they are more likely to owe rather than own time. This is similar to Calvin Warren’s use of “black being.” Warren leverages an Afro-pessimist critique to argue that “being is not universal or applicable to blacks.” The literary effectiveness comes through a recognition among readers that while “black being” may be a familiar-enough phrase, it remains, according to Warren, oxymoronic. The use of the strikethrough becomes another tool to uphold a key task of Black studies—namely, to rewrite knowledge. Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 5.

27. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).

28. Cedric Robinson, preface to Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso, 2017), 3.

29. In Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), Nancy Lesko writes, “On the future of white boys the civilized nations would rise or fall” (45).

30. Among this group of girls and boys, there are two youths who identify as trans—one boy and one girl.

31. According to a report created by Wilder Research, “Out of all homeless youth age 24 and younger, 23% identified as LGBTQ.” Virginia Pendleton, Walker Bosch, Margaret Vohs, Stephanie Nelson-Dusek, and Michelle Decker Gerrard, “Characteristics of People Who Identify as LGBTQ Experiencing Homelessness: Findings from the 2018 Minnesota Homeless Study,” Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, September 2020, https://www.wilder.org/sites/default/files/imports/2018_HomelessnessInMinnesota_LGBTQ_9-20.pdf, 2.

32. Kiese Laymon, Long Division (Chicago: Bolden Books, 2013), 1.

33. Michelle M. Wright describes qualitative collapse as “meaningful, layered, rich and nuanced interpellations that occur when seeking to interpellate the diversity of Blackness through the patterns of linear spacetime.” Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 142.

34. I am riffing on a virtual lecture delivered by Hortense J. Spillers in conversation with Lewis R. Gordon. Soka University of America, “Afropessimism and Its Others: A Discussion between Hortense J. Spillers and Lewis R. Gordon,” YouTube video, 1:23:31, May 24, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-s-Ltu06NI.

35. Javier Auyero and Débora Alejandra Swistun, Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 16.

36. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 44. McKittrick draws extensively on Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. As Glissant writes, “Description is no proof; it simply adds something to Relation insofar as the latter is a synthesis-genesis that never is complete.” Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 174. Sylvia Wynter also critiques the ontological violence of biocentric “descriptive statements” of the human, man, and Man’s overrepresentation. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 268.

37. I sometimes wonder whether sociology PhDs forget that they are doctors of philosophy as opposed to medical doctors. Sociology’s emphasis on prescribing solutions to social problems seems laudable; however, so often what sociologists prescribe are solutions conceived of through the individualization of social disorder. For example, criminologists’ emphasis on delinquency and deviance results in pathologizing prescriptions to improve human, social, and cultural capital, as opposed to condemning the systems and institutions responsible for constructing “delinquency” and “deviance” in the first place.

38. Fabian writes, “In simple terms, the ethnographic present is the practice of giving accounts of other cultures and societies in the present tense… . [T]he present tense ‘freezes’ a society at the time of observation; at worst, it contains assumptions about the repetitiveness, predictability, and conservatism of primitives.” Fabian, Time and the Other, 80–81.

39. “Flicka Da Wrist,” MP3 audio, track 7 on Chedda Da Connect, Chedda World: The Album, eOne Entertainment, 2015.

40. “New York (Ya Out There),” MP3 audio, track 10 on Rakim, The 18th Letter/The Book of Life, Universal Records, 1997.

41. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 207.

42. I would be remiss not to acknowledge the privileges of being “racially ambiguous.” If violence against Black people, as Wilderson suggests, is not contingent but gratuitous, I recognize that while I may be subject to police terror, I still exist within a particular position of thought/field of psychic and ontological relation that diminishes a cop’s instinct to kill. Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” in Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, ed. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 7.

43. Steve Mann, “Veilance and Reciprocal Transparency: Surveillance versus Sousveillance, AR Glass, Lifeglogging, and Wearable Computing,” in 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS): Social Implications of Wearable Computing and Augmediated Reality in Everyday Life (Toronto: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2013), 3.

44. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 21.

45. Richard Majors and Janet Billson describe how some young Black men rely on the “cool pose” as a physical and psychological deportment to counter the effects of racialized and structural violence. As the authors note, a “cool pose can be used to keep social service workers, mental health professionals, and therapists off guard. Some African-American males suspect that white counselors do not give them honest feedback, so they tell counselors what they want to hear; they resort to playing games and faking it by adopting a cool pose.” Richard Majors and Janet Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington Books, 1992), 40.

46. Yarimar Bonilla, Non-sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), xvii.

47. Trans youths’ room preferences did not always affirm their gender identity. I observed some tensions among male-identified youths over the staff’s decision to assign a transmasculine youth to a boy’s room, which matched that youth’s gender identity. Ostracized by families, friends, and community, many queer and trans youths remained in constant search of gender-affirming programs and programming. There were no specific rooms reserved for nonbinary youths. I observed at least one nonbinary youth placed in a gendered bedroom.

48. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 121.

49. I expand on the mutual construction of poor urbanized space and wealthy urbanized space in chapter 3.

50. During my time at Run-a-Way, “gas” was one of the most current slang terms to refer to marijuana.

51. George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

52. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 104.

53. The average length of stay for many youths in the emergency shelter program was seven to ten days, and most who left went home with family. I maintained the longest relationships with youths from of the independent living program, some of whom had transitioned from the emergency shelter program.

54. In some cases, however, parents, guardians, social workers, and/or staff members assigned youths’ racial and ethnic identities.

55. Grace Kyungwon Hong, “Intersectionality and Incommensurability: Third World Feminism and Asian Decolonization,” in Asian American Feminisms and Women of Color Politics, ed. Lynn Fujiwara and Shireen Roshanravan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018), 36.

56. Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 7.

57. I would be remiss not to acknowledge the limitations of “hauntings”—a term that evokes the presence of something or someone from the past. Throughout this book, however, I make clear that the past is always present for racialized, particularly Black and Native, youth.

58. Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 172.

59. Martinot, Machinery of Whiteness, 172.

60. Martinot, Machinery of Whiteness, 10–11.

61. Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), xv.

62. Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, 95.

63. I feel “penal-legal system” captures the perfunctory, technocratic, cold, and impersonal nature of a system that remains not just devoid of “justice” but antithetical to it. Because the penal-legal system functions to decriminalize white supremacy, racialized violence, and the perpetrators of both, it can never be a site of justice. When “justice” itself “produces and requires Black exclusion and death as normative,” as James Joy and João Costa Vargas put it, it will always elude its own point of reference (i.e., Black people). James Joy and João Costa Vargas, “Refusing Blackness-as-Victimization: Trayvon Martin and the Black Cyborgs,” in Pursuing Trayvon: Historical Contexts and Contemporary Manifestations of Racial Dynamics, ed. George Yancy and Janine Jones (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 193.

64. Here I am thinking of Richard Iton’s theorization of Blackness as engendering “possibilities in excess of and beyond modernity” as well as the “modern nation-state.” Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 15.

65. Martinot, Machinery of Whiteness, 173.

66. Nandita Sharma, “Strategic Anti-essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 175.

67. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 82.

68. Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 111.

69. I agree with Martinot, who writes, “For whites to think that they too were a race only valorized the concept of race as whites had invented it and allowed them to pretend that it had a foundation in something natural. It also places the relation of races on a horizontal plane, while the process of racialization that whites impose on others is by that token hierarchical, a vertical system of domination. Many whites have hidden their awareness of their hierarchical status from themselves by trying to think of themselves as simply human.” Martinot, Machinery of Whiteness, 86.

70. Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2017), xiii. As Martinot states, “By defining itself as the primary difference, whiteness defines itself as the power to define.” Martinot, Machinery of Whiteness, 100.

71. See Ashley W. Doane Jr., “Dominant Group Ethnic Identity in the United States: The Role of ‘Hidden’ Ethnicity in Intergroup Relations,” Sociological Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1997): 375–97; Amanda E. Lewis, “‘What Group?’ Studying Whites and Whiteness in the Era of ‘Color-Blindness,’” Sociological Theory 22, no. 4 (December 2004): 623–46; Pamela Perry, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30, no. 1 (2001): 56–91.

72. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 202.

73. Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).

74. Mike King conceptualizes “aggrieved whiteness” as a “white identity politics aimed at maintaining white sociopolitical hegemony through challenging efforts to combat actual material racial inequality, while supporting heavily racialized investments in policing, prisons, and the military, and positing a narrative of antiwhite racial oppression loosely rooted in an assortment of racialized threats.” Mike King, “Aggrieved Whiteness: White Identity Politics and Modern American Racial Formation,” Abolition Journal, May 4, 2017, https://abolitionjournal.org/aggrieved-whiteness-white-identity-politics-and-modern-american-racial-formation.

75. See Ferreira da Silva, Global Idea of Race, 30–31.

76. Several critical ethnic studies scholars have embraced a similar engagement with such ideas. See, for example, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, “‘The Whatever That Survived’: Thinking Racialized Immigration through Blackness and the Afterlife of Slavery,” in Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method and Practice, edited by Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez Hosang, and Ramóna A. Gutiérrez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 145–61. Consider scholarship in critical whiteness studies that acknowledge, in their respective essays’ subtitles, “The Role of ‘Hidden’ Ethnicity in Intergroup Relations” (Doane) and “The Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities” (Perry). For more on the formation of white identity from a position of race neutrality, see Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1992); Lewis, “‘What Group?’”; Martinot, Machinery of Whiteness; David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 1991); France Winddance Twine, “Brown Skinned White Girls: Class, Culture and the Construction of White Identity in Suburban Communities,” Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 3, no. 2 (1996): 205–24; Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68. Not only does whiteness signify the absence of race, but it also poses the threat of erasing racial identity for those who attempt to “act white.” For more on this, see Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, ““Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the ‘Burden of Acting White,’” Urban Review 18 (1986): 176–206. It is then no surprise that many racialized and Indigenous peoples equate assimilation with death. In short, whiteness is as much of a sociohistorical construct as other racial formations, but in reality it operates as a hidden ethnicity. We might think of this as an a priori and autopoietic character of whiteness.

77. Alia Al-Saji’s work on racialization and time also suggests that racialized subjects are not only stuck but delayed. Al-Saji writes, “The racialized subject is temporally decentred and delayed in regard to this virtual (absent but real) subject, incapable of catching up.” Alia Al-Saji, “Too Late: Racialized Time and the Closure of the Past,” Insights 6, no. 5 (2013): 8.

78. Michelle M. Wright critiques such provincializing logics and representations as a “qualitative collapse”: “The collapse of meaningful, layered, rich and nuanced interpellations that occurs when seeking to interpellate the diversity of Blackness through the patterns of linear spacetime.” Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 142.

79. Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 7.

80. For more on the role of CP Time as a tool of resistance, see Ronald Walcott, “Ellison, Gordone, and Tolson: Some Notes on the Blues, Style and Space,” Black World 22, no. 2 (1972): 4–29.

81. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 3 (1997): 469.

82. To “teef” is to steal. The word’s genealogy can be traced to Jamaica. The significance of Jamaican patois and “chat” to the sociolinguistic styles of neighboring islands in the Caribbean and countries around the world cannot be overstated.

83. Derek Thompson, “The Miracle of Minneapolis,” The Atlantic, March 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-miracle-of-minneapolis/384975/; Jessica Nickrand, “Minneapolis’s White Lie,” The Atlantic, February 21, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/minneapoliss-white-lie/385702/.

84. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

85. Despite being used colloquially among youths at Run-a-Way, “lame” is also problematic from a critical disability studies and disability justice perspective.

86. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 137.

87. Homi K. Bhabha, “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Les Back and John Solomos (New York: Routledge, 2009), 427.

1. Whose Time Is It?

1. Time is a racialized, gendered, and capitalist construct that precludes the coevalness of Black and Indigenous people, among many other racialized subjects. White time is synchronized to white life and asynchronized to nonwhite life. Hence, white people, according to George Lipsitz, maintain a “possessive investment in whiteness” (see his book of the same name) and time, while nonwhite people can only owe rather than own time. White time supports the construction of white people, mostly male/masculine identified, and whiteness as modern, civilized, and future oriented, while marking racialized subjects as backward, premodern, and other. Charles Mills describes “white time” as a product of the exploitation and extraction of nonwhite life. Charles Mills, “White Time: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory,” Du Bois Review 11, no. 1 (2014): 28.

2. Barbara J. Fields, “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity.” International Labor and Working-Class History 60 (2001): 53.

3. The transition from the category of dysselected to selected comes with a variety of risks. Here I am thinking with scholars like Denise Ferreira da Silva and Saidiya Hartman, who both attend to the violence of representation. In Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, Ferreira da Silva distinguishes the “transparent I” that exists within the “scene of representation” from the “affectable other” subjugated to the “scene of regulation” (38). Any attempt by the affectable other to move from the scene or regulation to the scene of representation requires what Ferreira da Silva describes as “self-obliteration” (162). Similarly, in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), Saidiya V. Hartman asks, “Why is pain the conduit for identification?” (20). Why are pain, subjugation, and abjection the primary mode for interpellating Black life? It is worth asking, then, how representation itself comes to legitimate violence against those who remain the targets of asymmetrical violence.

4. Adrienne Rich, “‘Disloyal to Civilization’: Feminism, Racism, and Gynephobia,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 299. Rich describes white solipsism as the ability to “think, imagine, and speak as if whiteness described the world.” Consequently, white people fail to, or refuse to, acknowledge the significance of nonwhite experience and/or existence.

5. John Hassard, ed., The Sociology of Time (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 1.

6. Johannes Fabian expresses a preference for “reflexion” over reflection. Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 91. Reflexion is a product of reflexivity, which itself derives from memory and an appreciation of how subjectivity and social location inform our research. In contrast, reflection tends to reproduce observations as objective fact rather than understanding the role of the self in constructing the other.

7. The notion that social time is a product of social structure is well established by several scholars of the sociology of time. For further discussions of social time, see Pitirim Sorokin and Robert Merton, “Social-Time: A Methodological and Functional Analysis,” in Hassard, Sociology of Time, 56–66; Lewis Coser and Rose Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” in Hassard, Sociology of Time, 191–202; Barry Schwartz, Waiting and Queuing: Studies in the Social Organization of Access and Delay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); David J. Lewis and Andrew J. Weigart. “The Structures and Meanings of Social-Time,” in Hassard, Sociology of Time, 77–101; Barry Glassner, “An Essay on Iterative Social Time,” American Sociological Review 30, no. 4 (1982): 668–81; Blanka Filipcová and Jindřich Filipec, “Society and Concepts of Time,” International Social Science Journal 107 (1986): 19–32; Norbert Elias, Time: An Essay (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992); Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, “What Is Agency?,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 4 (1998): 962–1023.

8. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 12.

9. As Frieda Johles Forman notes, “In ancient Greek myth, Cronus, son of mother earth and father heaven, who devours his own children, is identified with Chronos, the personification of time: thus our chronology.” Frieda Johles Forman, “Feminizing Time: An Introduction,” in Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality, edited by Frieda Johles Forman and Caroran Sowton (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), 4.

10. Hassard, Sociology of Time, x.

11. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), 77. Negri writes, “It then becomes possible to grasp the relation between external time (as the time of composition) and internal time (as the human time of the subjects that compose it).”

12. Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time Is It? The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1377.

13. Hassard, Sociology of Time, 3.

14. See Michael G. Flaherty, A Watched Pot: How We Experience Time (New York: New York University Press, 1999) and Textures of Time: Agency and Temporal Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011). Flaherty suggests that “time work” and “temporal agency” are key to bringing about a particular kind of “temporal experience.” See Textures of Time, 3.

15. Sorokin and Merton, “Social-Time,” 61.

16. Sorokin and Merton, “Social-Time,” 61.

17. On sociogenesis and sociogeny, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008); and Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Being/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

18. Eviatar Zerubavel, “The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” American Journal of Sociology 88, no. 1 (1982): 4.

19. Zerubavel, “Standardization of Time,” 5.

20. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 283–84.

21. A central concern of most quantitative research methods in sociology is causality or causal validity. These methods emphasize the importance of “temporal order”—a cause must come before an effect.

22. Rather than critique “Western civilization” and its reliance on temporal domination to maintain a coevalness with modernity, Zerubavel naturalizes time and legitimates modernity as defining characteristics of progress narratives. “Given that temporal coordination serves to solidify ‘organic’ ties among people (Zerubavel 1979, pp. 60–83; Zerubavel 1981, pp. 67–69), this system also seems to be a perfect manifestation of the modern prevalence in the West of interdependence and complementary differentiation over ‘mechanical’ ties of similitude and uniformity and is thus one of the key characteristics of modern Western civilization.” Zerubavel, “Standardization of Time,” 21.

23. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 80.

24. Coser and Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” 196.

25. Coser and Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” 202.

26. Coser and Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” 193.

27. Coser and Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” 196.

28. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger, 1969), 27–28.

29. Coser and Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” 201. In chapter 7, I demonstrate how Black youths in urbanized space remain ahead of time, as a result of their prescience within present orientations.

30. Saidiya Hartman describes “slavery’s afterlife” as a still-unfolding process in the wake of “emancipation.” The afterlife of slavery subjects Black people to “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.” Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 6.

31. Dylan Rodríguez, “Inhabiting the Impasse: Racial/Racial-Colonial Power, Genocide Poetics, and the Logic of Evisceration,” Social Text 33, no. 3 (2015): 19–44.

32. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 153.

33. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 163.

34. Clarissa Rile Hayward, How Americans Make Race: Stories, Institutions, Spaces (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 30.

35. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 92.

36. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 87.

37. Ferreira da Silva, Global Idea of Race, 94.

38. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 4.

39. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 10.

40. Crystal Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 16. Prior to the publication of Resurrecting Slavery, Helen Ngo introduced the concepts of “racialized temporality” and “racialized time” in The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2017).

41. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 247.

42. Here I am thinking with Black studies scholars who acknowledge “slavery’s afterlife.” For more on this topic, see Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 757–77; Christina Sharpe’s concept of “the wake” in Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 3; Jamaica Kincaid’s focus on the presence of the past in Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), 54; and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of slavery as a “living presence” in Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon 1995), 147.

43. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 104. Bonilla-Silva defines “white habitus” as “a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings and emotions and their views on racial matters.”

44. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 220.

45. Kamala Harris, “Smart on Crime: Elevating the Discussion in Our City, State, and Nation,” speech to the Commonwealth Club, January 14, 2010, quoted in Dan MacGuill, “Did Kamala Harris Once Boast about Prosecuting a Homeless Mother?,” Snopes, February 1, 2019, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kamala-harris-homeless-mother/.

46. I use “fugitive” here in a similar tradition to other critical theorists and Black studies scholars to describe futures that for many Black youth are continuously on the run. See Hartman, Lose Your Mother; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013); Frank B. Wilderson III, “Social Death and Narrative Aporia in 12 Years a Slave,” Black Camera 7, no. 1 (2015): 134–49; and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

47. Hanchard, “Afro-modernity,” 263.

48. Ronald Aminzade, “Historical Sociology and Time,” Sociological Methods Research 20, no. 4 (1992): 458.

49. Hanchard, “Afro-modernity,” 247.

50. Hanchard, “Afro-modernity,” 247.

51. Hanchard, “Afro-modernity,” 253.

52. Denise Ferreira da Silva defines affectability as “the condition of being subjected to both natural (in the scientific and lay sense) conditions and to others’ power.” Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xv.

53. Frank Wilderson writes, “For the slave, historical ‘time’ is not possible.” Wilderson, “Social Death and Narrative Aporia,” 136. Elsewhere he states, “The idea of ‘going back’ imbues Black suffering with a temporality that it doesn’t have; emplots the slave in the arc of equilibrium, disequilibrium, equilibrium restored; when, in point of fact, Blackness and Slaveness are coterminous.” Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” in Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, ed. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 29. My aim is not to introduce CP Time as an example of how Black people reclaim ownership over time. Instead, I see CP Time as a way in which Black people and other racialized persons transform white time into an internally functional metric to cope with the timelessness of racialized violence.

54. Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-framing (New York: Routledge, 2013).

55. CP Time is a general referent to the temporal patterns of Black people living in the United States. Similar expressions, however, exist among other racialized groups. “West Indian time,” “Dominican time,” “Indian standard time,” “Laos time,” and “Cape Verdean time” (“CV time”) share similar connotations to CP Time in that lateness is to be expected, not rejected. I argue that these different conceptions of time reveal not only the discordant relationship between racialized subjectivity and time but also resistance to white time. I would be remiss to ignore what I have heard described as “Spirit time” among Native and Indigenous peoples. Spirit time emphasizes the communion between Native peoples, the Creator, land, and space. Daniel R. Wildcat writes, “To the Western mind, human beings look backward and forward in time to get a sense of their place in history, whereas American Indians literally looked around the natural world to get a sense of their place in history.” Daniel R. Wildcat, “Indigenizing the Future: Why We Must Think Spatially in the Twenty-First Century,” American Studies 46 (2005): 432. “Crip time” is an expression familiar to people with disabilities, signaling the unique and often antagonistic relationship between disability and clock time. The “persistence of past forms of power under seemingly new conditions” is what Eric Tang calls “refugee temporality.” As Tang writes, “Refugee temporality is not another way of stating that the refugee is haunted by the past—through trauma or survivor guilt. Instead, it is the distinct way in which refugees know that the power of their past captivities remains in the present—in the supposed land of salvation that promised safety and freedom.” Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 173. Tang describes how for many Cambodian refugees attempting to survive in spaces not meant for living, the present is “unbroken” from the past given the nexus between “colonial warfare” and “warfare in the hyperghetto” (21).

56. Ronald Walcott, “Ellison, Gordone, and Tolson: Some Notes on the Blues, Style and Space,” Black World 22, no. 2 (1972): 8–9.

57. Fred Moten, Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 76.

58. Bonnie J. Barthold, Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 23.

59. Mark M. Smith, Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 5.

60. Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 137.

61. Quoted in Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 136.

62. Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 130.

63. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 110.

64. For more research on Black workers’ resistance to time discipline, see Philip S. Foner and David R. Roediger, Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (New York: Verso, 1989), 272.

65. Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1994), 20.

66. Kelley, Race Rebels, 50.

67. Rodríguez says, “‘Disparity’ is a bullshit concept, when we already know that the inception of criminal justice is the de-criminalization of white people, particularly propertied white citizens and those willing to bear arms to defend the white world. ‘Mass Incarceration’ is worse than meaningless, when it’s not the ‘masses’ who are being criminalized and locked up. So there is some furtive and fatal white entitlement involved in this discursive political structure.” Casey Goonan, “Policing and the Violence of White Being: An Interview with Dylan Rodríguez,” Black Scholar 12 (2016): 13. Rodríguez makes clear that the arrest and incarceration of racialized groups require the “de-criminalization of white people.”

68. Consider how approximately ten thousand people participated in the attempted coup at the US Capitol on January 6, 2022, while less than one thousand have been arrested at the time of this writing. Nik Popli and Julia Zorthian, “What Happened to the Jan. 6 Rioters Arrested since the Capitol Attack,” Time, last updated May 26, 2023, https://time.com/6133336/jan-6-capitol-riot-arrests-sentences/. The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse is yet another example of how “those willing to bear arms to defend the white world” (to quote Dylan Rodríguez; see previous note) will always be decriminalized in relation to those constructed as threats to the white world.

69. Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 195.

70. Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism,” in Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives, ed. Ann M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian (New York: Routledge, 2016), 62.

71. Though memory fades with the passage of time, some may recall when it was in bad taste to make haste. For example, Pierre Bourdieu observed, “Haste is seen as a lack of decorum combined with diabolical ambition.” Pierre Bourdieu, “Time Perspectives of the Kabyle,” in Hassard, Sociology of Time, 221.

72. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “‘Can the Subaltern Speak?,’” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

73. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 223.

74. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 228.

75. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 228.

76. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 228.

77. Quoted in Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 111–12.

78. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 112–13.

79. See Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 5.

80. Walcott, “Ellison, Gordone, and Tolson,” 8.

81. With over 125 sites nationwide, Job Corps is a free education and vocational training program administered by the US Department of Labor. The program aims to help youths between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four strengthen their preparedness for careers and/or help them meet educational benchmarks such as earning a high school diploma or GED. Job Corps has also come under intense criticism, mainly from the political Right, for failing to keep its students safe. According to a June 2017 report from the Office of the Inspector General, Job Corps staff reported 49,836 safety incidents, most of which involved serious illnesses or injuries, assaults, and drugs, between January 1, 2007, and June 30, 2016. US Government Accountability Office, Job Corps: Preliminary Observations on Student Safety and Security Data, June 22, 2017, https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-17-596t.pdf.

82. Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 146.

83. Wright, Physics of Blackness, 20, italics in the original.

84. Wright shared this analysis during a meeting with the critical race and ethnic studies (CRES) graduate writing group at the University of Minnesota on March 25, 2016.

85. Wright, Physics of Blackness, 145.

86. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (New York: Verso, 2016), 23. Within critical race theory (CRT), racism should be treated not as an anomaly or a contradiction, but rather as a central organizing principle of liberalism and democracy.

87. Wright, Physics of Blackness, 82.

88. Alexander Weheliye writes, “As W.E.B. Du Bois asked in 1944, if the Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not offer provisions for ending world colonialism and legal segregation in the United States, ‘Why then call it the Declaration of Human Rights?’” Alexander Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 76.

89. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 206.

90. Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 206.

91. It is worth noting that many social institutions were designed precisely with racialized youth in mind. They are the ones that schools reject and employers refuse.

92. Damien M. Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

93. The Movement for Family Power used the term “family regulation system” in a tweet as a more accurate name for the “child welfare system.” Movement for Family Power (@movfamilypower), “AND INSTEAD OF PREVENTING HARM, THE FAMILY REGULATION SYSTEM THRUSTS AND CREATES VIOLENCE!!!,” Twitter, June 11, 2020, 9:54 p.m., https://twitter.com/movfamilypower/status/1271259572938985472.

94. Shanté may have also been moved by what Max Weber calls “the ‘spirit’ of capitalism.” Weber references a “sermon” delivered by Benjamin Franklin in which he declared that “time is money” and “credit is money.” Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 11–13.

95. Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14, no. 1 (1988): 42–72.

96. In chapter 6, I further explore youths’ participation in the “fast life” as a means of transgressing time.

97. Benjamin Franklin, quoted in Weber, Protestant Ethic, 10.

98. Kemi Adeyemi, “The Practice of Slowness: Black Queer Women and the Right to the City,” Gay and Lesbian Quarterly 25, no. 4 (2019): 561.

99. J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 2.

100. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 17.

101. Halberstam, Queer Time and Place, 7.

102. Lisa M. Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 166–67.

103. “Pass-ons” are individual reports for each youth, containing a short summary of occurrences and significant events from previous shift(s).

104. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 2.

105. See James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); and James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

106. For Sylvia Wynter, “the overrepresentation of Man as Human” and the use of race as a “genetic status-organizing principle” signify central concepts structuring the current episteme. Wynter argues that “‘descriptive statements’ or governing master codes” established strict eligibility criteria turned “objective set of facts” for being human. See Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 271.

2. Teefing Time

1. According to Jared Sexton, “Whereas blackness precedes and precipitates anti-blackness, anti-blackness presumes and presupposes blackness. Call them blackness1 and blackness2, with the key qualification that the strange temporality of retroaction disallows the possibility of any strict chronology. In this perverse sense, then, black social death is black social life. The object of black studies is the aim of black studies. The most radical negation of the anti-black world is the most radical affirmation of a blackened world. Afro-pessimism is ‘not but nothing other than’ black optimism.’” Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism.” In Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives, ed. Ann M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian (New York: Routledge, 2016), 73.

2. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 31.

3. I am referring to white people who function as extensions of the state by criminalizing nonwhite people through surveillance (i.e., the white gaze) and/or seizure.

4. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 142.

5. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 223.

6. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 253.

7. Charles W. Mills, “White Time: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory,” Du Bois Review 11, no. 1 (2014): 36.

8. Mills, “White Time,” 29.

9. Claiming that racialized violence remains inconsequential is not hyperbole, especially when litigating racism remains a site of continuous debate. For example, US Supreme Court cases like McCleskey v. Kemp not only make racism largely unintelligible but institutionalize and legalize its unintelligibility. McCleskey ruled that racial bias in sentencing cannot be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment in the absence of clear “evidence of conscious, discriminatory action.” In other words, the legislative, judiciary, and executive branches of government all play a role in legitimating the exclusion of racism as a decisive part of racialized persons’ everyday lives. How, then, does one calculate or quantify something like racism, which according to the most powerful systems of government does not exist legally or socially? Perhaps this is the wrong question.

10. See Raygiene C. DiAquoi, “Critical Race Life Course Perspective Theory: A Framework for Understanding Racism over the Life Course,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 3, no. 1 (2018): 36–54; Celia B. Fisher, Seyatta A. Wallace, and Rose E. Fenton, “Discrimination Distress during Adolescence,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 6 (2000): 679–95; and Andrea J. Romero and Robert E. Roberts, “Perceptions of Discrimination and Ethnocultural Variables in a Diverse Group of Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescence 21 (1998): 641–56.

11. In “The Souls of White Folk,” Du Bois continues to invert questions related to the “Negro Problem.” Other scholars, including Gunnar Myrdal (An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy) and James Baldwin (“The Negro Problem: A Conversation with James Baldwin”), soon followed suit.

12. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 143.

13. August Wilson, introduction to May All Your Fences Have Gates, ed. Alan Nadel (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 1988), 8. Although white people’s survival does not depend on knowing Blacks and other nonwhites, this has not stopped them from claiming to know “the other.” Sociology generally, and white urban ethnographers in particular, remain in a relentless quest not just to make the familiar strange, but also to make the strange familiar (to whiteness).

14. Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 70–71.

15. Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 159.

16. Mills, “White Time,” 28.

17. See Du Bois’s description of the relationship between Black and white workers in the early twentieth century in W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1998), 6. David Roediger extends many of Du Bois’s ideas by revealing the psychic and material “wages” gained from whiteness in David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Brooklyn: Verso, 1991). In Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995), Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro show how the cumulative advantage is a product of cumulative disadvantage and dispossession. The authors make clear that white wealth is a product of unjust enrichment and the exploitation of Black labor. Dalton Conley builds on these ideas in Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Finally, Manning Marable, in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society (Cambridge: South End, 1999), makes clear that capitalism continues to ravage poor Black communities.

18. Javier Auyero explores poor people’s experiences waiting for social and administrative services, as well as the tactics of those who make them wait. Auyero describes waiting as a “strategy of domination” used to dispossess the poor in Argentina of time, information, and a sense of certainty. Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 15.

19. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel, 2017), 81. Ferreira da Silva invokes the main character of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Dana, to conceptualize unpayable debt as “a debt someone owes but is not hers to pay.” As Ferreira da Silva observes elsewhere, however, “The debt is hers because her blackness signals both slavery and lack of equity.” Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (London: Sternberg), 14.

20. Harvey, New Imperialism, 142.

21. For a critique of teleological assessments of race and racism, see Louise Seamster and Victor Ray, “Against Teleology in the Study of Race: Toward the Abolition of the Progress Paradigm,” Sociological Theory 36, no. 4 (2018): 315–42.

22. Du Bois describes how white people remain the beneficiaries of a “public and psychological wage” Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 700–701. In Wages of Whiteness, Roediger takes Du Bois’s ideas literally to describe how poor white workers failed to forge alliances across racial lines because they believed they had more in common with the people they worked for (i.e., their white elite bosses) than with the people they worked with (i.e., their poor Black counterparts). Cheryl Harris extends many of Du Bois’s ideas by describing whiteness as a “consolation prize” ensuring that, regardless of the competition, white people win. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1758.

23. Observing that the limitations in Marx and Engels’s ideas about the prospects of a “[European] bourgeois society would rationalize social relations and demystify social consciousness,” Cedric Robinson set out to develop a more complete analysis of capitalism through greater attention to its racial dimensions. He states, “The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.” Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 26.

24. Bonilla-Silva conceptualizes racialized social systems as “societies in which economic, political, social and ideological levels” are structured according to the hierarchical organization of racial categories or races. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “Rethinking Racism: Toward a Structural Interpretation,” American Sociological Review 63, no. 3 (1997): 469.

25. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008), xv.

26. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 95. Fanon’s words are as dense as they are poetically terse. To be “overdetermined from the outside” calls attention to the multitude of forces that (over)determine Blackness. The “outside” for Fanon is the social, which privileges white being as the reference category for determining each person’s fitness within the category of the human.

27. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 28.

28. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 16.

29. Browne, Dark Matters, 7.

30. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 92.

31. Additional critiques of straight time, family time, and heteronormative time can be found in Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); and Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

32. Tavia Nyong’o, “Non-binary Blackness: After the End of the World with Samuel R. Delany,” Art Practical, November 21, 2019, http://www.artpractical.com/feature/non-binary-blackness-after-the-end-of-the-world-with-samuel-r.-delany/, cited in Joshua Aiken, Jessica Marion Modi, and Olivia R. Polk, “Issued by Way of ‘The Issue of Blackness,’” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.7, no. 3 (2020): 429.

33. Elizabeth Freeman describes “chrononormativity” as “a mode of implantation, a technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts.” Freeman, Time Binds, 3.

34. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 93.

35. Muñoz describes straight time as “a naturalized temporality that is calibrated to make queer potentiality not only unrealized but also unthinkable.” Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 165.

36. Quoted in Walter D. Mignolo, “Sylvia Wynter: What Does It Mean to Be Human,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 116.

37. Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 43.

38. “The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, but Data,” The Economist, May 6, 2017, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data.

39. Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019), 80.

40. See Frieda Johles Forman and Caroran Sowton, eds., Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989); Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Life-Times in Fate Playing,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 4 (2012): 783–802; and Barbara Adam, “The Gendered Time Politics of Globalization: Of Shadowlands and Elusive Justice,” Feminist Review 70 (2002): 3–29.

41. Here I am particularly reflecting on the contributions of Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

42. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 4.

43. Elizabeth Deeds Ermath, “The Solitude of Women and Social Time,” in Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality, ed. Frieda Johles Forman and Caroran Sowton (Oxford: Pergamon, 1989), 37.

44. Ermath, “Solitude of Women,” 37.

45. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 57.

46. See McClintock, Imperial Leather.

47. Captive Maternals, according to James, “may be either biological females or those feminized into caretaking and consumption.” Membership within the category of the Captive Maternal requires sacrifice, resistance, and complicity against/with the predations of the state. Joy James, “The Womb of Western Theory: Trauma, Time Theft and the Captive Maternal,” Carceral Notebooks 12, no. 1 (2016): 255.

48. Bonnie J. Barthold, Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 101.

49. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 67.

50. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 80.

51. Deborah K. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of Black Feminist Ideology,” Signs 14, no. 1 (1988): 46–47.

52. King, “Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness,” 45.

53. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 68.

54. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67. As Spillers writes, “Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.”

55. Ferreira da Silva, Global Idea of Race, 60. David Couzens Hoy describes Kant as having a more ambivalent assessment of the origins of time. In response to whether Kant saw the source of time as being either of the world or of the mind, Hoy writes, “On the one hand, insofar as time is a form of intuition, it comes from the mind. On the other hand, however, insofar as it is a form of intuition, and intuition receives data from the real world, time is empirically real.” David Couzens Hoy, The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 5–6.

56. Marx, Early Writings (New York: Penguin, 1992), 351.

57. See Harris, “Whiteness as Property”; and George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).

58. Tadiar, “Life-Times in Fate Playing,” 794.

59. Tadiar, “Life-Times in Fate Playing,” 791.

60. See the National Youth Rights Association, “Top Five Reasons to Abolish Curfews,” accessed June 5, 2023, https://www.youthrights.org/issues/curfew/reasons-to-abolish/.

61. Jodi Rios, Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 84.

62. Rios, Black Lives and Spatial Matters, 91.

63. In Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston: Beacon, 2017), Andrea J. Ritchie exposes incommensurable levels of violence against Black women, Native women, and women of color by local, state, and federal authorities. The simultaneity and multiplicative connections between race, gender, sexuality, citizenship status, and class place racialized women at higher risks of being targeted as threats to the state and to heteropatriarchal constructions of womanhood and femininity.

64. Frank B. Wilderson III, “The Black Liberation Army and the Paradox of Political Engagement,” in Postcoloniality-Decoloniality-Black Critique: Joints and Fissures, ed. Sabine Broeck and Carsten Junker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 7.

65. It is worth noting that some of my peers called me “croissant” in middle and high school. Their jokes were not a critique of my racial identity, but rather a way of making fun of the sound of my name. “Croissant” and “Rahsaan” may not sound phonetically similar, but to kids from the hood, it was a convenient way of calling me out my name.

66. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 9.

67. Calvin Warren, “Black Time: Slavery, Metaphysics, and the Logic of Wellness,” in The Psychic Hold of Slavery: Legacies in American Expressive Culture, ed. Soyica Diggs Colbert, Robert J. Patterson, and Aida Levy-Hussen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 63.

68. Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 242.

69. Saidiya V. Hartman writes, “It is a tricky matter to detail the civil existence of a subject who is socially dead and legally recognized as human only to the degree that he is criminally culpable.” Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24.

70. See Stephanie H. Donald and Cristoph Lindner, Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture (New York: I. B. Taurus, 2014).

71. Michelle M. Wright reveals how Thomas Jefferson temporalizes race, privileging whiteness as dynamic and Blackness as static. As Wright observes, “Jefferson suggests that ‘Blackness’ can be altered when mixed with white blood. His rhetoric already assumes Black inertia and white activity.” Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 58.

72. City of Sanford, Florida, “Transcript of George Zimmerman’s Call to the Police,” Internet Archive, March 20, 2012, https://archive.org/details/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman.

73. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 6.

3. The Makings of a “Maybe Environment”

1. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 121.

2. Terrion L. Williamson, ed., Black in the Middle: An Anthology of the Black Midwest (Cleveland: Belt, 2020).

3. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). The “white spatial imaginary” is what George Lipsitz, in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), describes as a product of segregation and a broader “possessive investment” in the myth of meritocracy. Mills draws on Lipsitz’s concept to describe a “white temporal imaginary.” Charles W. Mills, “White Time: The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory,” Du Bois Review 11, no. 1 (2014): 29.

4. “Hot Cheetos and Takis” is a song created by Da Rich Kidzz—a hip hop group consisting of eight members between the ages of ten and thirteen from Minneapolis’s Northside.

5. Andrea Smith, “Sovereignty as Deferred Genocide,” in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler-Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, ed. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 120.

6. Such representations seem to fall into the category of what Teresa Gowan describes as “ethnonoir.” Gowan distinguishes between “ethnonoir” research that “makes a virtue of deliberately gritty, sometimes overblown realism” and neoromantic ethnography and ethnographers who “inflate and romanticize those aspects of the poor that illustrate how similar they are to other Americans—their mainstream aspirations, their law-abiding behavior, their conventional morality.” Teresa Gowan, Hobos, Hustlers, and Backsliders: Homeless in San Francisco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 174.

7. “The Black Midwest Initiative is a progressive collective of scholars, students, artists, organizers, and community-involved people who are committed to advocating for the lives of people of African descent as they are situated throughout the Midwest and Rust Belt regions of the United States.” “Mission—Vision—Values,” Black Midwest Initiative, accessed June 5, 2023, https://www.theblackmidwest.com/mission-vision-values.

8. Terrion L. Williamson, “This Place We Know: An Introduction,” in Williamson, Black in the Middle, 15.

9. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 42.

10. Derek Thompson, “The Miracle of Minneapolis,” The Atlantic, March 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-miracle-of-minneapolis/384975/.

11. Jessica Nickrand, “Minneapolis’s White Lie,” The Atlantic, February 21, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/minneapoliss-white-lie/385702/.

12. “Note: The Highest Poverty Rate Gap category describes the poverty rate of a certain ethnicity in relation to that of whites. For reference, 100% would mean twice the poverty rate of whites.” Adam McCann, “2023’s States with the Biggest and Smallest Wealth Gaps by Race/Ethnicity,” WalletHub, January 25, 2023, https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-the-highest-and-lowest-financial-gaps-by-race/9842/. Even the Washington Post took aim at Thompson’s article. Jeff Guo, “If Minneapolis Is So Great, Why Is It So Bad for African Americans?,” Washington Post, February 17, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2015/02/17/if-minneapolis-is-so-great-why-is-it-so-bad-for-black-people/.

13. Nickrand, “Minneapolis’s White Lie.”

14. Samuel Stebbins and Evan Comen, “These Are the 15 Worst Cities for Black Americans,” USA Today, November 16, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/11/16/racial-disparity-cities-worst-metro-areas-black-americans/38460961/.

15. “By surprise,” McKittrick writes, “I mean the outcome of wonder: an unexpected or astonishing event, circumstance, person, or thing; the emotion caused by this; astonishment, shock, or amazement; a gift or a present; a person or thing that achieves unexpected success; an attack or an approach made upon an unsuspecting victim; an act contrary to the expectations of a person; just as one might expect—no surprise at all.” Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 91.

16. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post–Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.

17. Fred Moten writes, “The history of blackness is testament to the fact that objects can and do resist. Blackness—the extended movement of a specific upheaval, an ongoing irruption that anarranges every line—is a strain that pressures the assumption of the equivalence of personhood and subjectivity.” Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1; Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

18. McKittrick reminds readers that when studying Black geographies, there is a need to appreciate the “rupture” that is the Middle Passage. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 32.

19. Council on Black Minnesotans, report, January 15, 2013, https://mn.gov/cmah/assets/2013%20Annual%20Report_tcm32-356559.pdf.

20. US Census Bureau, 2017 American Community Survey Five-Year Estimates (2013–17), unemployment and below-poverty rates, accessed September 14, 2023, https://data.census.gov/table?q=unemployment+in+minnesota+2015&tid=ACSST1Y2015.S2301; racial demographics, accessed September 14, 2023, https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP5Y2017.DP05?g=040XX00US27.

21. See Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

22. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith, “Beyond Incommensurability: Toward an Otherwise Stance on Black and Indigenous Relationality,” in King, Navarro, and Smith, Otherwise Worlds, 1.

23. Jared Sexton, “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology 42, no. 4–5 (2014): 9.

24. Smith, “Sovereignty as Deferred Genocide,” 125.

25. Sexton, “Vel of Slavery,” 9.

26. Smith, “Sovereignty as Deferred Genocide,” 126.

27. Frank Wilderson critiques Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead for structurally adjusting Blackness to conform to the esteemed qualities of Native peoples. As Wilderson writes, “She makes the Black safe for sovereignty and rescues sovereignty from the Black.” Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 244.

28. Helen Ngo, “‘Get Over It’? Racialised Temporalities and Bodily Orientations in Time,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 40, no. 2 (2019): 246.

29. Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like? The Struggle for Liberation in Dakota Homeland (St. Paul: Living Justice, 2008), 32.

30. Waziyatawin, What Does Justice Look Like?, 32.

31. Wilder Research, Characteristics and Trends among Minnesota’s Homeless Population, 2018 Minnesota Homeless Study, May 2019, https://www.wilder.org/sites/default/files/imports/2018_HomelessStudy_CharacteristicsFactSheet_5-19.pdf, 4.

32. Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology, ed. Incite! Women of Color against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2006), 68.

33. Smith, “Sovereignty as Deferred Genocide,” 125.

34. Smith, “Sovereignty as Deferred Genocide,” 126.

35. Tiya Miles, “Uncle Tom Was an Indian: Tracing the Red in Black Slavery,” in Relational Formations of Race: Theory, Method, and Practice, ed. Natalia Molina, Daniel Martinez Hosang, and Ramóna A. Gutiérrez (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 136.

36. Molina, Hosang, and Gutiérrez emphasize the need to analyze racialized (nonwhite) groups in relation to one another and not just in relation to whiteness, while demonstrating how colonialism and white supremacy have always been relational projects. Molina, Hosang, and Gutiérrez, introduction to Relational Formations of Race, 1.

37. See Kenyon S. Chan and Shirley Hune, “Racialization and Panethnicity: From Asians in America to Asian Americans,” in Toward a Common Destiny: Improving Race and Ethnic Relations in America, ed. Willis D. Hawley and Anthony W. Jackson (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 205–23; Lisa Lowe, “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian American Differences,” Diaspora 1, no. 1 (1991): 24–44; Claire Jean Kim, “The Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans,” Politics and Society 27 (1999): 105–38; Henry Yu. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, Exoticism in Modern America (New York: Oxford University Press), 2001; Sunaina Marr Maira, Missing: Youth, Citizenship, and Empire after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Sun Ah Laybourn, “Adopting the Model Minority Myth: Korean Adoption as a Racial Project,” Social Problems 68 (2021): 118–35. Eric Tang helps fill this void by exploring how Cambodian refugees comport to tenuous timelines structured by the state, particularly the executive branch of government. Tang offers “refugee temporality” as an epistemological tool to theorize and name the refugee’s knowledge of the way in which previous forms of power are reinscribed with each resettlement, displacement, and dislocation. Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015), 21.

38. Nandita Sharma, “Strategic Anti-essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 171.

39. As Saskia Sassen writes, “International migrations are produced, they are patterned and they are embedded in specific historical phases.” Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999), 155.

40. For more on the processes of relational racial formation, see Kim, “Racial Triangulation”; and Molina, Hosang, and Gutiérrez, Relational Formations of Race. See also Omi and Winant’s conceptualization of “racial formation” in Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994).

41. Wilder Research, Homelessness in Minnesota: Youth on Their Own; Findings from the 2015 Minnesota Homeless Study, April 2017, https://www.wilder.org/sites/default/files/imports/2015_HomelessYouth_4-17.pdf, 8.

42. Charles W. Mills, “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Time and Society 29, no. 2 (2020): 301.

43. See Vanessa Ogle, “Whose Time Is It?: The Pluralization of Time and the Global Condition, 1870s–1940s,” American Historical Review 118, no. 5 (2013): 1376–402.

44. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: New American Library, 1950), 68.

45. Bonnie J. Barthold, Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean and the United States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 35.

46. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 25.

47. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 60–61.

48. See C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959). As Bourdieu asserts, “The function of sociology, as of every science, is to reveal that which is hidden.” Pierre Bourdieu, On Television (New York: New Press, 1996), 17.

49. Simone Browne defines “racializing surveillance” as “a technology of social control where surveillance practices, policies, and performances concern the production of norms pertaining to race and exercise a ‘power to define what is out of place.’” Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 16.

50. William Fielding Ogburn uses the notion of “cultural lag” to describe any nonnormative adjustments to technological development. William Fielding Ogburn, Social Change with Respect to Culture and Original Nature (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1922), 200. William Julius Wilson adapts Ogburn’s idea to describe how Black people in poor urbanized space remain in a suspended state of delay due to “ghetto-related” behaviors. William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1996), 52. Comparing poor urbanized space to the wild, Ulf Hannerz writes, “There are slums which are more like villages and others which are more like jungles. At times one would look down Winston Street, see only the neighborliness and tranquility, and place this neighborhood close to the village end of the spectrum. But the people who live there know that it also has some attributes of the urban jungle. Some people and places mean trouble, and there is danger in the dark and the unknown.” Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 20.

51. “U, Black Maybe,” compact disc, track 8 on Common, Finding Forever, Good Music and Geffen Records, 2007.

52. Geof D. Wood rehearses the idea that “the determining condition for poor people is uncertainty.” Geof D. Wood, “Staying Secure, Staying Poor: The Faustian Bargain,” World Development 31 (2003): 468. See also Geof D. Wood, “Desperately Seeking Security,” Journal of International Development 13 (2001): 523–34. Scholarship on intimate partnerships also traffics in the concept of uncertainty. See, for example, Linda M. Burton and M. Belinda Tucker, “Romantic Unions in an Era of Uncertainty: A Post-Moynihan Perspective on African American Women and Marriage,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. 621 (2009): 132–48; and Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

53. Evelyn Nakano Glenn, “From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 1 (1992): 18.

54. E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (1967): 61. For more on the relationship between time and money, see Nigel Thrift, “The Making of a Capitalist Consciousness,” in The Sociology of Time, ed. John Hassard (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990), 105–29.

55. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 121.

56. Baldwin made the remarks during a 1963 interview with Kenneth Clarke. See “A Conversation with James Baldwin,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1989), 42.

57. Allen Costantini, “Rondo Neighborhood Gets Apologies for I-91,” KARE, July 17, 2015, https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/rondo-neighborhood-gets-apologies-for-i-94/89-105454642.

58. See Rondo Ave., Inc. (website), accessed September 14, 2023, https://rondoavenueinc.org/.

59. “Near North Neighborhood Data,” Minnesota Compass, 2013–17 data, https://www.mncompass.org/profiles/neighborhoods/minneapolis/near-north.

60. Edward G. Goetz, Brittany Lewis, Anthony Damiano, and Molly Calhoun, The Diversity of Gentrification: Multiple Forms of Gentrification in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, January 25, 2019, https://gentrification.umn.edu/sites/gentrification.umn.edu/files/files/media/diversity-of-gentrification-012519.pdf, 34.

61. Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Urban Underclass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

62. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 118.

63. Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism; An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 361–85.

64. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, 229. The authors recommend that the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adhere to existing federal legislation such as the Fair Housing Act and the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act.

65. “Across 110th Street,” MP3 audio, track 1 on Bobby Womack and Peace, Across 110th Street, United Artists, 1973.

66. George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 28.

67. Mills, “White Time,” 29.

68. I would be remiss not to acknowledge Jodi Rios’s important analysis of the spatialization of identity and how “space can easily change, or be recodified, from urban to suburban and back again, depending on who lives there and what they are doing.” Jodi Rios, Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020), 125. Rios describes how Blackness, when constructed as “risk,” threatens the authenticity of white, suburbanized space and white spatial imaginaries. Phrases like “suburban ghetto,” Rios argues, become part of the many “discursive regimes” used to regulate Black sociality and Blackness in North St. Louis (119).

69. For more details on the documentary series, see Jim Crow of the North, Twin Cities PBS, https://www.tpt.org/jim-crow-north/.

70. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 87–88.

4. “Keisha Doesn’t Get the Call before Kimberly”

1. Studies on the transition to adulthood have a long lineage within the social sciences. There is an extensive amount of research using education and employment as indicators of the transition to adulthood. For more on this topic, see John Modell, Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., and Theodore Hershberg, “Social Change and Transitions to Adulthood in Historical Perspective,” Journal of Family History 1 (1976): 7–32; Margaret M. Marini, “The Transition to Adulthood: Sex Differences in Educational Attainment and Age at Marriage,” American Sociological Review 43 (1978): 483–507; Michael J. Shanahan. “Pathways to Adulthood in Changing Societies: Variability and Mechanisms in the Life Course Perspective,” Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 667–92; Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson, “Social Origins, Adolescent Experiences, and Work Value Trajectories during the Transition to Adulthood,” Social Forces 80, no. 4 (2002): 1307–40; Janel E. Benson and Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., “Entry into Adulthood: Are Adult Role Transitions Meaningful Markers of Adult Identity?,” Advances in the Life Course Research 11 (2007): 199–224; Jennifer M. Silva, “Constructing Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty,” American Sociological Review 77, no. 4 (2012): 505–22; Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson, The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2014).

2. Consider Michel Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary function of the bell within schools. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 150.

3. Saidiya V. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007), 6.

4. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Chicago: Zed Books, 1978), 181.

5. Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 28–29.

6. Damien M. Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), xiii. Also see Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (New York: Verso, 2017), 127.

7. William H. Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education (New York: Teachers Education Press, 2000).

8. Gloria Ladson-Billings, “From the Achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding Achievement in U.S. Schools,” Educational Researcher 35, no. 7 (2006): 5.

9. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1754. Despite the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, white people still managed to “control, manage, postpone, and, if necessary, thwart change.”

10. Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), 183.

11. Anne Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 230.

12. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 153.

13. Richard Q. Shin, Lance C. Smith, Jamie C. Welch, and Ijeoma Ezeofor, “Is Allison More Likely Than Lakisha to Receive a Callback from Counseling Professionals? A Racism Audit Study,” Counseling Psychologist 44, no. 8 (2016): 1187–211. See also Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd, “The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets,” Annual Review of Sociology 34, (2008): 181–209.

14. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 34.

15. Lesko, Act Your Age!, 35.

5. Tabanca Time

1. This phrasing is a riff on La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation,” Social Text 35, no. 4 (2017): 1–31. My riff off Bruce should not be confused with ripping off Bruce. I find the concept of “interlude” both provocative and generative. Like Bruce, I am drawing on the musicality of “interlude,” but I am also thinking more about the impossibility of interlude within the context of deportation and deported time.

2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), 15.

3. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 20.

4. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 11.

5. Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 221.

6. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007), 59.

7. To “fire de wuk” is to quit a job. The phrase reflects the vernacular dexterity and overall creativity among many Trinis and Caribbean neighbors who consistently subvert power relations through language. In this case the employee fires their job, not the other way around.

8. Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar, Streets of Hope: The Rise and Fall of an Urban Neighborhood (Boston: South End, 1994), 31.

9. Aware that the police were not going to protect the community from fires or other forms of harm, many Roxbury residents, including my mother, formed their own community defense groups.

10. Medoff and Sklar, Streets of Hope, 31.

11. Contact with the prison-industrial complex signifies a site of racial formation. Contrary to criminological theories on the “race of a criminal record” (see Aliya Saperstein and Andrew M. Penner, “The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perceptions,” Social Problems 57, no. 1 [2010]: 92–113), my father did not become Black when the police arrested him. The classification only matched his racial identity.

12. “Lime” is a colloquialism in Trinidad used to describe an intentional effort to relax in the company of others. Those perceived to be working too hard are often encouraged to “take a lime, nah.” As Kevin Birth writes, “Liming is an essential social activity. The term … could be misconstrued as simply doing nothing, but there are two significant differences between truly doing nothing and liming: (1) one cannot lime by oneself; and (2) one can do an infinite number of things (other than ‘work’) while liming with others.” Kevin Birth, Any Time Is Trinidad Time: Social Meanings and Temporal Consciousness (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 4.

13. “Anytime is Trinidad time” is a popular expression among Trinbagonians to highlight both the spontaneity and the organization of temporal rhythms. On the 1971 album Curfew Time, Lord Kitchener popularized the phrase in the song “Trinidad Time.” “Trinidad Time,” vinyl, track A2 on Lord Kitchener, Sock It to Me Kitch, International Recording Co., 1970. For more on this concept, see Birth, Any Time is Trinidad Time. My father’s refusal to conform to Western standard time reflected his refusal to comport to Western space: namely, the United States. Believing that anytime is Trinidad time is also a belief that any space is Trinidad (space). To this day, my father lauds himself for swiftly moving through Boston with the kind of swag he carried while navigating the streets of San Juan or any other part of Trinidad. Perhaps he was prescient enough not to get too comfortable in the US. Did he know his stay would be temporary, regardless of whether his kids were born in the US? Though he established roots in the country, my father was intent on not assimilating to American culture. He had no desire to speak proper English. Instead he accentuated his accent while mocking our slang. I see this as one way the subaltern speak back to Western imperialism. In believing that “anytime is Trinidad time” and believing that “any space is Trinidad,” my father contributed to the provincialization of the West while centering the lived experiences of those subjugated by empire and imperialism.

14. “Clocker” is a slang term used to describe someone who sells drugs.

15. “Street Life,” 7-inch vinyl, track 1 on The Crusaders, Street Life, MCA, 1979.

16. Linda Bosniak argues that constructions of citizenship as “hard on the outside and soft on the inside” are inaccurate and that such a separation is in fact “elusive.” As Bosniak writes, “Noncitizen immigrants have entered the spatial domain of universal citizenship, but they remain outsiders in a significant sense: the border effectively follows them inside.” Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4.

17. Lisa M. Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 117. For more on the limitations of esteeming “desirable” migrants at the expense of those deemed “undesirable,” see Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism (Oakland: AK Press, 2013).

18. Harsha Walia describes how migrant justice collectives like No One Is Illegal (NOII) resisted such false oppositions: “NOII movements … challenge Darwinian constructions of good/desirable/real migrant (read: English-speaking, employed and/or conforming to heteropatriarchal norms) versus bad/undesirable/bogus migrant (read: unemployed, without formal education and/or with a criminal record). Such dichotomies reinforce state controls on self-determination, strengthen the capitalist exploitation of labor, and maintain social hierarchies based on race, class, gender, sexuality and ability” Harsha Walia, Undoing Border Imperialism, 77–78.

19. A significant amount of the perpetual emotional, psychic, and physical agony of deportation remains enshrined in legislation. For example, the 1996 Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) resulted in four devastating changes to immigration policy: (1) an increased number of categories warranting deportation and expanded categories of “aggravated felonies,” (2) reduced judicial power to grant relief from deportation, (3) an expedited process of deportation, and (4) limited avenues for appeal.

20. Despite differing opinions among immigration attorneys, state prosecutors, and ICE, I argue that there is no such thing as “postdeportation,” only “postremoval.”

21. The fledgling stages of my writing career are easily traceable to the many letters I sent to my father and uncles pre- and postremoval. I imagined what it was like for my father to be alone and so far removed from his loved ones. Thus, I took this undertaking very seriously. I injected more love and aspects of my being into countless handwritten letters. My aim was to maintain a sense of temporal continuity with loved ones behind the wall. I hoped my words would help them “stay up” within a system designed to keep them locked down.

22. “Time,” featuring AZ and Nas, MP3 audio, track 13 on Nature, Queen’s Classics, DCM, 2016.

23. “Licks” is a common phrase in the Caribbean used to refer to the use of physical discipline.

24. Anyone that has lost someone knows the brutality of time. To go on living when a family member, spouse, friend, or other loved one is gone is an extraordinary undertaking. Crying out, “I can’t go on” is an acknowledgment of the interminable pain of loss. Still, although time continues to violently press forward, those subjected to time’s foulness find a way to push on/back. My hope is that readers find some signs of resistance to time in the pages of this text.

25. Saidiya Hartman offers a compelling appraisal of empathy, writing, “Empathy is double-edged, for in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 19.

26. See Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of Living (Holland: D. Reidel, 1980).

27. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 194.

28. Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 107. Words in italics are direct quotes to Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro.

29. See Amanda Chicago Lewis, “How Black People Are Being Shut Out of America’s Weed Boom: Whitewashing the Green Rush,” BuzzFeed News, March 16, 2016, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/amandachicagolewis/americas-white-only-weed-boom. I sometimes wonder whether my father predicted that white people would be the only ones going gangbusters once the weed bonanza hit. With so many Black people still incarcerated for minor drug offenses, this is yet another example of white people capitalizing on Black dispossession, debt, and incarceration. I am reminded of Dylan Rodríguez’s words previously cited in chapter 1: “‘Disparity’ is a bullshit concept, when we already know that the inception of criminal justice is the de-criminalization of white people, particularly propertied white citizens and those willing to bear arms to defend the white world. ‘Mass Incarceration’ is worse than meaningless, when it’s not the ‘masses’ who are being criminalized and locked up. So there is some furtive and fatal white entitlement involved in this discursive political structure.”

6. Transgressing Time in the Fast Life

1. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 117.

2. Social scientists have a long track record of constructing Black youths in poor urbanized space as “present oriented.” See Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Random House, 1961); William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Martin Sánchez-Jankowski, Islands in the Streets: Gangs and American Urban Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Anderson, Code of the Street; Frank Furstenberg Jr. et al., Managing to Make It: Urban Families and Adolescent Success (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009).

3. Anderson, Code of the Street, 36. “Code switching” as a concept, however, seems to fit into Denise Ferreira da Silva’s critique of overemphasis on the logic of racialized exclusion, while ignoring how any attempts to be included by effectively alternating codes places the racialized other at risk of self-obliteration through assimilation. See Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 162. Perhaps it is time to do more code sticking and less code switching.

4. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 22.

5. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 9.

6. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2008), 95.

7. See Devah Pager and Lincoln Quillan, “Walking the Talk: What Employers Say versus What They Do,” American Sociological Review 70 (2005): 355–80; and Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and Bart Bonikowski, “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment,” American Sociological Review 74 (2009): 777–99.

8. See Phyllis Moen, “The Gendered Life Course,” in Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences, ed. Robert H. Binstock and Linda K. George (New York: Academic Press, 1996), 175–96; and Phyllis Moen and Robert M. Orrange, “Careers and Lives: Socialization, Structural Lag, and Gendered Ambivalence,” Advances in Life Course Research 7 (2002): 231–60. The gendered division of labor ensures that men work a single shift outside the home, while women have double and triple duty. Reproductive labor, affective labor, carework, and the labor-time required to reckon with acts of sexual violence, however, remain incommensurable within the logics of capital. Women and femmes, particularly women and femmes of color, may borrow time, but they take severe risks when attempting to spend it. Time is not simply lost due to the unequal value ascribed to women’s labor. Rather, it is stolen by gender-based violence.

9. Jody Miller brings greater attention to gender-based violence against African American girls. Miller’s specific aim is to “investigate how the structural inequalities that create extreme—and racialized—urban poverty facilitate both cultural adaptations and social contexts that heighten and shape the tremendous gender-based violence faced by African American girls.” Jody Miller, Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality, and Gendered Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 3. But Miller struggles to avoid interpellating both Black girlhood and Black boyhood through the lens of abjection, pathology, and heteronormativity. Moreover, her analysis is based on an indivisible concept of gender violence devoid of processes of racialization. Consequently, she ends up reproducing a variety of culture-of-poverty tropes and appears to fall into the second-wave feminist trap of equating womanhood with whiteness.

10. “Not respectively” because, as I have argued elsewhere, sociology departments do more than produce knowledge—they also produce police. See Rahsaan Mahadeo, “As Campuses Cut Ties to Police, Sociology Departments Must Do the Same,” Truthout, July 21, 2020, https://truthout.org/articles/as-campuses-cut-ties-to-police-sociology-departments-must-do-the-same/.

11. Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 469.

12. Hartman, “Anarchy of Colored Girls,” 470.

13. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that work within the underground economy is at all easy. The risks of arrest, incarceration, and police terror, along with unconventional work hours and meager earnings, remain undesirable to most with access to legitimate opportunities for work.

14. Linda M. Burton, Dawn A. Obeidallah, and Kevin Allison, “Ethnographic Insights on Social Context and Adolescent Development among Inner-City African-American Teens,” in Ethnology and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social Inquiry, ed. Richard Jessor, Anne Colby, and Richard A. Shweder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 409.

15. Robert K. Merton, “Socially Expected Durations: A Case Study of Concept Formation in Sociology,” in Conflict and Consensus: A Festschrift in Honor of Lewis A. Coser, ed. Walter W. Powell and Richard Robbins (New York: Free Press, 1984), 264.

16. Richard A. Settersten Jr., “Age Structuring and the Rhythm of the Life Course,” in Handbook of the Life Course, ed. Jeylan T. Mortimer and Michael J. Shanahan (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2004), 91.

17. Settersten writes, “Non-whites, non-professionals, and those with lower educational levels cited age deadlines more often than their counterparts.” Settersten, “Age Structuring,” 91.

18. Lisa M. Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 145.

19. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 10.

20. “Overstand” is a common phrase within Rastafari culture, which seeks to eliminate hierarchy in practice and discourse. For many Rastafari, “understand” constructs some as subordinate to the person who is presenting specific information or asking a question. By contrast, an “overstanding” is an effort to remain steps ahead of conventional knowledge.

21. Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 74.

22. See Anderson, Code of the Street; MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It; Richard Majors and Janet Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington Books, 1992); Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); David J. Harding, Living the Drama: Community, Conflict, and Culture among Inner-City Boys (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

23. Burton, Obeidallah, and Allison, “Ethnographic Insights,” 400.

24. “Fast Life,” featuring Nas, MP3 audio, track 8 on Kool G. Rap, 4, 5, 6, Cold Chillin’ and Epic Street, 1995.

25. Paul Gilroy, “The Dialectics of Diaspora Identification,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Les Back and John Solomos (New York: Routledge, 2009), 571.

26. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 45.

27. Walter Mischel, Yuichi Shoda, and Philip K. Peake, “The Nature of Adolescent Competencies Predicted by Preschool Delay of Gratification,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54 (1988): 687–96.

28. As Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri, and Richard N. Aslin note, “Consider the mindset of a 4-year-old living in a crowded shelter, surrounded by older children with little adult supervision. For a child accustomed to stolen possessions and broken promises, the only guaranteed treats are the ones you have already swallowed. At the other extreme, consider the mindset of an only-child in a stable home whose parents reliably promise and deliver small motivational treats for good behavior.” Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri, and Richard N. Aslin, “Rational Snacking: Young Children’s Decision-Making on the Marshmallow Task Is Moderated by Beliefs about Environmental Reliability,” Cognition 126 (2013): 111.

29. Joseph Scott, “Black Science and Nation Building,” in The Death of White Sociology: Essays on Race and Culture, ed. Joyce A. Ladner (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1973), 293. Tracing the origins of white manhood through histories of anti-Black violence, Gail Bederman writes, “Middle-class parents taught their sons to build a strong, manly ‘character’ as they would build muscle, through repetitive exercises of control over impulse… . By gaining the manly strength to control himself, a man gained the authority, as well as the duty, to protect and direct those less manly than himself, whether his wife, his children, his employees, or his racial ‘inferiors.’” Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 48.

30. Jodi Rios reveals the intimate connections between urbanized space and suburbanized space. By studying the racial and spatial politics in North St. Louis County, Missouri, Rios reveals how discursive regimes perpetuate logics of cultural inferiority while legitimating policing and anti-Black violence in suburbanized space. Rios argues that racializing and spatializing logics work to attach “risk” to Black bodies based on cultural norms associated within a “white spatial imaginary of suburban citizenship.” For example, municipal leaders justified the use of “extreme policing practices” under the guise that Black people moving from the projects to the suburbs “don’t know how to act.” Jodi Rios, Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020, 25.

7. Why Is the Time Always Right for White and Wrong for Us?

1. George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 37.

2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1998), 700–701.

3. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 1991), 13.

4. Steve Martinot describes how fear, anxiety, and paranoia became key elements for structuring white solidarity and cohesion. Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialization (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 49.

5. Tim Wise, Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-racist Reflections from an Angry White Male (Berkeley: Soft Skull, 2008).

6. Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1758.

7. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1714.

8. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 24.

9. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 24.

10. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Random House, 2001), 81–82.

11. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 1777.

12. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010), 104; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of a Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 72.

13. Owen J. Dwyer and John Paul Jones III, “White Socio-Spatial Epistemology,” Social & Cultural Geography 1, no. 2 (2000): 212.

14. As noted in the introduction, whiteness is as much of a sociohistorical construct as other racial formations. In quotidian life, however, whiteness proceeds as if it were race neutral and ahistorical.

15. Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 126–27.

16. For more on this topic, see Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Malden: Blackwell, 1993); Pamela Perry, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30, no. 1 (2001): 56–91; Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149–68; Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, “‘This Is a White Country!’ The Racial Ideology of the Western Nations of the World Systems,” Sociological Inquiry 70, no. 2 (2000): 188–214; and Renisa Mawani, “Law as Temporality: Colonial Politics in Indian Settlers,” University of California Irvine Law Review 4, no. 65 (2014): 65–96. I would be remiss not to acknowledge the “good stories” (see chapter 1) that white people tell to convince themselves of the need to return to the “good old days.” For example, many white nationalists, white nativists, and other white supremacists long to return to a time when white being was not troubled by the presence of racialized others.

17. Ahmed, “Phenomenology of Whiteness,” 151.

18. Helen Ngo, The Habits of Racism: A Phenomenology of Racism and Racialized Embodiment (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 81.

19. Ngo, Habits of Racism, 150.

20. Paul Willis, Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Alford A. Young, The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Jay MacLeod, Ain’t No Makin’ It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2009).

21. Joe R. Feagin, The White Racial Frame: Centuries of Racial Framing and Counter-framing (New York: Routledge, 2013); Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 46.

22. Wright, Physics of Blackness, 60.

23. See Victor E. Ray et al., “Critical Race Theory, Afro-pessimism, and Racial Progress Narratives,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 3, no. 2 (2017): 147–58; Louise Seamster and Victor Erik Ray, “Against Teleology in the Study of Race: Toward the Abolition of the Progress Paradigm,” Sociological Theory 36, no. 4 (2018): 315–42.

24. See Ray et al., “Critical Race Theory”; Seamster and Ray, “Against Teleology.” It is no surprise that whiteness remains future oriented. Whiteness looks to the future because it seeks to ignore a present past (i.e., slavery, settler colonialism, imperialism, etc.). Consider the Nick Estes critique of “settler narratives” that “use a linear conception of time to distance themselves from the horrific crimes committed against Indigenous peoples and the land. This includes celebrating bogus origin stories like Thanksgiving. But Indigenous notions of time consider the present to be structured entirely by our past and by our ancestors. There is no separation between past and present, meaning that an alternative future is also determined by our understanding of our past. Our history is our future.” Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York: Verso Books, 2019), 14–15.

25. McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279 (1987) ruled that racial bias in sentencing cannot be challenged under the Fourteenth Amendment in the absence of clear evidence of conscious discriminatory intent.

26. Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 36.

27. The courts and legal system often deny structural racism and anti-Blackness while reproducing both in the same breath. Consider how Derek Chauvin’s defense attorneys attempted to blame George Floyd for his own death, rather than acknowledge the systemic nature of anti-Blackness in policing.

28. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 67.

29. “Who feels it knows it” is a popular aphorism in Jamaica, and many other majority-Black Caribbean nations invoke signifying the subjective side to oppression that only the oppressed can understand. It is worth asking what happens when those who don’t feel it claim to know it. I am specifically considering Hartman’s theorizing of fungibility and the possibility of interchanging people with cultural capital. Hartman (Scenes of Subjection, 21) describes fungibility as “the joy made possible by virtue of the replaceability and interchangeability endemic to the commodity—and by the extensive capacities of property—that is, the augmentation of the master subject through his embodiment in external objects and persons.” What concerns me, then, is the possibility that the fungibility of Blackness provides an opportunity for those who don’t feel it to claim to know it.

30. As a “gender-fluent” and trans person, Dominique’s critique signals an attempt to speak back to chrononormativity and the heteronormative logics surrounding “family” and “domestic time.” Both queer and queer-of-color theorists, including J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005); José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009); and Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), critique time as privileging a social time in which queer and trans lives literally and figuratively don’t count. Like each of these theorists, Dominique answers the question “Whose time is it?” For Dominique and other queer and trans youth of color at Run-a-Way, time was concentrated in the hands of those privileged along the lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality.

31. Halberstam, Queer Time and Place, 5.

32. Halberstam, Queer Time and Place, 5.

33. Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, 19.

34. To be “clocked” is to be “read” or identified as trans by a cisgender person.

35. Halberstam, Queer Time and Place, 10.

36. Elizabeth Freeman describes “domestic time” as “a gendered form of and contributor to class habitus.” Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 44.

37. “Didn’t Cha Know,” MP3 audio, track 1 on Erykah Badu, Mama’s Gun, Motown, 2000.

38. Robert K. Merton, “The Matthew Effect in Science: The Reward and Communication Systems of Science Are Considered,” Science 159, no. 3810 (1968): 56–63.

39. Andrew Pallas, “Educational Transitions, Trajectories, and the Pathways,” in Handbook of the Life Course, ed. Jeylan T. Mortimer and Michael J. Shanahan (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2004), 174.

40. Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1995), 51.

41. Migration is itself a product of white time’s synchronization to global capitalism, free trade, US interventionism, and “low-intensity conflicts” that destroy local economies in dispossessed nations, lower wages, and reduce social spending on social services, all in the name of “progress.”

42. Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 10. Helen Ngo writes, “Sullivan looks at how white people tend to act and think as if all spaces—whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise—are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish.” Ngo, Habits of Racism, 81.

43. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Black Man Brings His Gifts,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 454.

44. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 700–701.

45. John Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger, 1969), 19.

46. La Marr Jurelle Bruce writes, “Whereas fugitivity, wandering, waywardness, and derangement are modes of motion defying modern mandates for ‘proper’ movement, loitering is slowness or stillness that violates said mandates. The fugitive goes when told to stay, while the loiterer stays when told to go.” La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “Shore, Unsure: Loitering as a Way of Life,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 25, no. 2 (2019): 353.

47. Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 133.

48. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1947); Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: New American Library, 1950).

49. While “late” is typically used as a reference to chronological delay, it is also an expression, particularly among youth, to signal a delay in picking up on recent trends.

50. On whiteness and modernity, see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Halberstam, Queer Time and Place; Homi K. Bhabha, “‘Race,’ Time and the Revision of Modernity,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Les Back and John Solomos (New York: Routledge, 2009), 422–36; Steph Lawler, “White Like Them: Whiteness and Anachronistic Space in Representations of the English Working Class,” Ethnicities 12, no. 4 (2012): 409–26; Mawani, “Law as Temporality”; Wanda Nanibush, “Outside of Time: Salvage Ethnography, Self-Representation and Performing Culture,” in Time, Temporality and Violence in International Relations: (De)fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives, ed. Ann M. Agathangelou and Kyle D. Killian (New York: Routledge, 2016), 104–18.
 On future orientations, see Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy; George De Vos, “Ethnic Pluralism: Conflict and Accommodation,” in Ethnic Identity: Cultural Continuities and Change, ed. George De Vos and Lola Romanucci-Ross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Perry, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic”; Daniel R. Wildcat, “Indigenizing the Future: Why We Must Think Spatially in the Twenty-First Century,” American Studies 46 (2005): 417–40.

51. Feagin, White Racial Frame, 21.

52. Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2005), 12.

53. Frank B. Wilderson III and Tiffany Lethabo King, “Staying Ready for Black Study,” in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler-Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, ed. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 56.

54. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 80.

55. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1992).

56. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 95.

57. Most of Quincy’s response is based on a November 7, 1993, New York Times article in which Timberland’s former executive vice president, Jeffrey Swartz, described his intended consumer base as “honest working people.” Swartz went on to say that he was not going to “build his business on smoke,” referring to what he perceived as the fickle and unreliable fashion sense among racialized youth in the inner city. “We are cutting back the number of doors we do business in. So if you want to buy us and you are not our target customer, we don’t have a point of distribution that speaks to your life style. We are making hip-hop come to our distribution.” Michel Marriott, “Out of the Woods,” New York Times, November 7, 1993, https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/07/style/out-of-the-woods.html. Though Swartz refuted claims that he and the Timberland Corporation would dissociate themselves from a “hip-hop” consumer base, critics see this as further evidence of the way in which corporations (intentionally) underestimate the economic power of poor communities of color in order to advance a broader agenda of economic exploitation. Black youths at Run-a-Way relied on localized knowledge of status symbols (such as Timberlands) to screen peers and staff on their ability to keep pace with the most culturally relevant trends.

58. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel, 2017), 81–112.

59. Marriott, “Out of the Woods.”

60. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 45.

61. For more on this point, see Signithia Fordham and John Ogbu, “Black Students’ School Success: Coping with the ‘Burden of Acting White,’” Urban Review 18 (1986): 176–206; Wendy Leo Moore, Reproducing Racism: White Space, Elite Law Schools, and Racial Inequality (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008); Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999); and Elijah Anderson, “The White Space,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1, no. 1 (2015): 10–21.

62. Time diaries are widely celebrated among life course and youth development scholars alike. See Anne Gauthier and Frank Furstenberg Jr., “Historical Trends in Patterns of Time Use among Young Adults in Developed Countries,” in On the Frontier of Adulthood: Theory, Research and Public Policy, ed. Richard Settersten Jr., Frank Furstenberg Jr., and Rubén G. Rumbaut (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 150–76; Cathleen D. Zick, “The Shifting Balance of Adolescent Time Use,” Youth & Society 41, no. 4 (2010): 569–96; Joseph L. Mahoney and Andrea E. Vest, “The Over-scheduling Hypothesis Revisited: Intensity of Organized Activity and Participation during Adolescence and Young Adult Outcomes,” Journal of Research on Adolescence 22, no. 3 (2012): 409–18; Vanessa R. Wright et al., “The Time Use of Teenagers.” Social Science Research 38 (2009): 792–809.

63. Perry, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic”; Ashley W. Doane Jr., “Dominant Group Ethnic Identity in the United States: The Role of ‘Hidden’ Ethnicity in Intergroup Relations,” Sociological Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1997): 375–97.

64. J. Brendan Shaw, “‘I Don’t Wanna Time Travel No Mo’: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Replacement in Erykah Badu’s ‘Window Seat,’” Feminist Formations 27, no. 2 (2015): 63.

65. Robin D. G. Kelley, “Resistance as Revelatory,” in Youth Resistance Research and Theories of Change, ed. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (New York: Routledge, 2014), 82–96.

8. Prescience within Present Orientations

1. Deval for All, “Deval Patrick Announcement Video,” YouTube video, 2:35, November 14, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJCY7qN48hU.

2. Jill Lepore, “Don’t Let Nationalists Speak for the Nation,” New York Times, May 25, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/25/opinion/sunday/nationalism-liberalism-2020.html.

3. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 80.

4. Lewis A. Coser and Rose L. Coser, “Time Perspective and Social Structure,” in The Sociology of Time, ed. John Hassard (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 196.

5. Victor Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 103.

6. Quoted in Rios, Punished, 103.

7. Fabian, Time and the Other, 80. These populations, as George Lipsitz writes, are “not so much disadvantaged as taken advantage of.” Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 107.

8. Renato Rosaldo states, “The ethnographic perspective develops an interplay between making the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon, 1989), 39.

9. Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 20.

10. See Kathleen M. Harris, Greg J. Duncan, and Johanne Boisjoly, “Evaluating the Role of ‘Nothing to Lose’ Attitudes on Risky Behavior in Adolescence,” Social Forces 80, no. 3 (2002): 1005–39.

11. It is worth noting that urban sociology adopted the ethnographic present from anthropologists to construct the “other.” Fabian’s major intervention, then, lies in taking his own field to task for reproducing discourses of power and domination. One potential target of Fabian’s critique could have been Oscar Lewis, who writes, “On the level of the individual, major characteristics are a strong feeling of marginality, of helplessness, of dependency and of inferiority … weak ego structure, confusion of sexual identification, lack of impulse control … little ability to defer gratification and to plan for the future … resignation and fatalism and belief in male superiority … tolerance for psychological pathology … provincial and locally oriented … very little sense of history.” Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sánchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family (New York: Random House, 1961), xlvii–xlviii, quoted in Charles Valentine, Culture and Poverty: Critique and Counter-proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 133.

12. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65–81.

13. See Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”; Ron Haskins, “Moynihan Was Right. Now What?,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621 (2009): 281–314; Sara McLanahan and Christopher Jencks, “Was Moynihan Right? What Happens to Children of Unmarried Mothers,” Education Next 15, no. 2 (2015): 14–20.

14. Alex Kotlowitz, There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 80. Though not a sociologist by training, Kotlowitz is widely read, cited, and taught within sociological subfields, including the life course perspective, sociology of families, urban sociology, and criminology. Even more disconcerting is that No Children Here is categorized as “Sociology/Black Culture.”

15. Frank Furstenberg Jr. et al., Managing to Make It: Urban Families and Adolescent Success (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 10.

16. Furstenberg et al., Managing to Make It, 226.

17. Furstenberg et al., Managing to Make It, 230.

18. See Alford A. Young, The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 42; and William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 60–61.

19. David Harding, Living the Drama: Community, Conflict and Culture among Inner-City Boys (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 134.

20. Harding, Living the Drama, 65.

21. Harding, Living the Drama, 244.

22. Robert J. Sampson, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Thomas Gannon-Rowley, “Assessing Neighborhood Effects: Social Processes and New Directions in Research,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 443.

23. William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 60–61.

24. Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 32.

25. Chad Benito Infante, “Murder and Metaphysics,” in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler-Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, ed. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 136.

26. Warren, Ontological Terror, 45.

27. Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 39.

28. Goffman, On the Run, 247.

29. Saidiya Hartman asserts, “The fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and as property, the dispossessed body of the enslaved is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power.” Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 21.What concerns me, then, is Goffman’s attempt to treat Black people as empty vessels for the projection of her own feelings, desires, and knowledge production while interchanging Black social life with criminality.

30. Michelle Alexander writes, “In the era of mass incarceration, what it means to be a criminal in our collective consciousness has become conflated with what it means to be black, so the term white criminal is confounding, while the term black criminal is nearly redundant… . Whiteness mitigates crime, whereas blackness defines the criminal.” Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness(New York: New Press, 2010), 193. Goffman treats “Black” and “crime” as synonymous, making the study of one a study of the other.

31. Here I am thinking with Dionne Brand, who describes how the Door of No Return transformed Black people into “bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied of self-interpretation into which new interpretations could be placed.” Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging (Toronto: Random House, 2001), 93. Brand illustrates the violence of fungibility, where social scientists like Goffman can empty Black bodies of being in order to occupy them and inscribe new interpretations and meanings for their enjoyment.

32. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 32.

33. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 2.

34. As Blume Oeur writes, “While Northside students had a sense of control over their participation in the long race to college, the school community members often described deviant young men as stuck in place. They were taking ‘passive, receptive stances towards an approaching future over which [they had] little control.’ While hope has forward momentum, despair lacks it or has downward momentum.” Freeden Blume Oeur, Black Boys Apart: Racial Uplift and Respectability in All-Male Public Schools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 92.

35. Saidiya V. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), 107.

36. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 4.

37. See Aldon D. Morris, The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern Sociology (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015).

38. Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, 104.

39. Young, Minds of Marginalized Black Men, 13.

40. Alford A. Young, “White Ethnographers on the Experiences of African America Men: Then and Now,” in White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology, ed. Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 197.

41. Young, “White Ethnographers,” 197.

42. Ferreira da Silva argues that a “sociological analytics of exclusion … does no more than to recount the many ways in which states fail to fulfill their task of promoting social equality (causing social harm, social exclusion, poverty, environmental damage …).” Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital,” in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler-Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, ed. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 40.

43. Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 35. Though Anderson acknowledges the thin and blurry line between “street” and “decent,” there exists a line, nonetheless. Here I am paraphrasing Jodi Melamed, who writes, “Esteeming some people of color of the same race, according to conventional categories, makes it easier to accept that others of that same race may be systematically treated unequally.” Jodi Melamed, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 153.

44. Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1967), 42.

45. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 67.

46. John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (New York: Praeger, 1969), 17.

47. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 17.

48. Rodríguez uses “futurity” as a way of disrupting teleological assumptions related to civil rights regimes. See Dylan Rodríguez, “Inhabiting the Impasse: Racial/Racial-Colonial Power, Genocide Poetics, and the Logic of Evisceration,” Social Text 33, no. 3 (2015): 34.

49. Blume Oeur, Black Boys Apart, 102.

50. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 95.

51. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of a Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 9.

52. Carmen Sirianni, “Economies of Time in Social Theory: Three Approaches Compared,” Current Perspectives in Social Theory 8 (1987): 165.

53. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime: Black Music, Madness, and Metaphysical Syncopation,” Social Text 35, no. 4 (2017): 4.

54. Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime,” 11.

55. James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (London: St. Martin’s, 1985), 148.

56.Michelle M. Wright, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 145–46.

57. See Louise Seamster and Victor Ray, “Against Teleology in the Study of Race: Toward the Abolition of the Progress Paradigm,” Sociological Theory 36, no. 4 (2018): 315–42.

58. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 9.

59. I think it is worth thinking about Black a’ightness alongside Savannah Shange’s notion of “black girl ordinary.” As Shange writes, “Black girl ordinary is that which signifies on (but does not conform to) normative notions of gender through a performative blackness shaped by hip hop, social media, and conspicuous consumption: it is a mode of queer(ed) disidentification (Muñoz 1999).” Savannah Shange, “Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality and the Refusal of Ethnography,” Transforming Anthropology 27, no. 1 (2019): 6.

60. Brand, Map to the Door, 19.

61. Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

62. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 21.

63. See Harding, Living the Drama.

64. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 4.

65. Quashie, Sovereignty of Quiet, 18.

66. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 9.

67. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 9.

68. Muñoz adapts “the future is in the present” from C. L. R. James’s first volume of collected writings, The Future in the Present (1977). Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 55.

69. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 49.

70. Loïc Wacquant, “Inside ‘the Zone’: The Social Art of the Hustler in the American Ghetto,” in The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, ed. Pierre Bourdieu et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 155.

71. Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 2.

72. Javier Auyero demonstrates how waiting functions as a tool of political subordination used to exploit the time and labor of poor people. The political production of “subjective uncertainty” among poor people, according to Auyero, “finds its roots in objective unpredictability.” Javier Auyero, Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 82.

73. Waverly Duck describes such certainties as part of local “interaction orders.” Within poor urbanized space, an interaction order functions as “a rational adaptation to otherwise impossible circumstances.” Waverly Duck, No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3.

74. Anderson, Code of the Street, 135.

75. See Loïc Wacquant, “Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Mobility, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography,” American Journal of Sociology 107, no. 6 (2002): 1468–532. Wacquant critiques Mitchell Duneier, Slim’s Table: Race, Respectability, and Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Katherine S. Newman, No Shame in My Game: The Working Poor in the Inner City (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999); and Anderson, Code of the Street. Wacquant accuses the authors of flattening difference within heterogenous subgroups and rendering agency invisible while creating “unitary tales of difference” (emphasis in the original). Wacquant, “Scrutinizing the Street,” 1521.

76. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 20.

77. Saidiya V. Hartman, “The Time of Slavery,” The South Atlantic Quarterly. 101, no. 4 (2002): 772.

78. Denise Ferreira da Silva critiques postcolonial studies and critical race and ethnic studies (CRES) for an overemphasis on the exclusion of the racial other from modernity and post-Enlightenment knowledge projects. Critiques of the racial subaltern’s exclusion prompts scholars to imagine possibilities for inclusion. But it is precisely such a curiosity that Ferreira da Silva criticizes for producing Europe’s affectable racial “other” in relation to the (white) “transparent I.” As she writes, “Race relations has produced racial subjection as an effect of the fundamental impossibility of certain strangers’ becoming … modern. Not only does this produce blackness as an impossible basis for formulating any project of emancipation; it suggests that, because it is always already the exclusive attribute of a transparent I, the racial subaltern’s desire for emancipation, for inclusion in the dominant (white Anglo-Saxon society), is fundamentally a desire for self-obliteration.” Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 162.

79. See the distinction Ferreira da Silva makes between “scene of regulation” and “scene of representation” in Global Idea of Race, 38.

80. Hannerz, Soulside, 185–86. Hannerz classifies “cultural repertoires” and “ghetto-specific behavior” as learned behavior within poor urbanized space. William Julius Wilson argues that high levels of joblessness undermine social organization, leading to increasing crime, gang violence, drug dealing, and family breakups. Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Vintage, 1996), 21.

81. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 106.

82. Here I am thinking of the use of “police violence” as a tool to reaffirm the logic of policing itself. Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton write, “There are two possibilities: first, police violence is a deviation from the rules governing police procedures in general. Second, these various forms (e.g., racial profiling, street murders, terrorism) are the rule itself as standard operating procedure.” Steve Martinot and Jared Sexton, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 9, no. 2 (2003): 170.

83. Jina B. Kim, “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?,’” Lateral 6, no. 1 (2017), https://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-critical-disability-studies-crip-of-color-critique-kim/.

84. Damien M. Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

85. Ableism cannot be divorced from anti-Blackness and other forms of racialized violence. For example, Jason Whitesel suggests that the simultaneity, intersection, and interaction between racism, fat hatred, ageism, ableism, and classism cooperated to justify the police killings of Eleanor Bumpurs and Eric Garner. Jason Whitesel, “Intersections of Multiple Oppressions: Racism, Sizeism, Ableism, and the ‘Illimitable Etceteras’ in Encounters with Law Enforcement,” Sociological Forum 32, no. 2 (2017): 426–33.

86. Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime,” 3–4.

87. Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime,” 15.

88. Sharpe, In the Wake, 41.

89. Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, 32.

90. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 112.

91. Ytasha Womack credits Mark Dery with coining the term “Afrofuturism” in his 1994 essay, “Black to the Future.” Womack describes Afrofuturism as a tool taken up by “sci-fi-loving black college students and artists” seeking to affect transformative social change through science and technology in the 1980s and ’90s. Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013), 16. Octavia Butler is another one of Afrofuturism’s earliest innovators, and since her passing she has been widely celebrated for her own literary prescience. See Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents—two-thirds of a trilogy that was never finished. See also Survivor (1978) and Wild Seed (1980) for evidence of Butler’s rich imagination and capacity to construct alternative worlds and universes that defy normative conceptions of time and space, all while centering Black life.

92. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 6.

93. Zerubavel makes this distinction between “marked” and “unmarked time”: “As a strictly mathematical entity, time is homogenous, with every minute essentially identical to every other minute, as demonstrated by the way they are conventionally measured by the clock.” Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 23. This form of time, for Zerubavel, is “unmarked” because of its banality and synchronization to calendar days, weeks, months, etc. “Marked” time, by contrast, reflects those “extraordinary chunks of social reality” that help distinguish between “eventful” and “uneventful” historical periods (26).

94. Tasha is referring to Dylann Roof, a white man convicted of killing nine Black worshipers at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015. He was sentenced to nine consecutive life sentences without parole after pleading guilty to nine state counts of murder, and he was sentenced to the death penalty on federal charges after being found guilty at trial.

95. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 4.

96. DJs use the term “heavy rotation” to describe the high frequency of plays of a particular record.

97. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 51.

98. Pamela Perry, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic: White Youth and the Construction of ‘Cultureless’ Identities,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 30, no. 1 (2001): 58.

99. Hartman describes whiteness as an “incorporeal hereditament or illusory inheritance from chattel slavery.” Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 24.

100. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Unpayable Debt: Reading Scenes of Value against the Arrow of Time,” in The documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel, 2017), 81–112.

101. Perry, “White Means Never Having to Say You’re Ethnic,” 73.

102. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage International, 1962), 81.

103. Zerubavel, Time Maps, 25.

104. Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me,” in Book of Light (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon, 1993), 25.

105. Damien M. Sojoyner, “Dissonance in Time: (Un)making and (Re)mapping of Blackness,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso, 2017), 67.

106. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

107. Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime,” 23.

108. Bruce, “Interludes in Madtime,” 5.

109. Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance (New York: Persea Books, 1979), 111.

110. Katherine McKittrick, “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle: Sylvia Wynter and the Realization of Living,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 7–8.

111. Lauren Berlant, “Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material),” Feminist Studies 21, no. 2 (1995): 379–404.

112. Warren, Ontological Terror, 37.

113. Warren, Ontological Terror, 12.

114. Warren, Ontological Terror, 7.

115. Warren, Ontological Terror, 171.

116. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 138.

117. For more on mindfulness, see The Miracle of Mindfulness (1975), by Thích Nhất Hạnh; and The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment (1999) and/or Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life (2006), by John Kabat-Zinn.

118. Wilson, Truly Disadvantaged, 14.

119. In a critique of Hegel’s construction of the transcendental subject as the “culmination of a temporal trajectory,” Ferreira da Silva asks, “How could the recognition of transcendentality be limited to particular human beings located in a rather small corner of the globe?” Ferreira da Silva, Global Idea of Race, 86.

120. Fred Moten, Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 13.

121. Lisa M. Cacho, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

Conclusion

1. Frank B. Wilderson III and Tiffany Lethabo King, “Staying Ready for Black Study,” in Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler-Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, ed. Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 68.

2. Rachel Kushner, “Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind,” New York Times, April 17, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition-ruth-wilson-gilmore.html.

3. Here I am thinking about Jodi Byrd’s critique of an “affective investment in multicultural liberal democracy.” Byrd writes, “The Hopi (who became the site of a national affective investment in multicultural liberal democracy as the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign circulated the faux-Hopi prophecy ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’) are transformed into the logocentric imperial order that cannot tolerate any systemic line of flight.” Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 15. What about those who are not waiting but actively creating the not-yet-here?

4. Gilmore, Change Everything. Gilmore’s book is forthcoming; her quotation appears in the book description on the publisher’s website, accessed September 17, 2023, https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1597-change-everything.

5. In a panel discussion titled “The Architects of Abolitionism,” Joy James suggests that “abolition democracy” is a “promissory note” rooted in ideals and aspirations, without a sufficient critique of the state and adequate mobilization against the organized terror of fascism and genocidal systems. James offers a broader critique of the way the state has systematically deradicalized prison struggles. Brown University, “Joy James: The Architects of Abolitionism,” YouTube video, 1:45:57, May 6, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9rvRsWKDx0.

6. I am thinking with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, who make this important clarification about abolition: “Not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of a society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 114.

7. I am referring to the 1954 US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education.

8. Kara Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 34.

9. As Brand writes, ‘To travel without a map, to travel without a way. They did long ago. That misdirection became the way. After the Door of No Return, a map was only a set of impossibilities, a set of changing locations.” Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Random House, 2001), 224.

10. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 153.

11. King, Navarro, and Smith, Otherwise Worlds, 8.

12. King, Navarro, and Smith, Otherwise Worlds, 13.

13. Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 33.

14. La Marr Jurelle Bruce, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 75.

15. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 226.

16. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002), 9.

17. Kay Bonetti, “An Interview with Toni Cade Bambara,” in Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara, ed. Thabiti Lewis (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), 3.

18. Keeling, Queer Times, Black Futures, 126.

19. Dylan Rodríguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), 107.

20. Melissa Phruksachart, “The Literature of White Liberalism,” Boston Review, August 21, 2020, https://bostonreview.net/articles/melissa-phruksachart-literature-white-liberalism/.

21. George Jackson writes, “We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class. But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define it in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.’” George L. Jackson, Blood in My Eye (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1990), 118. Jackson speaks to the hegemonic character of reform that requires coercion and consent before being naturalized as common sense.

22. As Haunani Kay Trask states, “For Indigenous people, civil society is … a creation of settler colonizers.” Quoted in Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 149.