Introduction

Aims of the Book

This book is more than just a tome on time. In turning to the experiences of Black youth, it reveals why conventional sociological theories of time are both empirically and theoretically unsustainable and, more importantly, why they need to be funked with. As an application of ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews, this book departs from conventional sociological theories of time and representations of Black youth within urban sociology. My aim is to wean sociology off vapid approaches to operationalizing time by revealing how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and the consequences of owing versus owning time. Through these young people’s stories, we come to see that by borrowing time, Black youth could be criminalized by anyone—salespeople, teachers, police, and deputized whites.¹⁵ The charge? Using time and space that does not belong to them. Despite the stigma of time theft, the Black youth I study openly rebel against punctuality and time’s call to order. Youth funk up the clock while also funking with whiteness. Assailed by the onslaught of schedules, tardiness, deadlines, curfews, and other technologies of temporal discipline, Black youth have no other choice but to fight back in order to free themselves from time. By redefining start and end times and resisting liberal futurities predicated on “equal” opportunities, Black youth become key moderators of time and temporality. Funking the clock proves to be a site of generation. Each chapter in this book, then, is filled with vivid examples of youth constructing alternative temporalities that center their lived experiences and ensure their worldviews, tastes, and culture are most relevant and up to date. In their stories exists the potential to stretch the sociological imagination to make the familiar (i.e., time) strange. Through such an exercise, fissures and fractures emerge, revealing why existing theories within a sociology of time are untenable. In sum, this book forges new directions in the study of race and time, upending what we think we know about time and centering Black youths as key collaborators in attending to the task of rewriting knowledge as we know it.

Whose Youth Are the Future?

Embodying innocence, vulnerability, and boundless potential, children and youths are synonymous with future possibilities. Adults treat children as having the freedom to explore a world that promises protection and security. Investments in the future begin when we invest in children, or so they say. In short, “save the children” is also a call to save the future. The impetus behind this project does not rest in a shared belief that “the children are the future.” What concerns me, rather, are the children already relegated to an antifuture and thus out of and outside time. These are the children deemed always already expendable within time. Teachers are more likely to fail these youths because they “aren’t going to amount to anything” and hence remain noninvestments in the venture-capitalist future.¹⁶ Doctors are more likely to ignore these children’s symptoms because they “mature faster” than their peers, thus making them less susceptible to “childhood illness.” Police are more likely to kill these youths because they look like “demons” with the strength of “Hulk Hogan.” I am concerned about those youths consistently warned that they will likely end up either dead or in jail. In short, I am concerned with those who exceed containment within the category of “youth” because the innocence, vulnerability, and boundless potential of the Child function as exclusionary criteria.¹⁷

In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman describes the “Child” as the “perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.”¹⁸ It is the innocence of the Child that “solicits our defense.”¹⁹ What concerns Edelman is the potential of the Child to render the queer outside time and thus the future. As Edelman notes, “The sacralization of the Child thus necessitates the sacrifice of the queer.”²⁰ As compelling as Edelman’s argument is, I am left wondering about the eligibility criteria required to access the category of the Child and whether all children are capable of “sacralization.” We might then ask, Whose children are the future?

I argue that in prefiguring the Child as white, sociology is left with a narrow conception of youth development. Insofar as the Child is emblematic of futurity, the queer cannot exist. That is to say, within the logics of “reproductive futurisms,” the queer, according to Edelman, must be sacrificed in order to save the Child.²¹ Within one elision, however, exists many more. What concerns me are those left unprotected and largely outside the category of the Child. I am referring not only to racialized youth but also to queer and trans children of color. If, as Edelman argues, the queer exemplifies a threat to “reproductive futurism” and the Child is “the obligatory token of futurity,” where and when does this leave Black youths, particularly Black queer and trans youths like Dominique and JT?²² My research attends to their experiences. For example, how do Black youths fit into the “future,” when racialized and structural violence squeezes them out? How do Black youths read themselves into the future, when the future is so illiterate that it equates “child” with whiteness? As I wrestle with these questions, I wrest the “Child” from the clutches of whiteness and “Man” and show just how indispensable Black and other racialized youths are to what was, what is, and what is to be.²³

This is what Nina Simone means when she sings, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black.” The world that is “waiting” for Black youths may look quite different from the one they currently inhabit. As the subtitle of this book suggests, I aim to add a dose of funk (as tactfully as possible) to Simone’s classic by substituting “perceptive” for “gifted.” Several of the youths I worked with at Run-a-Way knew there was another world waiting for them because they could see it. But just because another world may have been waiting for Black youths does not mean they were going to wait for it. Hence, Black youths funked the clock in order to inhabit that world today.

The intersection of race and time is still a largely unexplored topic within sociology, while any examination of the temporalities of racialized youth remains unprecedented.²⁴ Because of this empirical void within sociology, an undertaking of this magnitude is most fruitful when engaging with a range of disciplines. Hence, in addition to sociology, this research is informed by a variety of fields including Black studies, queer theory, ethnic studies, critical anthropology, cultural studies, American studies, critical geography, history, and English. I place these various disciplines in conversation to describe how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racialized violence shapes youths’ perspectives on time.

Johannes Fabian refers to “temporalization” as “the various means a language has to express time relations”: “Semiotically, it designates the constitution of sign relations with temporal referents. Ideologically, temporalization has the effect of putting an object of discourse into a cosmological frame such that the temporal relation becomes central and topical (e.g., over and against spatial relations).”²⁵ Fabian critiques anthropology’s approach to locating its object within time while making clear that temporalization is wrought with power relations. Fabian is specifically concerned with social scientists’ refusal to allow “the other,” or the exoticized object of social research, to inhabit the same (modern) space and time as the researcher. By contrast, this book acknowledges that Black youths are ahead of their time.²⁶ I also show respect for youths’ power to defy the “here and now” in favor of what José Esteban Muñoz describes as a “then and there.”²⁷ The intimate connection between space and time warrants some discussion of the context in which I study the temporalities of Black youth.

Run-a-Way

In December 2014, my interest in studying the relationships between race, time, and youth brought me to Run-a-Way—a multiservice center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, providing support to youth in crisis, and where most of this story takes place. “Run-a-Way” is a pseudonym, as well as a play on existing constructions of youth “deviance,” delinquency, and the consequences of being unhoused. I liken this prescience to Cedric Robinson’s notion of the “Black Radical Tradition.” Robinson makes a similar point when distinguishing between a “runaway” and “fugitive status”: “At some point when I was writing Black Marxism, I came across the notion of the ‘runaway.’ Most historians talk about runaways, write about runaways. But I became convinced that that language contained and persisted in the notion that slave agency was childlike. Children run away, but what these people were doing was achieving fugitive status.”²⁸

Robinson’s critique of “runaways,” while mostly on point and on time, overlooks the capacity of Black children to achieve a fugitive status. Perhaps Robinson sees the “child” as always already white, thus making Black youths exempt from critique. Still, having worked in paid and unpaid youthwork positions for nearly a decade, I know that youths do not simply “run away.” Many are, in fact, running a way. In other words, they are running with a vision and with prescience.

I volunteered at Run-a-Way as a direct-care worker for fifteen months. Run-a-Way sought to set itself apart from what youths may be accustomed to seeing in similar programs such as group homes, residential programs, hospitals, youth jails, and other restrictive settings. Unlike in most of these programs, youths are not mandated to remain at Run-a-Way. During my time there, I worked with over one hundred youths but limited my research to thirty, including twenty-one who identified as Black or African American, seven mixed-race youths (most of whom have one African American/Black parent), one Native youth, and one youth who identified as “Hispanic.” Nine youths who identified as Black or African American also identified as Native American, making the connections between Blackness and Indigeneity an integral part of this story. With heteronormativity and maleness indexing “natural history,” nation making, empire building, and youth development, queer and trans youth generally, and Black queer and trans youth in particular, remain largely ignored within studies of time.²⁹ My interviewees included fifteen boys, fourteen girls, and one nonbinary youth.³⁰

The group was consistent with the overall demographics of youth served at Run-a-Way, 67 percent of whom are between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, while 30 percent are between twelve and fourteen, 2 percent between ten and twelve, and 1 percent age eighteen. While there is a similar ratio of white to nonwhite among staff, volunteers, and interns, most of the youth served are nonwhite, with a significant overrepresentation of Black/African American youth. The racial and ethnic demographics of Run-a-Way youth are as follows: 50 percent Black/African American; 22 percent white; 16 percent “biracial”; 4 percent Native American; 2 percent Hispanic; 2 percent Asian; and 4 percent other. Girls have a slight majority (55 percent) over boys (44 percent) at Run-a-Way. In 2018, Run-a-Way served 833 youths (15 percent of the total number served) who identified as LGBTQ. The overrepresentation of queer and trans youth at Run-a-Way was consistent with previous statistics on youth homelessness in Minnesota.³¹

Funk the Formula

This book is based on “mixed methods” research. The strict limits on what constitutes mixed methods research in sociology makes such a claim debatable. To be more specific, sociology tends to privilege a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods as the only mix that counts. Despite its emphasis on time, this book has little to do with numbers or quantitative statistics. How do we quantify qualitatively distinct experiences? What are the consequences of reducing lived realities to coefficients and asterisks? In short, what is lost in statistical translation? I am funking the literal formula required in quantitative analyses and the methodological formula that seeks to quantify the unquantifiable and demonstrate a regression from a mean that does not mean much to those rendered illegible within the mean itself.

In addition to my use of in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation, I rely on less conventional approaches that in many ways exceed the methodological capacity of “qualitative” or “quantitative” research. This book is part autoethnography and memoir, which makes memory work integral to my method. My biography informs my scholarship in important ways. Still, I’m hesitant to reduce my story to “data.” I am not seeking to claim generalizability or representativeness based on the way my life has unfolded. Instead, I acknowledge the way in which particular events in my life course shape the way I theorize connections between time and race.

My biography also informs my writing style. As a youth, sidewalks, stoops, corners, bus stops, basketball courts, school hallways, cafeterias, auditoriums, and the classroom all looked and sounded a lot like the “Can You Use That Word in a Sentence?” contest that Kiese Laymon describes in Long Division.³² Like City and LaVander Peeler—two of the novel’s central characters—if you wanted clout, you had to be nice with words. Wordplay was both an offensive and defensive strategy. In other cases, the goal was more simple: funk the grammar. So when the pressures of the university demand conformity to the formulaic prose saturating sociology, I think about the utility of greater code sticking and less code switching. My hope is that readers engage with this book as they would a favorite song—through feeling more than listening or reading.

It would be disingenuous of me to suggest that I am striving to make Funk the Clock accessible to all Black youths. First, it is worth considering that any attempt to make academic writing and knowledge “more accessible to a wider audience” presupposes the idea that there is something that the university has to offer to this wider audience in the first place. Such presuppositions only further privilege the university as a gatekeeper of knowledge, while disregarding the many contributions of knowledge producers outside the academy. Second, there is a need to appreciate difference within already differentiated groups and refrain from what Michelle M. Wright describes as a “qualitative collapse” (of Blackness).³³ Though Black youths recognized the way their fates were linked to other Black people, they also recognized that Blackness and Black people are not singular but plural. Several Black queer and trans youths, for example, exposed the multidimensionality of Blackness. Hence, these stories may resonate with some Black youths but not others.

Sociology, as a discipline, has left me averse to prescribed ways of thinking, learning, and knowing. I remain skeptical of sociological claims and subtitles that begin with “How to …” Perhaps sociology could benefit from fewer answers and more wonderings and/or questions, including self-inquiry and self-critique. For example, how are sociologists complicit in concealing what they claim to be hidden in plain sight? Is sociology capable of making space for more knowledge destruction and less knowledge production? There is no question that other sociologists find themselves in a similarly antagonistic relationship to the discipline. Sociology and “its others” have work to do.³⁴ The goal is not to save the discipline, but rather to decide on the appropriate ways for sociology and sociologists to be held accountable for creating the same systems of power and domination they seek to dismantle. If this is not possible, then perhaps the goal is to make the current enterprise of sociology untenable.

My research began with ethnographic observation, and a significant amount of my time at Run-a-Way was spent observing how the youths spent “their” time. I volunteered four days a week for approximately six hours a day, usually from three in the afternoon until nine or ten o’clock at night. I spent much of my initial ethnographic work observing the youths’ comportment to personal and programmatic schedules. I paid close attention to their punctuality, comparing their physical deportment in meetings with staff to their demeanor with peers. Jottings helped capture how they responded to programmatic benchmarks such as chores, job applications, and medical appointments.

Rather than feed into the empirical obsession with coherence and intelligibility, I situate my participant observation within the subfield of cubist ethnography. Within cubist ethnography, according to Javier Auyero and Débora Alejandra Swistun, “the essence of an object is captured only by showing it simultaneously from multiple points of view.”³⁵ Attempting to understand how Black youths reckon with time requires a similar willingness to embrace the heterogeneity, inconsistencies, and contradictions of temporality. I spent approximately three to four hours after each shift at Run-a-Way translating my jottings into ethnographic fieldnotes. After approximately six months of ethnographic observation, I began conducting in-depth interviews. Still, as I describe my attempts to funk the formula, I cannot help but heed Katherine McKittrick’s caution: “Description is not liberation.”³⁶ And contrary to the claims of both conventional and critical sociologists, neither is prescription.³⁷ Conventional sociological research methods courses emphasize four types of social research: (1) descriptive, (2) exploratory, (3) explanatory, and (4) evaluative. To this end, it is worth reminding sociologists that just as description is not liberation, neither is exploration, explanation, or evaluation, particularly when it comes to understanding Black life, Black sociality, and Black people.

With permission from each youth, all interviews were audio recorded. Interviews ranged from forty-five minutes to one hour and forty-five minutes, with most averaging about one hour. Interview locations varied depending on available space and the youths’ preferences. Most interviews took place in a private conference room, usually reserved for evening groups on subjects such as “healthy relationships” and “chemical health.” The interview schedule contained a series of questions related to (1) opportunity structures; (2) perceptions of time and space; (3) race, racialization, and racism; and (4) life course transitions and trajectories. In return for their participation, each youth received a ten-dollar gift card. At the end of each interview, the youths completed a one-page sheet with several demographic questions related to race, ethnicity, school, and eligibility for free or reduced lunch at school.

During my orientation to Run-a-Way, most staff and volunteers were encouraged to “meet youth where they are at.” To refrain from reproducing the violent temporalizing logics of the “ethnographic present,” I strived to meet them both where and when they were at.³⁸ As I argue in chapter 7, several youths at Run-a-Way were not only ahead of their time but ahead of time itself. For example, a number of Black youths engaged in a sort of self-synchronization by linking their own tastes and worldviews with the latest trends in music, fashion, and social media. Youths taught me what was “lit” and “litty.” Sometimes I had to learn the hard way. For example, during a game of foosball, before each score or mere attempt to score, one youth would taunt me by saying, “Look at the flicka da wrist.”³⁹ I was familiar with the verse’s connotation and was impressed with the youth’s wit and skill in turning a reference to cooking crack into some effective trash talking—so effective, in fact, that the score was something like eleven to one. Admittedly, I had not yet heard this song. So later that evening, I found myself doing my homework on YouTube. Being an effective youthworker requires you to be a quick learner, especially when it comes to youth slang. Those who cannot keep up will be left in the discursive dust, precisely because many Black youth wield a “high-tech dialect you ain’t catch yet.”⁴⁰

My aim in this project was to theorize with youth, rather than using them as evidence. First, I took note of Renato Rosaldo’s serious, yet sincere, reminder that “the objects of social analysis are also analyzing subjects whose perceptions must be taken nearly as seriously as ‘we’ take our own.”⁴¹ Upon entering Run-a-Way, most youth began creating their own research agendas, and both staff and volunteers were objects of their analysis. Their data often included personal information about staff and volunteers (e.g., age, marital status, and racial/ethnic background). My own racial identity proved to be of great interest to a number of youths. As a mixed-race person, I received the usual “What are you?” question.⁴² If staff were present and overheard such a question, they sometimes intervened by treating the youths as if they had just cursed. It is quite common in youthwork for staff to evade questions about their personal lives by saying something like, “We are not here to talk about me. Let’s focus on you and how we can work together to help you reach your goals so you can get out of here.” Alternatively, some workers are taught to answer youths’ questions with a question of their own: “Why does my race interest you?” While such questions are offered with the purported goal of protecting both the youth and the worker, they inevitably intensify existing asymmetrical power relations.

Most youths were proficient at observing while being observed. They peeped the scene, the program, and the staff using what Steve Mann describes as “sousveillance”: “observing and recording by an entity not in a position of power or authority over the subject of the veillance.”⁴³ Simone Browne goes on to advance the concept of “dark sousveillance”:

a way to situate the tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight… . I plot dark sousveillance as an imaginative place from which to mobilize a critique of racializing surveillance, a critique that takes form in antisurveillance, countersurveillance, and other freedom practices. Dark sousveillance, then, plots imaginaries that are oppositional and that are hopeful for another way of being. Dark sousveillance is a site of critique, as it speaks to black epistemologies of contending with antiblack surveillance, where the tools of social control in plantation surveillance or lantern laws in city spaces and beyond were appropriated, co-opted, repurposed, and challenged in order to facilitate survival and escape.⁴⁴

Black youths at Run-a-Way were adept at dodging cameras when returning to the program after curfew or simply evading staff during the day. There were approximately five television monitors located in the main office on the first floor that relayed video feeds from the cameras. I never saw any staff reviewing old footage, though it no doubt happened. I sensed that many staff members reckoned with the tension of needing to perform carework within the context of a paternalistic power structure that treats youths as liabilities.

At Run-a-Way, youths learn to be deferential to a number of adults whom they may have known for only a few days, weeks, or months. Some of the younger staff, particularly college interns, pointed out that adults’ expectations that youths remain deferent was an extension of hegemonic power and made youths, particularly racialized youths, vulnerable to authoritative manipulation and control. Generally, there were few staff members who maintained a “by-the-book” approach to the work. Most staff, particularly staff of color, tended to strike a balance between sharing some aspects of their personal lives and keeping other parts private. When asked about my own racial identity, I tended to respond by describing my parents’ racial identities. I informed youths that I was “mixed race” and that my mother is white and my father is from Trinidad and is of Indian (South Asian) descent. My father identifies as Black and Indian. But I did not expect youths to read me as Black. In fact, several assumed I was Latino.

Regardless of whether you are a caseworker, teacher, doctor, or other professional, interviewing youths is not an easily adaptable skill. My experience as a former youthworker and social worker reminded me that many youths have legitimate reasons to remain tight-lipped around adults.⁴⁵ Most youths at Run-a-Way had already shared their stories with multiple staff members at Run-a-Way alone, including intake workers, caseworkers, and therapists, and even with their peers during groups. During interviews, I did not ask about “turning points” or “transitions” in the life course, but rather gave youths the space and time to contribute in whatever way made them most comfortable. In my experience, social workers, family regulation/child welfare workers, and even some youthworkers are experts at reading a child’s biography through a lens of “intergenerational transmission” of dysfunction. Several youths shared intimate aspects of their biography both during and outside interviews. The fact that many of these disclosures were volunteered, rather than extracted, signaled at least partial trust in my role as a volunteer staff. While my interview schedule did not include many sensitive questions related to family or personal experiences with various forms of trauma, an abstract topic like time is not a popular conversation starter. But the lack of empirical evidence about the temporalities of Black youth is precisely why this research is not only warranted but desperately needed.

Interviews presented the opportunity for youths to elaborate on what is so often obscured in quantitative research methods: namely, the incommensurability between white and nonwhite experiences and the false equivalence between control variables and racialized reality. Youths were eager for the opportunity to make experiences routinely rendered illegible within quantitative data legible, such as racialized bias in schools or at Run-a-Way, whiteness, and police violence. Still, I left ample room for them to deviate from the methodological path of the interview. They did not always answer the questions I asked. Instead they sometimes inverted the terms and conditions of the interview by turning questions on their head. In turn, Black youths at Run-a-Way expanded the breadth of our collective theorizations on time.

I draw inspiration from Yarimar Bonilla’s research on contemporary labor activism in Guadeloupe, the overseas department of France. In aiming to place Guadeloupean labor movements within the context of broader Caribbean postcolonial politics, Bonilla is careful not to ventriloquize her interlocutors. Rather, the goal is to “not just ‘face the native’ but theorize with them” (emphasis in the original).⁴⁶ Bonilla’s aim aligns with my broader commitment toward decentering the university as a gatekeeper of knowledge and the primary site of knowledge production. I respect the intellectual capacity of those without extra initials behind their names to sabotage research agendas, demolish cherished theoretical frameworks, and effortlessly extinguish scholars with caustic quips like, “Who lied to you and said it was a good idea for you to become a professor?” or “Your scholarship smells like scholarshit.”

Apart from locked facilities (i.e., detention centers and residential treatment programs) and actual homes, there are few places like Run-a-Way where youths live, learn, and labor. Among its many services, Run-a-Way offers access to a twenty-four-hour crisis hotline, an emergency shelter program, a transitional living program for sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds, individual and family counseling, community education and outreach, and weekly support groups for boys, girls, and queer and trans youths. Youths at Run-a-Way are there “voluntarily,” though many are brought by parents, social workers, or other referral sources. Most attend public school outside the program and spend a fair amount of time in their communities. Leaving the program without permission, however, places a youth at risk of “losing their bed,” or being barred from returning without staff approval. The combination of research methods, procedures, and sampling strategy produced rich findings and contributions to the sociology of time, urban ethnography, and the life course perspective. From morning wake-up calls to evening curfews, I and other staff members at Run-a-Way remained embedded in an environment where Black youths’ temporalities manifest.

Funk the Spot

Run-a-Way is in a bustling, commercial district in the Twin Cities comprising yuppies, hipsters, college students, and older homeowners, most of whom are white. All of Run-a-Way’s services are housed in a three-story brick building. I spent most of my time at Run-a-Way in the emergency shelter program, located on the second floor. For most youth, there is only one way in and one way out of the emergency shelter program—a large door at the top of the second-floor stairwell with a small rectangular windowpane on the upper half of the door. Upon entry, youths are greeted by a vibrant mural filled with colorful trees, a cornucopia of fruit, inviting messages like “Peace” and “Welcome,” and a palette of painted people. In the middle of the wall, there is an elevator used by staff and youths with disabilities. The elevator is located in a spacious living room with a worn shag carpet, several pieces of furniture, and a large shelving unit for books, board games, and a large flat-screen TV. When not in use, the TV was locked behind two cupboard doors. Staff members maintaining more austere approaches to their work treated television watching as a way of skirting the challenge of engaging youths in more generative activities or conversations. To avoid the risk of placating them with television, staff encouraged them to spend their free time playing cards, drawing, playing foosball, and, when possible, listening to music in the annex space attached to the living room.

Typically, there were also approximately three to four working desktop computer stations, where youths could do homework, apply for jobs, or perform other tasks that aligned with Run-a-Way’s expectations for “progress.” Across from the activity room is a long hallway leading to a laundry room and four to five bedrooms, most of which were gendered. From what I observed, queer and trans youths were usually allowed to reside in rooms matching their gender identity.⁴⁷ There were two beds in each room, some of which were bunked. Each room shared a bathroom with neighbors in the next room over. Next to the beds was ample storage space for clothes, shoes, school supplies, and so on. There was also shared desk space facing large windows overlooking the street below.

Windows were a key benefit of the activity room and bedrooms. Not only did they provide sunlight and fresh air, but they also served as important portals to the outside world, which was largely a world of whiteness. Youths delighted in mocking the local residents out for a stroll, a casual run around a local lake, or other activities they saw as reserved mostly for the white and wealthy. Black and other racialized youths held little to no reservations about yelling out the windows to ask local passersby, “How come you dress like you ain’t got money?” Playing pretend poor was, in the words of many youths, “not cute.” In fact, most of them were insulted by local hipsters who appeared unfazed by any expectations to prove they were not poor. Unlike Run-a-Way’s neighbors, Black and other racialized youths could not inhabit a whiteness that, in Sara Ahmed’s words, “allows bodies to move with comfort through space, and to inhabit the world as if it were home.”⁴⁸ Many racialized youths, particularly Black youths, knew that the sense of safety and security that local residents maintained required the construction of unsafety in their communities, including Minneapolis’s Northside.⁴⁹ It was this recognition that motivated one youth to ask a white man walking by the program’s courtyard, “That’s you with that gas?”⁵⁰ This was his attempt to get the white man to admit to smoking weed. The youth knew the answer to his own question but still found it amusing watching white people try to decipher slang. More importantly, all the youths outside that day enjoyed the sight of upper-middle-class whites questioning their own spatio-temporal location and proprietorship, while wondering whether they could still move through the world like they owned it. Making fun of local residents, though, was nothing compared to the youths’ being made to feel as though they inhabit a different space and time, despite residing next door.

When outside the program, youths saw firsthand what George Lipsitz terms “the possessive investment in whiteness” and protectionist stances over white spacetime.⁵¹ Based on their experiences in the upscale community surrounding Run-a-Way, many youths were not under any illusion that “Minnesota nice” would protect them. Even before “social distancing” was a thing, local white residents would cross the street to avoid racialized youths. I watched white people clutch their purses, just as tightly as they held their children, as we made our routine treks around a local lake. Even if they received an occasional fake smile, the youths knew that this was more indicative of Minnesota polite than Minnesota nice. At six or seven in the evening, it was far too late for our ragtag group of youths and adults to be out on a field trip. I would not have been surprised if some neighborhood parents used youths at Run-a-Way as scare tactics, warning their children to behave themselves unless they wanted to end up like “those kids.” Apparently, white habitats were integral to constructing what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “white habitus.”⁵²

During most shifts, there were approximately two to three staff members on the floor, though it was not uncommon to find at least one of them in the office completing paperwork or having a one-on-one conversation with a youth about their progress in the program and long-term goals. At nine thirty at night, after a day filled with recreational activities, homework help, and meals, youth and staff gathered in the living room of the shelter program to do “end-of-the-day check-ins” and our group closing. A staff member would initiate the conversation by asking for a volunteer to say their name and report a “high and low”—a positive and negative part of the youth’s day. After each youth checked in, staff asked about their needs and preferences for the next day’s morning activity. Youths took turns informing the group of their school’s start time, the time they wished to be woken up, whether they would take a shower in the morning or evening, and whether they had any current medication needs. During most circles, those who were enrolled in school left a half-hour window between the time they woke up and the first bell. Most students, especially those relying on public transportation, would inevitably be late to school. Staff often challenged a youth’s desired wake-up time by writing an earlier time in the shift report. Still, there were countless instances of youths refusing to wake up any earlier than their requested time. Whether they were arriving fashionably late to a party or making their presence felt by disrupting existing schedules, Black youths at Run-a-Way asserted their positions as temporal conductors and demonstrated a unique ability to funk the clock, whether at school or at Run-a-Way.

The daily structure for youths at Run-a-Way varied by program. Those in the emergency shelter program spent more time with one another compared to those in the independent living program located one floor above. Mealtimes, however, were one exception. Every evening, youths in the independent living program and emergency shelter program gathered on the third floor to break bread. Usually at least one staff member and one youth helped prepare the evening’s meal together. Before each meal, staff and youths would gather in a circle and each say one thing they were thankful for. Most staff expressed being thankful that the youths at Run-a-Way were somewhere safe and that they had an opportunity to share a meal together. Responses from youths struck a similar tone, with most expressing gratitude to friends and staff from Run-a-Way. On weekends and nonschool days, youths from both programs also had breakfast and lunch together. Still, there were marked distinctions between the emergency shelter program and the independent living program.

Though several youths from the emergency shelter program regularly petitioned staff to transfer to the independent living program, only a select few would be chosen to “step up.” Located on the highest floor of the building, the independent living program is designed to signal progression from a lower level or stage of youth development. Eligible youths must demonstrate a certain level of “maturity.” Many make the transition from the emergency shelter after showing compliance with the program structure. Most had to be at least sixteen years old and be actively searching for a job and/or their own apartment. While many youths stayed in the emergency shelter program only for a couple of weeks, those in the independent living program had the option of staying up to one year, with some staying longer due to extenuating circumstances.⁵³ For example, during their time in the program, some youths lost jobs, got “got” by shady landlords, or faced challenges in reunifying with their families. Still, most who transitioned from one floor below were happy to no longer be among the “little kids” in the emergency shelter program.

Most youths in the independent-living program had greater freedom, including later curfews, which meant the floor tended to be quieter than the shelter program. There were also some slight differences in the physical design of the program. For example, in place of the large living room was an industrial-size kitchen with ample cafeteria-style seating. There was a tacit understanding that the kitchen was contested terrain. Because youths in the independent living program could buy their own food to keep in the program, there were occasional quarrels over food that went missing. This was one of the many reasons why staff pleaded with youths to label their food with the stickers provided. Youths took pride in being able to buy and cook their own food, which they would prepare after coming home from school or work. Overall, staff held greater expectations for youths in independent living, in hopes of strengthening their preparedness to find a steady job and/or an apartment once they left Run-a-Way.

Most other space at Run-a-Way was reserved for administration, case management, conference rooms, activities, and storage. The case management office, health clinic/medicine room, individual and family therapist offices, and several rooms used to conduct intakes with new youths, were located on the ground floor. There was also a wing of the ground floor housing additional office space, accessible only by staff. The basement held a conference room, which functioned as an activity space in the evening. As part of their contractual agreements, several local youth-based organizations visited Run-a-Way to facilitate weekly workshops and activities in the conference room. Youths participated in pet therapy with dogs, made art with graffiti artists, rehearsed roles with performance artists, practiced meditation, and competed in the occasional video game tournament. The basement also housed a makeshift gym, with minimally operable machines that most youths were reluctant to use out of fear of being spotted using janky equipment and getting injured while doing so. Connected to the gym was a donation closet. Youths who arrived at Run-a-Way without sufficient clothes, shoes, coats, or hygiene products were able to take whatever they needed from shelves of new and used items. Most of the food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner came from the food pantry, large walk-in refrigerator, and freezer in the basement. Only staff were permitted to access the food pantry and fridge, but youths would occasionally finagle their way in and gather a stash of snacks for personal and possibly collective use. In warmer weather, youths spent recreation time in the backyard, where they had the option of playing basketball using a portable hoop on a small concrete patio similar in size to two parking spaces. Those that opted out usually spent time hanging out together at a picnic table on a small grassy area in the backyard. When in the program, youths made the rounds through all these spaces, but they spent most of their time in the emergency shelter program and/or the transitional living program.

Racialization and Temporalization of Youths in Urbanized Space

Based on self-identifying information acquired during intake processes,⁵⁴ I use the term “racialized youths” to refer to youths of color. I do not use “Black youths” and “racialized youths” interchangeably. Instead, “racialized youths” is meant to be inclusive of the few youths in this book who may not identify as Black but are nonetheless racialized. Black and other racialized youths experience similar consternation over being told they are “the future” while watching their futures foreclosed by structural violence. My aim, though, centers the experiences of Black youths, including several who identify as Black and Indigenous. I occasionally use “racialized youths” rather than “youths of color” to avoid euphemizing a dynamic, hybrid, and heterogeneous group of racially marginalized persons. “Youths of color” and “people of color” are both rooted in a politicized consciousness and awareness of the collective strength and self-determination of racially oppressed groups.

What concerns me, though, is the potential for “people of color” to flatten difference in service of mutuality, equilibrium, equivalence, commensurability, and consistency. In such cases, “people of color” obscures the incommensurability of different forms of racialized violence and the need for those disproportionately harmed to disproportionately benefit. Attention to such complexities upholds key principles of intersectional analysis. As Grace Hong writes, “what intersectionality inherently means is the recognition of difference rather than a demand for uniformity.”⁵⁵ This book resists demands to sacrifice incommensurability in favor of similarity. Instead, each youth’s story remains grounded in nuanced understandings of their unique relation to racialized violence and the disproportionate impact of temporal alterity.

Too great an emphasis on “people of color” conceals the way in which anti-Blackness and colonization exceed the available meanings and grammars linked to “discrimination” or even “racism.” This is in part why Dylan Rodríguez aims to distinguish white supremacy from both anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. “The latter forms of dominance,” Rodríguez argues, are “not fundamentally aspirational, but the long existing, pre-aspirational conditions through which white supremacy is made fathomable and coherent.”⁵⁶ As hauntings, the afterlives of slavery and conquest condition Black and Indigenous persons’ life chances and chances at life.⁵⁷ By differential “chances at life,” I am referring to the role of educational enclosures, the penal-legal system, police terror, and starvation wage work in contributing to the premature deaths of those attempting to survive in spaces not meant for living. A central contribution of this book is to illustrate the role of racialization and racialized violence in taking time from Black youth. Not only do I make clear how time is racialized, but I also argue that racialization itself takes time.

To better operationalize how racialization takes time, I draw on Steve Martinot’s conceptualization of racialization as a cultural structure—a structure of social categorizations of people.⁵⁸ Racialization, Martinot writes, has “nothing to do with blood or the inheritance of appearance. It is a social status that is imposed on people through political definition.”⁵⁹

It [racialization] derives from the verb “to racialize.” It refers not to the social status of people (of different colors) that produces itself culturally in this society (as Omi and Winant 1994 use the term), but rather to what is done socially and culturally to people for which personal derogation and alien status are part of the outcome. It is a transitive verb. “Race” is something that one group of people does to others. In the hierarchy of “race,” one group racializes another by thrusting them down to subordinate levels in a dehumanizing processes… . [R]ace is something that Europeans, in the course of colonization of other people, have done to those people. “To racialize” and “to humanize” stand opposite each other, in contradiction.⁶⁰

Racialization, according to Martinot, occurs within three distinct yet mutually constitutive dimensions: (1) individual, (2) institutional, and (3) cultural. At the individual level, racialization involves what Frantz Fanon describes as “epidermalization”⁶¹—the inscription of race on the body. It is a process of being, as Fanon so eloquently notes, “overdetermined from the outside.”⁶² Racialization commands racialized subjects to reckon with the experience of being marked as temporally, spatially, and ontologically other. Racialization requires the construction of a threat to produce and protect the purity of whiteness. Once overdetermined as inferior and thus a “threat,” racialized subjects are at an even greater risk of violence.

Racialization, however, is not limited to microlevel interactions but is part of the standard operating procedure of virtually all social institutions. Racialization has no fixed spatial, temporal, or institutional location. Schools, hospitals, the penal-legal system, poor urbanized space, wealthy suburbanized space, and the state are among the many institutions in which racialization resides.⁶³Funk the Clock examines how many of these institutions remain complicit in ensuring that racialized youth begin from temporal deficits. For example, the equation of the ghetto and barrios with anachronistic space ensures that Black youth will remain suspended in time and rendered illegible within progress narratives linked to modernity.⁶⁴

Finally, at the cultural level, racialization takes form in what Martinot describes as the “white para-political state, its periodic white vigilantism, the general support for police harassment and brutality against black and brown people, and support for U.S. interventionism.”⁶⁵ It is within the cultural level that deputized whites deny Black youth coevalness, or the capacity to inhabit a similar spacetime. Lacking contemporaneity within white logic made it possible for many Black youths at Run-a-Way to have consistently been in the wrong place at the wrong time. At all three levels, racialization constitutes whiteness. In other words, white people need racialized others to know they are white and thus not (negatively) racialized. Racialization also affirms white people’s status as modern and antithetical to the atavistic status of their negatively racialized counterparts.

Racialization is further complicated by Nandita Sharma’s reference to “negatively racialized persons.”⁶⁶ Sharma allows the term to stand on its own without conceptualization, but she seems to suggest that racialization is integral to the construction of an ontological order through selective ascription of value and humanness. Though “negative” reinforces an absolute state of abjection, if left alone “racialization” possesses a universal application across all racialized groups. While “positive racialization” may sound absurd, there remains a need to recognize differences among those within an already differentiated category.

Racialization involves more than what Michael Omi and Howard Winant describe as the institutionalization of particular groups into “a politically organized racial system.”⁶⁷ It also, they argue, exceeds “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified social relationship, social practice or group.”⁶⁸ Countering existing ideas within the sociology of race and ethnicity as well as critical race theory, this research does not entertain the common sociological claim that white people must also be included within the category of “racialized.” Such claims teeter on a precipice above white liberal humanisms and relentless pursuits of commensurability. I cannot, though, be an apologist for whiteness.⁶⁹ Neither will I massage its contours to help white people feel included as “other” or “them,” when they are in fact “it” and “us.” To further substantiate my position, I draw on Helen Ngo’s instructive conceptualization of “racialization”:

Throughout this book, “racialization” designates the process by which one is deemed to have “race.” In the context of the West, this invariably means the process by which people of color are assigned a racial identity, whereas people of Caucasian description are not; racialization is about the production of a racialized “other” and a concurrent non-naming, normalizing, and centering of the white “I.” … Racialization, then, is almost always a form of racism… . Moreover, I use separate terms also to draw attention to the way racialization—the process of assigning a racial identity to a person of color with all its associated meanings and trappings—forms the basis of racism understood in its narrower sense.⁷⁰

According to Ngo, the banality of the white “I” is what disqualifies it from racialization. Sylvia Wynter might describe this as the “overrepresentation of Man as human.” Whiteness is as much of a sociohistorical construct as other racial formations, but in reality, whiteness proceeds as if it were race neutral and ahistorical. This is why scholars describe whiteness as a “hidden ethnicity” and white people as “cultureless.”⁷¹ Renato Rosaldo makes this point exceptionally clear when distinguishing between the white, Western self and the nonwhite other: “As the Other becomes more culturally visible, the self becomes correspondingly less so.”⁷²

White people understand themselves as the default racial group yet still without race. While some white people recognize the construction of whiteness and what Nell Irvin Painter describes as “the history of white people,” most understand themselves to be the default.⁷³ So as much as we can agree that white people are not race neutral, I believe there exists an important need to distinguish between what is and what ought to be the case.

This is especially important given the success of the Trump administration in weaponizing whiteness while also constructing it as under threat. For example, Mike King’s theorization of “aggrieved whiteness” reveals a perverse logic that leaves an overwhelming number of white men “in their feelings.”⁷⁴ They are reminded that there is no need to apologize for being white. To the extent that white people are connected to racialization, they are, according to Denise Ferreira da Silva, products of raciality that manufactures the “transparent I” in the form of a “post-Enlightenment” European subject and the racialized, subaltern, and affectable “Other.”⁷⁵ While some critical race theorists petition for white inclusion in the category of the “racialized,” this book thwarts such attempts in favor of a more nuanced and critical assessment of racialization.⁷⁶

Because racialization is itself a value-making process, the racialization of time reinforces a dichotomy of “deviance” and decency, whereby white people reap rewards for remaining on (white) time and nonwhite people pay the price for remaining off it. Racialization is a process of ontological ordering in which life value is guaranteed for some, ascribed to a select few, and denied to others. Racialization is also relational. Thus, differential racialization occurs within an uneven biopolitical distribution, whereby specific categories of the human gain value through the devaluation of others. Racialization and racialized violence ensure that Black and other racialized youth remain asynchronous and out of step with temporal progress. Perhaps time’s march onward is predicated on racialized youth remaining stuck in place.⁷⁷

The temporalizing capacity of racialization is clear. What is less evident is racialized youth’s capacity to resist temporalization. Funk the Clock tells the story of Black youths reckoning with time and producing liberatory temporalities to free themselves from essentialist representations and narratives not their own.⁷⁸ Black youths can no longer be told the time. The firsthand accounts making up this text suggest that Black youths have a lot to say not only to time but also to those who claim to be able to tell it.

My aim, then, is to trouble time through ethnographic observation and first-person interviews far too rich and theoretically dense for interpretation within existing sociological paradigms. To this end, youths at Run-a-Way present a preview of what it looks like to live asynchronously with the temporal logics of whiteness, anti-Blackness, conquest, heteronormativity, and capitalism. Rather than being punctual, meeting deadlines, and abiding by curfews, Black youths at Run-a-Way prefer to get there when they get there. Instead of being future oriented, they remain present oriented yet remarkably prescient. At Run-a-Way, whiteness does not serve as a reference to gauge who or what was most enlightened or modern. Instead, Black youths cast whiteness into a played-out past, declaring their sociality most relevant and up to date, while taking the title of avant-garde. This is what it means to funk the clock.

Book Overview

This book makes several independent interventions and collectively facilitates a paradigmatic shift toward a new sociology of time. Chapter 1 opens with an acknowledgment of the undeniable role that time plays in orienting everyday life. From the moment a person wakes until the time they retire to rest, time orients eating patterns, leisure activities, hygiene, and work schedules. Paradoxically, it is time’s banality that obscures its significance as a central organizing principle used to distinguish between the owners and owed within time. In order to make the mundane matter, I illustrate how time is racialized and how race is temporalized by troubling normative conceptions of time within classical and contemporary sociology. Drawing on previous literature within the sociology of time, I argue that “social time” renders racialized persons illegible within time. Social time requires the systemic marginalization of racialized subjects from the existing temporal order and the social itself. The “social” in “social time,” I argue, belies unity, equivalence, equilibrium, mutuality, and any possibility of creating a time shared by all. Instead, white time prefigures social time. “White time,” for example, represents a site of exploitation and extraction of nonwhite life. Similarly, “racial time” is premised on enslavement, dispossession, and death. Given that time is money, it makes sense that white time and racial time remain the products of racial debt. In the wake of emancipation exists “slavery’s afterlife” and a racial debt that continues to mount because racialized exploitation and violence lack a deadline and defy location within a linear timeline.⁷⁹

Yet still, resistance is central to this story. The brutality of white time led many youth at Run-a-Way to challenge temporal conventions and mock the clock. For example, despite the enforcement of strict bedtime curfews, one member of the night staff at Run-a-Way admitted, “No one ever goes to bed by nine thirty.” I leverage the concept of “CP Time,” or “Colored People’s Time,” to illustrate the power of temporal subversion. How might CP Time serve as an internally functional metric to cope with the timelessness of racialized violence?⁸⁰ CP Time aids Black people and other racialized persons in their efforts to contend with what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “racialized social systems,”⁸¹ which take “their” time. Several youths found ways to violate white, Western, linear time, predicated on a past, present, and future. Having acknowledged the incompatibility between their lived experiences and racialized temporality, the youths at Run-a-Way subverted white time through what I call transgressive temporalities and insurgent time. By arriving to school late, missing curfew, or skipping work, Black youths violated that which consistently violates them.

The impetus behind the second chapter comes from a warning. Once the state terminated my father’s time in this country and forcibly removed him, he would make the following demand of all his children: “All yuh must teef time and come nah man.”⁸² My father never asked us to “find time” or “make time.” Instead the goal was to thief it. Thus, in chapter 2, I describe the consequences of transgressing time while young, prescient, and Black. This chapter answers a straightforward yet understudied question: What does it mean to use time that does not belong to you? As youths transgressed time and space, they were charged with “walking up to no good” because they “fit the description.” In distinguishing those who own time from those who owe it, this chapter expands the breadth of life course scholarship and time use studies. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), for example, lacks any adequate measures of either racialization or racism. If the ATUS cannot account for the time that youths spend processing acts of racialization or racism, then it is inevitably capturing but a fraction of this group’s purported “time use.” Racialized violence, however, is incommensurable with routine activities such as the time youths spend on personal hygiene or chores. Experiences with racialization and racism remain unquantifiable. They literally and figuratively do not count. To racialized persons, and Black youths in particular, acts of racialization and racism will always count because they are countless.

Space is the mutually constitutive counterpart to time and a vital part of this story. Chapter 3 begins with two starkly different representations of the Twin Cities from a 2015 issue of The Atlantic. Both articles were published shortly after I began my fieldwork with youths at Run-a-Way. In “The Miracle of Minneapolis,” Derek Thompson describes a “rising tide” of Fortune 500 wealth benefiting all Twin Cities residents. According to Thompson, the significant number of Fortune 500 companies in the Twin Cities helped subsidize “the Minneapolis miracle” through the redistribution of commercial tax revenues to “enrich some of the region’s poorest communities.” In a response, Jessica Nickrand takes Thompson to task for perpetuating “Minneapolis’s White Lie” and using white people as a reference category for assessing the economic status of all others. Nickrand references several studies suggesting that the “Minneapolis Miracle” has disproportionately benefited the city’s white population and resulted in some of the greatest employment and educational disparities between whites and nonwhites in the nation.⁸³

What the United States owes Black and Indigenous youth exceeds the available vocabularies associated with “debt.” The history of “Mnisota” (the Dakota Sioux name for “Minnesota”)—unceded indigenous territory—is one of violated treaties, conquest, genocide, and racial capitalism, making Blackness and Indigeneity important parts of this story. Youths who identified as Black and Native resisted what Mark Rifkin calls “settler time,”⁸⁴ while maintaining psychic connections to relatives and ancestors. Racialized violence, however, is never past but present. Hence, I explore how systematic neglect, underdevelopment, and divestment of majority-Black communities in the Twin Cities is key to the construction of what fifteen-year-old Devon describes as a “maybe environment.” Devon’s phrase provokes further exploration into the saying “I heard a white man’s yes is a Black maybe.” “Black maybe” signals a double standard wherein what is guaranteed to whites is but a possibility for Black people. The use of “maybe” does not only function as a discursive tool. There is a materiality to “maybe.” As Devon states, “It’s very, very hard to raise a kid in a maybe environment. Maybe I’ll get a job. Maybe there’ll be money coming in and maybe we’ll have an apartment.” What are common markers of life course transitions and trajectories proved to be a maybe for many of the youths at Run-a-Way.

The experiences of youth attempting to survive within “maybe environments” and make sense of educational and work opportunities nearing obsolescence is well documented in sociology, particularly urban ethnography. Less attention is devoted to what it means for Black youths to work twice as hard to get half as far as their white counterparts. In chapter 4, I argue that such incommensurable labor-time inevitably results in Black youths having far less time than their white peers. The combination of compressed time and foreclosed opportunities abbreviates aspirations for the life course. The time that Black youths spend searching for work is protracted not only because of delays in callbacks but also due to the psychic labor required to make sense of the ease with which white youths find jobs. Lamont, who was sixteen years old, recalled a saying from his mother that succinctly describes this problem: “Keisha doesn’t get the call before Kimberly.” Racialization and racism, I argue, exceed the conceptual capacity of transitions and trajectories and instead function as life course constants for Black youths. In naming racialization and racism “life course constants,” I make the case that working twice as hard to be twice as good means that racialized youths are consistently forced to do more with less (time).

I use chapter 5 as a temporal break or caesura to linger in a previous spacetime and enduring funk. I consider the temporality of this book and strive to resist any literary urge to reach the conclusion by privileging what has felt like an endless pause over progress. I invite the reader to “hold up” and “wait a minute,” as I perform additional memory work and enter what I call tabanca time. In Trinidad and Tobago, tabanca refers to an agonizing feeling often induced by an unrequited love or longing for a person or thing. Signaling the book’s overall musicality, I think of this chapter as an interlude and an opportunity to think about the book’s overall pacing, tone, sound, and general relationship with time and space. My father funked the clock in a variety of ways, but the “fast life” proved to be his chosen transgressive temporality. He never described what he did as “crime.” In fact, he said he was doing what he had to do to survive. This mattered little, though, because time had a tenacious revenge impulse. As a form of payback, time teamed up with space. I soon learned that this temporal-spatial collaboration would deny my father and all his children any opportunity to share another minute of coevalness. As a consequence of his temporal transgression, my father was deported. “Postdeportation,” I argue, is a misnomer, precisely because deportation is a process, not an event. My father may no longer be incarcerated, but he is still doing time. It is a time that can never be done and a time that can never claim to heal the same harm it caused. For my father and many others, the opportunity to make in one week what many people make in a month is a compelling proposition when you have to work twice as hard to get half as far.

In chapter 6, youths make clear that the urge to transgress time is not isolated to my father’s generation. Prepared to begin a long and hard road filled with roadblocks at every conceivable level of opportunity, some Black youths in urbanized space learn various shortcuts and detours along the life course. The dilatory payoff associated with (s)low-wage labor and schooling prompted some youths to seek expedited pathways to make money and funk the clock, including the “fast life.” When I asked eighteen-year-old Finesse to characterize those involved in the fast life, he responded by saying, “People that really got no other choice. I never heard nobody gettin’ into [the] trap that wanted to be in the trap [a site of drug dealing]. You know? Nobody wakes up and is like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go sell some crack.’” Finesse’s perceptive response is a reminder that the “trap” is just that—a trap. Still, when forced to choose whether one will “trap or die,” it becomes clear that some must hustle to live.

Black youths recognize that working twice as hard to get half as far means that they will inevitably have less time than their white counterparts. Thus, chapter 7 investigates how Black youths interpret time in relation to whiteness and their assessments of white youths. Independently, the study of whiteness and the study of time are important interventions in sociology. A solid foundation for any empirical investigation of the relationship between whiteness and the time perspectives of Black and other racialized youths, however, has yet to be set. Despite the temporal inequalities between them and their white counterparts, youths at Run-a-Way discovered ways to invert the terms of temporality to ensure that their culture was always most relevant and “up to date” and never late.

In spite of whiteness’s links to modernity and that which is future oriented, Black youths viewed their white counterparts as behind time, “lame,” or just plain wack.⁸⁵ Being up to date or up on the latest trends was gauged not by whiteness but by being in tune with Blackness. Birkenstocks and socks may be constantly trending according to white time, but within the context of Run-a-Way, Black youths declared such fashions wack on arrival. Run-a-Way became the site for experimenting in alternate spatial and temporal realities, where and when Black youths’ styles, trends, and tastes were most relevant while whiteness was cast into a played-out past. In exposing the wackness of whiteness, Black youths discovered ways to mock the clock and further funk with time. By turning the fundamental principles of whiteness on their head, they reconfigured the terms and conditions of modernity to locate whiteness and white people within anachronistic space. Making whiteness wack also signaled the youths’ recognition that being most up to date was more a matter of being off white time than on it.

With greater attention to climate change, pandemics, and the future of the planet comes renewed attention to the future and those emblematic of it. Hence, in chapter 8, I ask whose children are the future and whose children are relegated to the “ethnographic present.” It is what Nancy Lesko describes as the “evolutionary supremacy of the West” that keeps Black and other racialized youths lingering in temporal suspension:

Adolescence is an emblem of modernity, and time is its defining mode… . In my view, adolescence enacts modernity in its central characterization as developing or becoming—youth cannot live in the present; they live in the future, that is, they exist only in the discourse of “growing up.” Adolescence reenacts the evolutionary supremacy of the West over primitive others in its pathologized (internalized) progress from (primitive) concrete operational stages to (advanced) abstract ones. Adolescence continuously enacts Western progress carried in the oppositional positions of past and present and ever points to even greater futures. (emphasis in the original)⁸⁶

As Lesko notes, whiteness, maleness, and future orientations were key characteristics in the making of adolescents. This particular genre of adolescents, in turn, came to be part of the foundational logics of nation and empire building. The construction of white youths as future oriented required nonwhite peoples to remain suspended in time. I make the case, however, that urban ethnographic representations of Black youth in poor urbanized space as “present oriented” elide their prescience. Having a preview of the multiplicative forms of oppression yet to come over the life course, Black youths retain a unique ability to foretell their futures.

With limited life chances and limited chances at life, youths at Run-a-Way saw the future as fugitive. It is, then, not as though Black youth have not thought about the future. It is precisely because they have cogitated so deeply over their futures that they reject what is constantly on the run—“equal opportunity” within a highly unequal world. Their choice not to entertain liberal futurities directed toward “freedoms” associated with whiteness and a “postracial era” does not make them present oriented. It makes them prepared. Interpreting time as an iterative process incapable of being isolated to a finite past, present, or future allows Black youth to construct their own spatial imaginaries where they interpellate themselves in answers to “Whose time is it?” by responding, “It’s we o’clock.”

What forms of time exist beyond a time that is always right for white and whiteness and wrong for the racialized and rightless? In chapter 8, I return to the core questions driving this book and push them further to consider the implications of upsetting time as we know it and perhaps moving toward a teleos of time itself. I take stock of the theoretical contributions that emerge from this story of Black youths reckoning with time and funking up the clock. It is through their experiences that the shift from “What time is it?” to “Whose time is it?” not only makes sense but maintains grammatical coherence and correctness. As youth shift time, they create the necessary “temporal caesura” to imagine alternative temporalities and futurities that exceed the limitations of white, androcentric, straight, and linear time.⁸⁷

Black youth’s temporalities are not only transgressive but transformative. Transgressive temporalities are conducive to the production of a nowness situated outside the past, present, and future. Youth not only see foreclosed futures in the present but also imagine a “then and there” of Black sociality free from white time and racialized violence. I contend that the residence of slavery’s “afterlife” in the present leads many youth to imagine the “not-yet-here.” As Black youth both funk the clock and queer the clock, they place the direction of time under their discretion.