Racism Takes Time

Attempting to quantify the time-consuming experience of racism is a largely futile quest. Living with racism involves careful reflection on and analysis of racist acts. Racism is not something that people get used to or forget. Processing acts of racialized violence is psychic, physical, and emotional labor—labor that many perform just to get by, maintain, and survive. The length of time required to process an act of racialized violence cannot obscure the qualitative experience with the act itself.

Racialization and racism resulted in significant time loss for many youths at Run-a-Way. It is during adolescence that many racialized youth report their first encounter with racism.¹⁰ Most youths were poised to speak on the issue of racism, and when I asked fifteen-year-old Kendra if she had ever been targeted because of her race, she responded without hesitation:

Yes. All the time… . Say I’m on the bus going to school and this guy or girl … [of] a different race than I am starts yelling or getting mad because I’m Black… . And then I have to crack him in his face and then they … cause me not to be able to get to school on time… . So it always takes up time to actually cuss them out or something.

Kendra’s sense of being the target of racism and anti-Blackness “all the time” exemplifies the time-consuming nature of racialized violence. She also reveals the psychic and cognitive labor required to address racist acts. This labor, however, seems largely ignored by teachers and administrators at school. In short, Kendra’s lateness is inexcusable, despite the undeniability of anti-Blackness. I asked Kendra about the time required to perform these forms of labor in response to racialized violence:

Not all youths have to ask, “What am I doing wrong?” Kendra, though, seems to ponder this question regularly. And yet, time is unforgiving. When it comes to the time expended to reckon with racialized violence, time has a no-return policy, especially if you’s a “teef.” Kendra invokes several aspects of Du Boisian thought to illustrate what it means to live with racism. In asking herself, “OK, what am I doing wrong?” she echoes Du Bois’s memorable question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” By acknowledging racism as a source of time consumption, she recognizes that “the Negro Problem” is a problem of white America’s response to Black life.¹¹ Under a white racial gaze, Black youth are forced to question their own integrity because, as Kendra’s remarks suggest, their integrity remains an open question to others. When I asked Kendra how often she thinks about racism, she responded by saying, “Every time I’m around a white person. To be honest,” and she chuckled.

In detailing the importance of a “double consciousness” to Black sociality, to what extent did Du Bois consider this “peculiar sensation” a form of time use? Does a doubling (of consciousness) necessitate a fractioning (of time)? Du Bois may not have set out to quantify the physical, emotional, and psychic labor associated with a double consciousness. To suggest, however, that he had not considered what is lost/taken by “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” would be a specious assumption. Evidence of Du Bois’s prescience can be found in this passage from the essay “On the Faith of the Fathers”: “Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or revolt, to hypocrisy or radicalism.”¹²

This statement exemplifies a phrase familiar to many Black people: “You have to work twice as hard to get half as far.” By definition, working twice as hard to be half as good means that the halves have significantly less time to accomplish their goals than their more temporally advantaged counterparts—the haves. Without an appreciation of the ways that racialization and racism condition the time perspectives of racialized persons, sociologists construct time use as a homogenous and routine activity familiar to all. Such universalisms, however, ignore the significance of processing time—the time expended on the infinite and incommensurable process of reckoning with racialized violence. Remy, a sixteen-year-old, Black, nonbinary youth, recognizes that teaching biases are deeply racialized and, in the end, major learning impediments for Black students:

White kids simply got it easy. They doin’ somethin’ for two seconds and it’s over… . Let’s say we all get asked the same thing and the white people do everything that they were asked to do and they get to go. Even though the Black person did the same thing but maybe the professor wants to push them because they care or they wanna see if they can work a little bit harder… . I feel like … when I raise my hand I get ignored, [but when] the white kid raises their hand, the teacher goes to them. So I’m spendin’ more time on my work because I’m struggling and because the teacher not helping me. And so it’s taking me more time to get work done and to learn stuff, so it’s slowing me down in school ’cuz I have so little time to learn what the teacher’s teaching us every day.

Remy reveals the temporal impact of working twice as hard to get half as far as their white counterparts while in a learning environment predicated on “equal opportunity.” The number of hours in a school day is the same for all students in a particular school. Remy’s account, however, reveals that while all students may have quantitatively similar amounts of time in school, Black students’ temporal experiences are qualitatively distinct. Processing times are not compartmentalized into scheduled intervals of the day or placed on anyone’s to-do list. Rather, processing racialized violence spills over into each and every part of a youth’s daily routine. These spillover effects result in a smothering and layering of already densely packed temporal experiences. What is supposed to be scheduled learning time for all students is, for Remy, processing time. Questioning whether racialized bias is responsible for differential treatment in the classroom compresses Remy’s time to learn. For Remy, the classroom is a site of multiple forms of time theft. Remy sees white students’ education subsidized by the systemic neglect of Black students. As white teachers privilege white students, Black youths like Remy find themselves constantly beginning from behind. As racism interferes with regularly scheduled activities, Remy and countless other Black youths are asked to do more with less (time).

Processing racialized violence while learning cannot be reduced to mere “multitasking.” Remy is doing much more than simply comprehending while reading aloud. It is unrealistic to expect that Black youth will never have to think about racism and racialization. But it is also unrealistic to expect these youth to allocate a specific amount of time to process racialized violence. For many students, an extended ringing bell signifies the end of the school day. For racialized youth, the same bell ring marks a recalibration of processing time as they make their way out of school and into the streets. When asked about things that take up their time but not that of their white counterparts, Remy offered this cogent response:

Walkin’ alone home at night. Makin’ sure people not watchin’ you, especially white people ’cuz they love to call the police for no fuckin’ reason. I have to worry about not making white people uncomfortable ’cuz … if they feel in danger, we can get hurt. ’Cuz I know that from the moment I wake up to the moment that I go to sleep, I am being targeted as a Black person, as a person of color… . So I’m doing extra stuff to make sure that I’m safe and I’m getting treated fairly and equally and I’m working harder… . And so it’s literally just taking up my time.

When around white people, Remy is forced to worry about being the target of racialized and sexualized violence. Through Remy’s experiences we come to see that both white fragility and the threat of racialized violence (e.g., being targeted by police) take an inordinate amount of time. To what extent does white fragility center white people while ignoring those that are actually vulnerable to racialized violence? Remy is aware that when that which is fragile breaks, nonwhite people get hurt. Not only is Remy subject to the threat of whiteness and its shards, but they are also forced to accept that whiteness inflicts harm with impunity. What worries Remy and many other Black people, however, is not simply the impunity of whiteness but an understanding that white people are emboldened by this impunity to unleash anti-Black terror in everyday life.

As both an involuntary activity and a survival strategy, double consciousness is a vital part of Black sociality. As August Wilson affirms, “Blacks know more about whites in white culture and white life than whites know about blacks. We have to know because our survival depends on it. White people’s survival does not depend on knowing blacks” (emphasis in the original).¹³ As Remy shows, their survival depends on knowing whites. This is what makes racialization, according to Helen Ngo, a “non-event”:

In experiencing one’s body schema as inherently unsettled or at any moment “unsettleable,” the racialized body not only becomes accustomed to but indeed anticipates these moments of unravelling… . That is to say, racialized bodies, by virtue of the common experience of racism, learn to anticipate and be “on guard” for such occurrences… . The experience of being constantly marked by others’ racialized perceptions and responses becomes incorporated into the body schema such that one comes to anticipate, based on frequent experience, that this identity will once more get called into question… . Moreover, the question of anticipation also draws us back into the discussion of temporality, where in the moment of anticipation and defense, one never quite lives in the present, but always ahead of one’s self and situation (in a similar but different way to how disappointment recalls one away from the futuricity of intentional being).¹⁴

Failure to make white people feel comfortable places Remy and other Black people at risk of getting hurt. Remy alludes to the very real possibility that a white person could harm a Black person for unauthorized use of both time and space. In anticipating the threat of racialized violence, Remy struggles to be fully (in the) present. Instead, they are forced to think ahead of themself and think ahead of white people. Remy’s future orientation contradicts representations of Black youth in poor urbanized space as present oriented and capable only of living in the moment. The mental, emotional, and physical preparation Remy performs out of concern for “making white people uncomfortable” is labor—labor that remains unquantifiable yet time consuming.

I conceptualize unquantifiable time as the time corresponding to the physical, emotional, and psychic labor performed by racialized persons as a means of survival. The exhausting exercise of having to think not only for yourself but also for others is not measurable within conventional time-use categories. Thinking about racialized violence intersectionally requires an appreciation of the simultaneity, interaction, exponentiation, and layering of multiple forms of oppression that belie additive models of seconds, minutes, and hours. This is what makes attempts to quantify time expended to process racialized violence so paradoxical. Highlighting the unquantifiability of racism is not an attempt to account for or compensate for stolen time. Exposing racialized violence as a form of time theft stands as an intervention in and of itself. But who, might we ask, consumes the time of racialized persons, particularly Black youths?

Thinking for both themself and white people requires Remy to perform a significant amount of labor that exceeds temporal and compensatory boundaries. Racialized persons are not paid to process their experiences with racism. In fact, they are more likely to foot the bill from licensed mental health counselors after individual therapy sessions. In turn, the racialized violence of white time remains largely subsidized by nonwhite labor. My interview with sixteen-year-old Cedric makes this point exceptionally clear:

Within what Sara Ahmed describes as the “phenomenology of whiteness,” the white male driver in Cedric’s account could “move with comfort through space” and “inhabit the world as if it were home.”¹⁵ Synchronized to space and time, whiteness worked, in this case, to deny Cedric and his brother a place in time. The white man cast both boys into an anti-Black climate that rendered them disposable and expendable. To process the racist act, Cedric spent an hour speaking to his brother. Just as race is relational, so are time and time loss in one space or place accompanied by temporal gains somewhere else. In other words, Cedric and his brother did not just lose time; their time was mined by the “white guy” driving by. The man thus profited off the unquantifiable time and labor Cedric and his brother used to make sense of the violent act. By “profit” I am referring to the way in which this man reaped what Du Bois calls a “public and psychological wage” at the expense of Cedric and his brother. The wage was public because Cedric and his brother were performing unpaid labor to reckon with whiteness in a crowd of one hundred people. On top of the white man’s temporal earnings, he was also emboldened by whiteness’s psychological wage—a wage paid by Cedric and his brother that evidentially granted him license to commit further acts of racialized violence without consequence. There are no wages to be earned by the targets of racialized violence. Cedric and his brother cannot recoup this time or labor, which instead are added to a growing number of hours, minutes, and seconds spent living within “slavery’s afterlife” and settler colonialism. Being both Black and Native in urbanized space, Cedric must wrestle with settler-colonial logic predicated on the need for Native peoples to vanish and the desire to keep Black people captive postemancipation. The boys’ experience is a reminder that the afterlife of slavery and ongoing forms of settler colonialism are incommensurable with a paycheck. What the United States owes Black and Indigenous youth exceeds the conceptual capacity of “debt.”

When time is stolen from one place, it amasses somewhere else. Cedric’s and his brother’s time was likely transferred to white time. Charles Mills writes,

Assuming that, with reference to the appropriate stochastic counterfactuals, we could conclude that the life expectancy of Blacks (for instance) has been diminished by these temporal deprivations, we can then say that the time they would have had has been removed… . Where has it gone? Could we speak, perhaps fancifully, of its having been transmuted into White time, and posit a set of intra- and intercontinental equations that could be shown to balance through increments of White time on one side matching decreases of non-White time on the other, shortened life-spans over here extending life-spans over there? If so, then metaphysically these processes, these regimes of temporal exploitation and temporal accumulation, would not just be taking time—as, trivially, all processes, exploitative and non-exploitative, do—but transferring time from one set of lives to another.¹⁶

Mills makes clear that, within the context of white time, nonwhite time is not simply taken but excavated and transferred. The white man in Cedric’s account exploited the two youths, resulting in temporal accumulation and temporal deficits. The moment the white man opened his mouth and spewed such vileness marked the start of the temporal reallocation process. The event initiated a gradual transfer of time from Cedric and his brother to the white man. Each minute of processing time corresponded to further temporal accumulation for the white man. As a form of time mining, racialized violence generates time and wealth for white people. As a measurement of racial capitalism and Black debt, white time subsidizes white life while depreciating the value of Black life. In other words, white wealth is a product of Black and other racialized debts.¹⁷ Truncated life expectancies among Black people are in fact lowered, not lower. Capitalism, the legal system, carceral schooling, the nonprofit-industrial complex, racialized medicine, and the state all ensure that existing as a poor racialized subject in the United States means you have to wait.¹⁸ Wait for service. Wait for a visit. Wait to be educated. Wait on your caseworker. Wait to be seen. Wait to be made unseeable. Wait on whiteness because whiteness takes its/your time. Perhaps the problem of quantifying racialized youth’s time use is not solely a product of the countless seconds, minutes, and hours spent processing racialized violence. Maybe racialized youth are living on time that is not their own—what we could conceive of as borrowed time.

Taken Time and Unsettleable Debts

While most work is performed in the service of productivity and with the expectation of compensation, the labor required to process racialized violence cannot be paid because it represents an unsettleable debt. I liken unsettleable debt to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s concept of “unpayable debt.”¹⁹ Both debts are incapable of being settled because what is done cannot be undone. In fact, what is done is liable to a redoing. Slavery’s afterlife and settler-colonial violence signify not only continued “accumulation by dispossession,”²⁰ but the degree to which time, for racialized persons, is nonlinear.

Recurring forms of racialized violence bely linear time and teleological assessments of race and racism, ensuring that some debts can never be settled.²¹ Rather than ending, racism is extending, yet the labor required to process racialized violence exceeds the compensation limits of overtime and double-time pay because both rely on a false pay scale balance between workers. What to many whites is a wage is, for racialized subjects, an unsettleable and incommensurable debt. Incommensurability, however, does not preclude responsibility.²²

Though processing acts of racialized violence offers little financial return for laborers, this work is highly generative for racial capitalism.²³ Here, I detail how police, salespersons, deputized whites, and those invested in maintaining what Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “racialized social systems” accumulate time through racialized violence (i.e., surveillance, harassment, and racist attacks).²⁴This section attends to the synchronization of white time and racial dispossession. I use the notion of “time mining” to illustrate the extractive and exploitative potential of racialized violence. Given that time is money, mining time is a lucrative enterprise. I argue that racialized violence produces significant debt and dispossession, which in turn subsidize white time. In addition to bolstering the relational role of white wealth and Black debt, racialized social systems convert the time that racialized persons spend reckoning with racialized violence into profit. The subsidies gained through time mining and racialized violence perpetuate existing forms of temporal power and discipline.

To further examine the temporal costs of racialized violence, I asked youths about their experiences as consumers. Most described exerting significant time and energy to participate in what most of their white counterparts describe as a leisurely activity. To better understand what made these experiences so temporally taxing, I asked the youths to describe how they expect to be treated when entering businesses. Fourteen-year-old Cherise, for example, had this to say: “It’s different in each store, but they’ll keep an eye on you, ’cuz they think you’re gonna steal something. And like, they’ll follow you around the store just to make sure you don’t.” Jerome (sixteen years old) picked up where Cherise left off by describing an experience of being profiled and then followed: “Mm, sometimes I think they treat me different ’cuz I’m Black so they think I’m gonna steal something… . ’Cuz I was in Marshall’s … I was looking at something and one of the managers was like, ‘Do you need help?’ And I said no. And then she act like she was workin’ over there and she kept asking me ‘Do you need help with something.’ I kept saying no.”

In her account, sixteen-year-old Tasha provided a vivid example of how her double consciousness remains in full effect while shopping:

Like … you know those white people at the store … those white people that be workin’, like cops or whatever who be lookin’ at you in the store? They be always thinkin’ you’re stealing, just because you’re Black. Like, I got my own stuff! I got money! Yeah, I just think that’s like really rude. Just because I’m Black. I’m coming in the store with a bag, doesn’t mean I’m gonna steal. Not every Black people steal stuff. They should know that. Like, white people steal! Asian people steal!

Similarly, Kendra showed how a purse goes from fashion accessory to accessory to theft when worn by Black girls: “They’re, oh my goodness, they’re always staring. I carry a purse, so they’re always watching me or following me or asking me, ‘Do you need help?’ every five minutes because I’m Black and they think I’m going to steal. And it’s not true. I have money so I don’t have to steal. Not every Black girl or girls of color steal.”

Beyond having to think for others, each youth articulated the physiology of racialization, what Frantz Fanon calls “epidermalization.”²⁵ Epidermalization, or the inscription of race on the body, takes time. The white child who screams, “Look, a Negro!” subjects Fanon to psychic labor. This gesture further ostracizes Fanon from white spacetime. Just as Fanon is “overdetermined from the outside,” each youth’s time use became interpreted by the exterior as criminal.²⁶ The “outside” is similar to what Denise Ferreira da Silva describes as the “stage of exteriority” on which “the racial” is signified and marked as “other.”²⁷ It is on this stage that racializing logics mutate youths’ time use into time theft.

The twin process of epidermalizing and criminalizing racialized youth engenders new forms of what Simone Browne terms “racializing surveillance”: “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.’”²⁸ Browne studies Blackness as “metaphor and as lived materiality,” with particular attention to the way Blackness becomes an object of surveillance.²⁹ The racializing power of epidermalization defines not only a person’s degree of humanness but also their spatial and temporal location. As Cherise, Jerome, Tasha, and Kendra illustrate, the white gaze is especially vigilant in stores. In retail spaces, the gaze functions as a data-mining tool and tracking device, locating each youth as out of place and out of time. Within retail stores exist certain temporal eligibility criteria that Black youths seem to rarely meet. Salespersons relegate Black youths to a state of temporal alterity upon entry. Beholden to the white gaze, salespersons refuse to entertain the possibility that Black youths have enough money to shop in the store. The thought is too preposterous, given that structural violence keeps Black youths suspended in poor urbanized space devoid of coevalness.

As the gaze tracks youths from the ghetto to the store, we also see how salespersons fully invest in seeing and recognizing criminality. Salespersons, white and nonwhite alike, then capitalize on the opportunity to read Black people. The time youths spend processing racializing surveillance increases investments in white time and other time-saving technologies. Cherise, Jerome, Tasha, and Kendra each reveal that racialized algorithms inform protocols for responding to Black youths. The physical, emotional, and psychic labor resulting from racialized violence forced many youths at Run-a-Way to think not only for themselves but for others. Notice the youths’ use of the phrase “they think” to describe the vigilance of store clerks. “They think” was a recurring phrase throughout most of our conversations about racism. In claiming to know how they are perceived by salespersons, youths exercise their double consciousness to move through space and time. In addition to noting the “epidermalization of inferiority,” Fanon writes, “I was responsible not only for my body, but for my race and my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slaver traders, and above all, yes, the grinning Y a bon Banania.”³⁰

Here, Fanon ably demonstrates the psychic labor associated with a double consciousness. Psychic energy activates key synapses in order to connect with racialized histories while establishing connections across space and time. Epidermalization is accompanied by physiological responses, and as youths were “overdetermined from the outside,” they comported themselves differently in space and time. In anticipation of being misrecognized by salespersons, Remy feels the pressure to buy or bounce (leave):

In Remy’s words, they are not only seen or perceived by a white person—they are studied. As a Black, nonbinary youth, Remy performs an inordinate amount of labor (none of which is compensated; rather, it is incommensurable) simply to cope with the anxiety of being studied and mined by white salespersons working in straight economies of time.³¹ In stores, Remy is overdetermined by their Blackness and queerness. The white gaze is also gendered and sexualized and seeks to sync Remy with heteronormative protocols and “biological time.”

As a nonbinary youth, Remy is also funking the biological clock that demands they identify themself within a gender binary. Perhaps Remy is thinking and being within the context of what Tavia Nyong’o calls “non-binary blackness: a blackness that asserts another temporality than that which is enforced within straight time.”³² Remy feels the weight of being overdetermined by the white, cisheteronormative gaze. Still, they embody a temporal orientation that refuses the onward pace of gendered progress narratives. Remy does not entertain “chrononormative” logics endorsing the accomplishment of a singular, specific gender identity.³³ Instead they force surveilling eyes to reckon with their refusal to be pigeonholed into a specific spatial-temporal location that belies their subjective coordinates. Nor will Remy be bound by developmental deadlines. When it comes to locating themself on the gender spectrum, it is not a matter of Remy getting there when they get there. Instead Remy acknowledges that they are always already where they need to be. The problem lies not with Remy but with those consternated by incoherence, incongruity, and inconsistency and allergic to ambiguity. Remy, though, is no stranger to infrapolitics, as demonstrated by their use of a white friend to funk the clock and maneuver through space. The white peer is meant to act as a buffer against racialized violence by deflecting the white gaze to other “potential suspects.” Though their friend may help Remy pass (temporally and temporarily) into and through white spacetime, the pass expires once outside the store.

White people read Fanon and Remy in a way similar to how Katherine McKittrick describes Black people in Canada: as “surprises.”³⁴ Remy’s Blackness and queerness invoke wonder while simultaneously alerting technologies of racializing surveillance. In transgressing gender norms and roles, Remy is also transgressing time, particularly the “self-naturalizing” character of straight time.³⁵ They are resisting the progressive nature of linear time and any supposed accomplishments related to identity within existing strictures of gender and sexuality. In addition to the phenomenological effects of racializing surveillance, there are the consequences of temporalization. Here I am referring to the ways in which queer and trans people are consistently imagined as underdeveloped or overdeveloped. Black queer and trans youths, in particular, are consistently adultified and hypersexualized. Remy knows that being studied means they are simultaneously racialized, sexualized, and gendered. Consequently, Remy is rendered illegible within the category of the Child.

Cherise, Jerome, Tasha, Kendra, and Remy all described how their Blackness is surveilled and ontologically located as out of place and time. Each explained what it means to be seen while seeing oneself. For example, just as the time expended to reckon with racialized violence is unquantifiable, so too is the time Remy spends processing the intersections of Blackness and queerness. Within their accounts lies the convergence of Du Bois’s “double consciousness” and Fanon’s concept of “sociogenesis,” or what Sylvia Wynter calls the “sociogenic principle”: “The concept of sociogenesis underlines that: I am who I am in relation to the other who sees me as such; and, in a society structured upon racial hierarchies, becoming black is bound up with being perceived as black by a white person (as Fanon understood that we was black, according to the child’s and the mother’s eyes).”³⁶

Shopping as a racialized subject is a sociogenetic process—one that mines time while supporting racial capitalism. Sensing the anti-Blackness of capital and what Steve Martinot calls “capitalization,” Remy hastens their shopping, revealing the effectiveness of surveillance technologies within racial capitalism.³⁷ The quicker the purchase, the faster the profit. The time white salespersons take to surveil and profile Remy and countless other racialized youths yields tremendous profits in time, money, and intel. According to a 2017 article in The Economist, “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.”³⁸ Increasing investments in home security systems, such as Amazon’s Ring, have intensified concerns over racial profiling. Racializing surveillance generates racialized data, which are used to equate criminality with nonwhiteness, and Blackness in particular. As Ruha Benjamin reminds us, “Anti-blackness is no glitch” but a “form of evidence” within the New Jim Code.³⁹ Consequently, youths like Remy must work physically, emotionally, and psychically to reckon with what it means to “fit the description.” In return, racial capitalism offers no compensation, only further exploitation. Racializing surveillance thus represents an illicit investment in “seeing” and “recognizing” nonwhite criminality.

Black youths demonstrate that shopping is hardly a leisure activity, because epidermalization, criminalization, racialized surveillance, and other sociogenetic processes prove to be the greatest consumers (of time) in any store. Taking their time in stores makes Black youths vulnerable to having their time taken. Taken time is a product of exploitation and extraction through racialized violence and surveillance. The physical, emotional, and psychic labor required to reckon with racialized violence remains unpaid, producing an unsettleable debt. Despite this debt, it is racialized youths who are more likely to owe, rather than own, time. Hence, youths provide additional answers to the central question orienting chapter 1: Whose time is it? Racialized surveillance and the labor required to think not only for themselves but for whiteness and white life are sources of dispossession but also a reminder that time is not their own. Hence, racialized youths’ alleged “time use” remains a misnomer.

The Temporal Arithmetic of Misogynoir

While this chapter brings greater attention to the way that racialization and racism function as sites of systemic temporal dispossession and violence, ignoring the way in which sexism, patriarchy, misogynoir, and sexualized violence take time risks flattening difference while foreclosing discussions of incommensurability. Hence, this section attends to the unique ways that Black girls and one nonbinary youth at Run-a-Way reckon with the time taken by symbolic and structural violence. Arithmetically, we might describe this particular operation (i.e., taking time) as subtraction. What may not be as apparent is the way in which racialized and sexualized violence also add time, divide time, multiply time, or even exponentiate time.

Feminist scholars,⁴⁰ queer theorists, and cultural studies scholars have made significant inroads toward understanding the gendered and sexualized dimensions of time.⁴¹ The association between whiteness and linear time (see chapter 7) is indicative of androcentric logics that demand progress regardless of those trampled in its path. Adherence to linear time makes people “forgetful” not only of conquest, genocide, and slavery, but also of the way that androcentrism remains indelibly etched in each. Progressive time dismisses the time taken from women within the context of reproductive labor, patriarchy, and the psychic expenses paid to process sexualized violence and the epistemic brutality of what La Marr Jurelle Bruce describes as the “aegis of Reason”: “a proper noun denoting a positivist, secularist, Enlightenment-rooted episteme purported to uphold objective ‘truth’ while mapping and mastering the world.”⁴² The feminist scholar Elizabeth Deeds Ermath argues that women never had any ownership of time to begin with: “The phrase ‘women’s time’ is a contradiction in terms. If, as I believe, our conventional definitions of it are rooted in patriarchy, then women’s time qua time does not exist at all: except as an exile or an absence of time as it is conceived in patriarchal conventions, that is, as what Julia Kristeva calls ‘linear time, the time of project and history.’”⁴³

“Women’s time,” as Ermath sees it, cannot exist when interpellated through patriarchal logics and projects. History itself is a project that, according to Ermath, requires the exclusion and repression of women.⁴⁴ Patricia Hill Collins makes a similar, yet more nuanced, argument about Black women’s relationship to time: “Women did not retain authority over their time, technology, workmates, or type or amount of work they performed. In essence, their forced incorporation into a capitalist political economy as slaves meant that West African women became economically exploited, politically powerless units of labor.”⁴⁵ Though white women were often rendered invisible within the context of history, such elision necessitated the construction of Black women as surrogates and/or empty vessels. While Ermath and other feminists depict time as a negative value for women generally, Collins and other Black feminists remind white feminists that white women, while temporally marginalized, have historically benefited from the extraction of Black women’s time and labor.⁴⁶ In short, white women’s dispossession of time first required the fungibility of Blackness, the ungendering of Black women, their dysselection from womanhood and femininity, and their selection into the category of what Joy James calls “Captive Maternals.”⁴⁷ Constructed as “politically powerless units of labor,” Black women became units of time and targets of its dispossession.

In Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, Bonnie Barthold describes how Western constructions of “illegitimacy” ensured that Black children could make no claims to time. Barthold writes, “The child not ‘owned’ by a father has no legitimate relationship to time or to society; he is born into a fallen state.”⁴⁸ While Barthold privileges the severed filial bond between a father and son, Hortense Spillers critiques the way the flesh and blood of Black women is “ejected from ‘the Female Body in Western Culture’”:⁴⁹

Even though we are not even talking about any of the matriarchal features of social production/reproduction—matrifocality, matrilinearity, matriarchy—when we speak of the enslaved person, we perceive that the dominant culture, in a fatal misunderstanding, assigns a matriarchist value where it does not belong; actually misnames the power of the female regarding the enslaved community. Such naming is false because the female could not, in fact, claim her child, and false, once again, because “motherhood” is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance. (emphasis in the original)⁵⁰

The purpose of this section is to identify some sources of temporal dispossession and division specific to Black girls, as well as Black queer and nonbinary youths. Interviews with Black girls, femmes, and nonbinary youths reveal several other time-structuring factors that compound the temporal tax of racialization and racism, including misogynoir and transmisogynoir. Appreciating the time-consuming experience of exercising a double consciousness should not eclipse the impact of what Deborah King describes as Black women’s “multiple consciousness”:

The triple jeopardy of racism, sexism, and classism is now widely accepted and used as the conceptualization of black women’s status. However, while advancing our understanding beyond the erasure of black women within the confines of race-sex analogy, it does not yet fully convey the dynamics of multiple forms of discrimination. Unfortunately, most applications of the concepts of double and triple jeopardy have been overly simplistic in assuming that the relationships among various discriminations are merely additive… . The modifier “multiple” refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative relationships among them as well.⁵¹

King reveals the problem with using an additive model to make sense of the race-gender analogy. Misogynoir is not simply a product of the simultaneity or synchronization of oppression against Black women. These oppressions are also interactive. The equation of Blackness with maleness, and femininity or womanhood with whiteness, renders Black girls, femmes, and nonbinary youths invisible. As King notes, “It is mistakenly taken for granted that either there is no difference in being black and female from being generically black (i.e., male) or generically female (i.e., white).”⁵² In short, racial realities cannot be divorced from gendered realities. Looking at either as separate perpetuates additive models of social difference that are ultimately anti-intersectional.

To extend my analysis of the time-consuming aspects of racism, I asked Black girls and one youth who identifies as Black and nonbinary about the unique experiences that consume their time, compared to boys. Tanisha, who was seventeen years old and two months pregnant with her first child at the time of our interview, described one of many controlling images that regulate her time and sense of self: “Mm, being called a ho. Boys don’t have to think about [that]. Well, if they were called one, they wouldn’t care. But girls do.” Compared to boys of color (and white boys), Tanisha reveals the multiplicative relationship between her Blackness, gender, and sexuality. She must reckon with the fungibility of Black femmeness while simultaneously, and perhaps subconsciously, accounting for the time required to navigate social space. Multiplicative forms of oppression demand simultaneity—questioning whether responses to your hair, Blackness, and femininity will invite interrogation over what you choose to do with your body. At the same time, the relationship between sexism and time, like that between racism and time, is subtractive and divisive. Still, Tanisha was intent on reclaiming her time and pursuing her aspirations of becoming a lawyer, nurse, attending a musical arts college, and/or studying real estate.

Tanisha knew that as a Black woman, her life chances were significantly different from those of her white counterparts. I asked her and other Black girls about things that consume their time but not the time of white girls. Several Black girls explained why having to think about standards of beauty is a form of cognitive labor—labor that should not negate the physical labor associated with actually fulfilling these standards. I asked Tanisha to think of some things she must worry about that white girls can ignore:

Tanisha’s remarks signal an awareness of how easy it is for others to hold her body and various parts of her body captive, while projecting their own desire onto her. To construct Tanisha’s concern over being called “bald headed” as a product of self-consciousness ignores her multiple consciousness that requires an accounting of the perceptions and the ever-present threat of misogynoir. Chris Rock may not have intended to harm Jada Pinkett Smith when comparing her to the title character in G.I. Jane during the 2022 Oscars. Still, the joke had a distinct sting when added to and multiplied by the open and public wounds associated with controlling images, discursive violence, expectations for “good hair,” and Pinkett Smith’s public disclosures about her personal struggle with alopecia. Speaking to the intimate connection between discourse and action (i.e., power), Spillers writes, “We might concede, at the very least, that sticks and bricks might break our bones, but words most certainly will kill us.”⁵³ Tanisha’s multiple consciousness reminds her that being called “bald headed” is a threat not simply to her self-esteem but to her life as well. This form of optical dissection is what legitimates the separation of “flesh” from “body.”⁵⁴

When divided by misogynoir, the time of Black girls lacks a remainder. The inordinate seconds, minutes, and hours girls spend processing and resisting misogyny, patriarchy, and gender violence are seldom accounted for in urban sociology and ethnography. I asked all the youths who or what controls their time. In response, sixteen-year-old Shanice said “boys” and “friends” at school. I asked her how people show respect for her time:

Misogynoir subtracts and divides spacetime while multiplying and exponentiating oppressions. Offering us another way of conceptualizing the space-time continuum, Shanice shows how boys disrespect her time by violating her space. There are important racialized and gendered dimensions of space and time grounded in philosophical tradition. According to Denise Ferreira da Silva, Immanuel Kant successfully negates exteriority (spatiality) by locating the subject of scientific knowledge within the interior (mind) and thus time: “Although he postulates that space is the condition of possibility for representing external (exterior) things, the objects of knowledge, Kant further renders knowledge an effect of interiority when he places all phenomena in time.”⁵⁵

Though Ferreira da Silva may not explicitly describe the link between exteriority and gender, there remains an intimate connection between space, femininity, and Blackness. Interiority is a key attribute of what Ferreira da Silva describes as the “Transparent I,” which exists within time and the “scene or representation.” By contrast, the “affectable other” is marked by exteriority or space and is thus subject to the “scene of regulation.” Black girls, femmes, and nonbinary youths help constitute the category of the “affectable other.” Thus, colonizing space is an integral part of the colonization of (Black) women’s bodies. In controlling Shanice’s time, boys are also enacting phenomenological violence—a violence that requires emotional, physical, and psychic labor while mining both time and space from Black girls. When I asked Shanté about things she must worry about that are not of similar concern for boys of color, she responded with the following:

It’s like the protection. They gotta worry about beef and rivals, but we gotta … I gotta worry about when I’m walkin’ down the street if a dude finna’ to kidnap me, he about to grab me and try to rape me, if he gonna try to hit on me. Then if I don’t have no protection or no weapon on me, then my life is in danger ’cuz my … I can fight but my fist is not gonna hit no grown man and he might not hit the floor as quick as I think he gonna and then it’s my life in danger.

Shanté recognizes that violence against her and Black boys is not contingent on transgression. But she is also acutely aware of the capacity of anti-Blackness, as a structure and concept, to overwhelm the distinct impact of misogynoir. The times boys feel comfortable going out in public may be different from those when Shanté does. For Shanté, boys and girls have different levels of violability. While boys may be subject to violence at the hands of other boys, they are less likely to be the targets of the gendered and sexualized violence that Shanté must account for each time she leaves home.

I also asked Remy whether there are things they have to worry about that are of less concern for boys of color. They replied,

Yes. Now, I don’t identify as female. I identify as nonbinary agender. So when people look at me, they see a feminine female. And people like to target females on the street, you know, lots of sexual harassment. So open, so ain’t nobody tryin’ to hide it no more, nothing’s discreet about it. They just out in the open, just sayin’ whatever they wanna say. They feel like they can just touch you wherever they wanna touch you no matter what. No matter what time of day it is. And definitely get paid less, especially as a Black female of color. We automatically get paid like, what, sixty-five cents out of the seventy-five cents that a white woman makes.

Remy covers several components of a multiple consciousness. From their vantage point, cisheteronormativity, sexualized violence, and the gender-racial wage gap are always already interacting in ways to place them and other Black girls and femmes in multiple jeopardy. Just as time consumed by racialization and racism remains unquantifiable, there is no way to fully account for the time and energy that Black girls, femmes, and nonbinary youths spend negotiating (trans)misogynoir. Through their stories, Black girls, femmes, and nonbinary youths prompt us to question whether the time spent reckoning with patriarchy—including sexual harassment, misogynoir, and racialized standards of beauty, as well as heteronormative and chrononormative logics—can be classified as time use.

Time Use or Time Theft?

What does it mean to use time that doesn’t belong to you? To youths at Run-a-Way, it means that police and nonstate actors deny Black coevalness by targeting youths for being out of place and “up to no good.” In turn, the youths are more likely to be used by time than to use it for themselves. In distinguishing those who own time from those who owe it, I expand the breadth of youth development and time use studies. The American Time Use Survey (ATUS), for example, lacks any adequate measures of either racialization or racism. While time-use charts clearly delineate chores, homework time, and recreational activities, in what category does the time spent processing racialized violence fit? Seconds, minutes, and hours as units of measure mean little when one cannot claim ownership over time. If the ATUS cannot account for the time 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, remains incommensurable with routine activities such as the time youths spend on personal hygiene or chores. When Black youths are routinely used by time, studying their “time use” patterns is an empirical error.

According to Marx, the transmutation of a thing into private property begins with the use of that thing: “Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it.”⁵⁶ It is unclear, however, whether Marx considered the extent to which time itself was already private property. Both white time and whiteness are the property of whites.⁵⁷ For Black youth, white time represents a time they owe rather than own. Consequently, they must first borrow time before using it. Neferti X. M. Tadiar describes how most migrant domestic workers go into debt as a result of “mortgaging” their time to find work outside their home countries. This debt, as Tadiar affirms, constitutes a “life they owe rather than own.”⁵⁸ Since time is money, it makes sense that poor, racialized youth owe rather than own time.

We need no other evidence that time is in fact money than the banality of temporal sayings. Consider, for example, the adage that “time waits for no one.” Just as time does not wait, neither does capitalism. Time and capital accumulation are predicated on future orientations, speculative investments, and other progress narratives. It makes sense that those who attempt to take “their” time are punished for slowing down time, money, production, and progress. Still, the impatience of time and money warrant resistance. This book illustrates the ways in which Black youth, dispossessed of time-money, practice a form of temporal sabotage by throwing a wrench into the gears of white time and reversing linear progress narratives. Based on their experiences with past and present racialized violence, as well as projections of future harm, Black youth prohibit time from proceeding without being accountable to those targeted for temporal exploitation.

Racialization and racism take time while also seizing what Tadiar calls life-time: “the overlooked productivity of social practices of life making that seem to lie outside contemporary modes of exploitation of life as living labor.”⁵⁹ Time is taken by “processing” racialized violence and continuously questioning one’s placement in existing onto-epistemological orders. Racialized youths at Run-a-Way described countless experiences with police terror. Shanté, who is sixteen years old, described the following encounter with police outside another youth program:

One time I was outside at like three in the morning, right outside the shelter I was stayin’ at. The cops pulled up and arrested me, put me in the back of the car ’cuz it was [after] curfew. And … they like, “Do you have any tattoos? Where’s your ID? What’s your name?” and they like, “OK, you need to stop with the attitude.” I was like, “I don’t have an attitude. This is how I talk.” They’re like, “Oh, well, keep on with that attitude and you’re ’bout to go downtown.” And I was like, “This is how I talk. First of all, I’m irritated ’cuz you just put me in the back of a cop car.” And then there was bottles outside and he like, “Have you been drinking?” and got the flashing light in my eyes. I was like, “You can do a breathalyzer. I’m clearly sober.” … I don’t take authority well. They just disrespect us so quickly.

Shanté explains why racialized youth are more likely to be used (and abused) by time than to use it themselves. Curfews are products of both temporal and spatial relations. “Juvenile curfew laws” remain heavily enforced in communities of color, disproportionately targeting Black youth.⁶⁰ Time thus makes theoretically possible that a curfew can be violated, and that police terror is necessary. In short, time creates “crime.” What is legible as “crime” is contingent on space. As Jodi Rios demonstrates in Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis, police create “crime” by issuing citations for cosmetic matters, including a resident not painting the front and back door of her own house.⁶¹ Such predatory tactics of law enforcement are what Rios describes as “policing for revenue.”⁶² What does it mean, though, to make a living off life-taking systems?

When poor urbanized space is equated with anachronism, Black youths like Shanté become temporal and spatial interlopers infringing on white time and space. While violating curfew constitutes a temporal transgression, Shanté is always already read as transgressive, which means police read her alleged “time use” as criminal conduct. In addition to violating curfew, Shanté also violates white time—a time that denies Black people coevalness within modernity. Shanté’s encounter with police is not random. When womanhood and femininity are read as white, Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color have few protections from police terror.⁶³

My conversation with Melissa makes this point exceptionally clear. Melissa was a high school senior and maintained a towering presence even when not in school. She had a powerful voice—the kind you heard before seeing her. Perhaps her use of her outside voice indoors came from her avid soccer skills. As she often reminded me and most others at Run-a-Way, “Soccer is life.” During our interview, I asked Melissa how she interacts with people in positions of authority.

Melissa’s account, like Shanté’s, reveals what in fact may be the violent origins of “tone policing.” Questions seemingly absurd to many white youths are not only discerning but vital to the safety and survival of Black and other racialized youths. Do I have to keep my hands out of my pockets? Do I keep my hands in my pockets? What happens when I take my hands out of my pockets? Will they think I’ll be pulling out something more powerful than a wallet? Will I be accused of stealing? Will I be searched? Will I be arrested? Will I be sexually abused? Will I be next? The processing time of each of these questions literally and figuratively does not count. Read as a transgression, Melissa need not do anything to be the target of police terror. In other words, state violence against Black youth is not contingent but, as Frank Wilderson notes, “gratuitous.”⁶⁴

Still, Melissa was quite charismatic, and her sense of humor kept me laughing during most shifts. Despite the program’s efforts to eliminate any distinction between staff and volunteers, some youths still knew I was different. Melissa was one of them, and she was keen on learning what made me tick. She was quite nice at flipping the script and finding ways to interview me. I was partly responsible for inviting such questions, in part due to my own apprehension over “exercising authority.” The following jotting from July 2, 2015, the day Melissa and a thirteen-year-old named Emory arrived at Run-a-Way, helps capture my usual response to youth resistance:

During today’s trip to the museum, I walked with several youth including 13-year-old Emory and 16-year-old Melissa. Melissa plays soccer. At the start of our walk, Emory asked me to remind him of my name. When I did, he mocked my name, calling me “croissant.”⁶⁵ Jokingly, I told Emory that his comments were re-traumatizing as I grew up being teased by that name. Melissa found the name hilarious.

Melissa found the name I shall not mention to be so amusing that she adopted it as my nickname for the rest of her time at Run-a-Way. Almost a year after meeting Melissa, I was on the Northside for two popular events taking place on the same day: “Flow,” an annual art crawl, and “Carifest,” an annual Caribbean music festival. I was walking through a parking lot on one of the main streets when I heard that familiar voice yell, “Croissant!” I turned around to see Melissa and some of her peers with a staff member from another program. We caught up for a little bit before the staff member redirected Melissa and her friends back to their weekend outing. As we parted ways, it remained unclear whether Melissa and her friends would be able to enjoy the weekend festivities without being targeted for teefing time.

The time Shanté, Melissa, and other Black youths spend thinking not only for themselves but for police as well illustrates the relationality of racialized violence. Processing racialized violence is in and of itself a research process. Black youths at Run-a-Way regularly collected data, analyzed and interpreted that data, and then drew conclusions about their relation systems of power and domination, specifically racialized social systems. Interpreting one’s position through what Du Bois calls the “revelation of the other world” takes time.⁶⁶ Though one’s consciousness may double, time does not. In fact, this sort of doubling requires fractioning. Kendra exposes the divisibility of time when she uses her “own personal time” to wonder why police construct her and other Black youths as “up to no good”:

Say that you’re going to just go out and have a good time with your friends or something. Like, my own personal time and you’ve gotta worry about being targeted by the police because they see a group of Black kids all together. So it’s like, “What are they doing? They’re probably up to no good.” Just because of the color of our skin. But if you see a group of white kids you ride past them like they’re not doing anything.

A gathering of white people is a “social,” while, according to Kendra, a gathering of Black people is a threat to the social. Presumed guilty until proven less guilty, Black youth understand the consequences of being seen together by police. In vivid detail, Kendra not only describes what she and other Black youth have to think about when it comes to police encounters, but also narrates the police’s response to Blackness and Black youth. Such a description requires a sort of racial metamorphosis, whereby Kendra enters the mind of a police officer in order to confirm what Calvin Warren observes: that the “ontological problem of blackness is not yet resolved.”⁶⁷ Not only is “not doing anything” (mis)read as “doing something,” but according to police, Kendra and other Black youth must be “doing something criminal.” Kendra’s remarks echo those of the many Black girls featured in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. Regardless of whether public assembly is a site of affirmation and defense for many Black youth, “what mattered was not what you had done, but the prophetic power of the police to predict the future, and anticipate the mug shot.”⁶⁸ Perhaps the “prophetic power of the police” is a product of the future orientations of whiteness. Whiteness, white people, and especially white police are so future oriented that they have already forecasted the futures of Black youth, and according to each, the future for Black youth is always already criminal. Thus, under the guise of “stopping crime” or “preventing” it, the police Kendra pictures have license to harass Black youth for being currently, if not eventually, “up to no good.” Police have already predicted that, instead of being destined to shine, Black youth are destined for crime or destined to “do time.” Still, for many Black youth, no prediction was necessary, because they were always already charged with using time that does not belong to them.

My interviews suggest that police read Black youth as agentic insofar as they are “criminally culpable.”⁶⁹ “Up to no good” was a recurring theme the youths at Run-a-Way used to describe reckoning with racialized violence. Sixteen-year-old Lamont, for example, described the criminalization of his time use for walking around:

One day I was just walkin’ down the street and I was with … I got white friends too so I was with one of the white friends, right. And he was walkin’ on the other side of the street, and the police pulled me over and gave me a ticket. They said it was like … walking up to no good. Like walkin’ around up to no good and robbin’ and stealin’. Somethin’ like that. I forget the real name they put for it, but that was the definition of it. You know what I’m sayin’? Walkin’ around up to no good, and I was just walkin’ by myself. And he [Lamont’s friend] was still walkin’ across the street, he didn’t get stopped for nothin’. I got stopped. He was like, “What’d they stop you for?” Like, I don’t know… . They think you’re walkin’ up to no good, they stop you… . They didn’t stop the white dude. I was kinda mad… . I felt like it was kinda racist. ’Cuz I told them I was with the dude across the street and they just let him keep walkin’, you know what I’m sayin’. Then he finally came across the street once he realized they were finna’ to let me go, you know what I’m sayin’. He was like, “No, he’s with me,” you know what I’m sayin’. And after he told them that, you know what I’m sayin’, like they got cool and like, “Oh, I’m just gonna write him [Lamont] a ticket …”

In addition to the inordinate amount of time consumed by racialized violence, the charge of “walking up to no good” exemplifies the criminalization of racialized youth’s time use. As a Black youth from a low-income community, Lamont is not legible to police and many others as “good.” Hence, he must rely on his friendship with a white youth to buffer his encounters with police. Once Lamont’s white friend steps on the scene, the police suddenly “got cool.” It is as if Lamont’s white friend’s own legibility within time underwrites Lamont’s existence as a temporal subject.

Though he could not immediately recall the charge, through some clarifying questions Lamont remembered the police describing his behavior as “loitering.” Should such a charge be that surprising within the context of what Stephanie Donald and Cristoph Lindner call the “inert city”?⁷⁰ When whiteness is equated with active forward motion and Blackness treated as stagnant,⁷¹ police read racialized youths like Lamont as “loiterers.” Tragically, while activeness or activity may protect racialized youths from a loitering charge, it is no defense from the criminalization of agency. It is important that we not ignore that in charging Black youths with loitering, police are actually charging Black youths with being.

Some might find it convenient to describe Lamont as being the wrong race at the wrong/white time. But Lamont was walking through a majority-Black community in North Minneapolis, not far from where his cousin, Jamar Clark, was killed by police on November 15, 2015—one month before our interview. Within racialized enclosures such as the ghetto, police officers serve as “watchmen” and moderate the tempo of anti-Blackness, in accordance with white time. The spatialization of Blackness suggests Lamont was exactly where he was supposed to be—enclosed and trapped. Any attempt to deviate from the enclosure meant that the police would arrive not just on time but early to greet him with racialized terror. “Predictive policing” does not predict crime. It predicts/creates “criminals.” How can police predict already established outcomes? No predictions are necessary when you create the same problems you claim to solve.

For police and white civilians turned deputies, “up to no good” functions as probable cause and motive. On February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman used “up to no good” as a license to kill seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin:

Already a watchman, Zimmerman required no deputization. Emboldened by the notion that white people are not just protected by the police but are the police, Zimmerman read Martin’s agency as criminality and ensured that his time at life would not exceed another minute. The “blameworthiness of the free individual,” as Hartman puts it, highlights the continuum between freedom and slavery.⁷³ With “emancipation” came new forms of punishing Black people and Black sociality. Lamont’s repeated reference to being read as “up to no good” harks back to the period of Reconstruction, when “vagrancy laws” legitimated the capture and arrest of Black people found without a labor contract. These and other “Black Codes” marked a seminal phase in slavery’s afterlife. As fugitives of white time, Black youth were not only on the run; they were wanted for attempting to use time that did not belong to them. Black youths like Lamont were charged with “walking up to no good” while walking down the street in their own neighborhood. Lamont’s encounter with police reveals the transmutation from time use to time theft, while illustrating how racialized violence takes time.

When the time is always right for white and wrong for nonwhite, is it even possible for Black youths to use time? According to my father, time use was not an option. Instead he urged us to “teef” it. Though Black youths at Run-a-Way may not have perceived their time use as time theft, they were acutely aware that completing schoolwork, playing, shopping, hanging out with friends, or even simply walking came with clear consequences.

Youths’ unauthorized use of time was read as time theft and thus criminalized by salespersons and the police, as well as deputized whites. If youths were not stealing time, it was clear that time could only be borrowed. While their white counterparts could own time, racialized youths at Run-a-Way could only owe it. We need only look to the many systems that hold Black youths captive to understand what it looks like to owe time. When Black youths are late for school, they must report to detention and pay back the clock and the keepers of time (i.e., teachers and administrators). Detentions, suspensions, and expulsions are not simply academic consequences but forms of temporal violence. Repeated disregard for the academic clock may bring Black youths to the attention of truancy court, placing them at greater risk of entering carceral space. Contrary to popular belief, Black youths held captive in jail are paying a debt not to society but to time and its regulators.

Spending time processing racialized violence ensured that the youths’ time was not their own. Rather, whiteness, white people, and racialized violence infiltrated their psyches to demand more labor time. Remy, for example, went to extreme lengths to protect themself, knowing that their actual safety was predicated on white people’s sense of safety. Youths like Cedric and his brother had to spend time making sense of a white man’s anti-Blackness. Shanté and Melissa had to wonder whether they would have been tone policed by actual police if they were not young Black women. Finally, youths like Lamont could not help but wonder why, according to police, he was “walking up to no good,” while his white friend was just walking.

Each of these accounts raises the question: if Black youths did not have to perform such involuntary labor processing racialized violence, how else might they use their time? What might Cedric and his brother have done instead of talking about a white man’s violent actions for over an hour? How might Remy spend their time if white people’s safety did not supersede the safety of all others? How might the time youths spend shopping change if they did not have to think about how they are viewed by salespersons every time they enter a store? It matters less how youths choose to spend their time, so long as it is theirs. Herein lies the problem of racialized time. It is the product of exploitation and extraction. Consequently, Black youths remain in debt, owing both time and explanations. They must explain why they entered a store and did not immediately make a purchase, why they are walking, why they are out at night, and why they are together. In short, Black and other racialized youths must make the case for why they are using time that does not belong to them.

During my time in the Twin Cities, I had the privilege of collaborating with the renowned, Minneapolis-based movement artist Ricardo Levins Morales. Ricardo is known for literally “drawing the line for social justice” in brilliant artwork. Most people who have had an opportunity to share physical and mental space with Ricardo know that “artist” is but one of many titles he holds. He is also a brilliant activist who does not shy away from the messiness of organizing, but instead finds creative ways to, in his words, “ask bigger questions,” in the spirit of solidarity. I, like many other organizers in the Twin Cities and beyond, still consider Ricardo a one-of-a-kind friend and mentor. One of the first posters I bought from Ricardo was a piece titled Firsts. In the poster, Ricardo depicts a white person in a suit, carrying a briefcase, walking away from a crowd of mostly nonwhite people, with the following message sketched between both parties: “What if nobody could have seconds until everyone had gotten firsts? Could I be sent to jail for asking that?” Ricardo’s use of “seconds” likely referred to second helpings of food. Still, I could not help but consider the temporal use of “seconds.” In reframing/rephrasing this question temporally, we might ask, “What if nobody could have seconds, minutes, or hours, until everyone had time? Could I be forced to do time for asking about it?”

Throughout this chapter, each youth has provided further evidence that both time and space subsidize white life while amassing an incommensurable debt to Black youth. The instances of racialized violence I have presented here are not meant to cast readers as voyeurs. Rather, each account strains mutual conceptions of time. These Black youths were consistently used by white time and white space. They demonstrate why the concept of time use lacks measurement validity— the extent to which a concept measures what it intends to measure. Given that Black youths’ time use was routinely surveilled and criminalized, it appears that they were renting time rather than using it.