Conclusion

COVID-19, Disorientation, Rebellion, and the Wounds Time Cannot Heal

Many described COVID-19 as a “disorienting” experience—one that left people disconnected from familiar spatio-temporal coordinates. Losing track of time or the day of the week was further evidence of disorientation and the unmooring of time and space. Some went as far as to conflate “sheltering in place” or the lockdown with incarceration. Soon enough, I learned that disorientation was largely limited to the level of the individual. What became even clearer was that most people in the United States were not disoriented toward systems and institutions complicit in a form of world making that naturalizes Black dispossession, captivity, debt, and death. The pandemic sparked fears that “the world will never be the same.” But what about those who worried that things would not be all that different?

Even fewer people seem to have been disoriented to time itself. Some may express concern over the provocation to funk the clock: “Without time, how will we educate students?” “Will we simply get rid of deadlines?” “Are we promoting laziness, procrastination, waywardness, and an overall devolution of societal norms?” “If we don’t teach punctuality now, youth will never gain the skills necessary to join the workforce.” I tend to respond to such inquiries by encouraging the asker to question the question. How might flexibility with deadlines be a commitment to disability justice and to helping Black and other racialized youths reclaim the time taken from structures of racialized violence? Moreover, why are we so quick to individualize disorder and ignore systemic forms of temporal violence? What if before punishing Black youths for lateness, we first sought to transform the onto-epistemological conditions that make lateness possible in the first place? How can teachers mark Black youths tardy when systems and structures are consistently late in delivering “equal” educational opportunities “with all deliberate speed”?⁷ What would it take to eliminate logics that equate Black youths’ time use with time theft? What would it look like for adults, including teachers, youthworkers, and others in positions of authority, to encourage Black youths to take/reappropriate their time, rather than chastising them for doing so? What must be done to transform the social conditions that make “maybe environments” so very real? How can we upend the logics that equate survival with “crime”? Before condemning Black youths for ‘living for the moment,” why not question why they are denied access to liberal futurities when whiteness is equated with modernity and future orientations?

Black youths seek not only an exit from the here and now of anti-Blackness and racialized violence but an escape from white time necessitating an anti-Black future. Black youths at Run-a-Way were not interested in going “back to the future,” precisely because they knew that the future was foreclosed by white time. Rather, they found ways to create Black futures in the present. While reckoning with time, they also wrecked it in order to design new possibilities for being. Drawing inspiration from Robin D. G. Kelley’s conceptualization of the “black radical imagination,” Kara Keeling states, “Black existence is a condition of possibility for moving beyond the what is. At the same time, it presently anchors a set of possibilities for ‘something else to be.’”⁸

As Black youth transgress the “what is” of white time and liberal futurities, they bring new meaning to the notion of time travel. Just as Dionne Brand taught readers the importance of traveling “without a map” and “without a way,” Black youth find a way in disorientation and “misdirection.”⁹ Perhaps we might think of disorientation as direction, in the sense that losing our coordinates from the current spacetime is integral to charting new paths and constructing otherwise ways of being. As Édouard Glissant writes, “There is no place that does not have its elsewhere. No place where this is not an essential dilemma.”¹⁰

Abiding by CP Time, inverting the temporal terms of whiteness, “teefing” time, and rejecting liberal futurities are evidence of Black youths’ desire to free themselves from time and create what Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith describe as “otherwise worlds”: “Otherwise: something or anything else; something to the contrary” (emphasis in the original).¹¹ Funking the clock is key to the creation of liberatory futurities and otherwise worlds. Youths, however, are not “the ones we’ve been waiting for,” because, in truth, nobody is waiting. The uprisings of 2020 are a reminder that an otherwise world is possible, but not without struggle. Black youths know the stakes are high. As King, Navarro, and Smith, write, “Otherwise: if not, or else.”¹²

In addition to being about time, this book has made the case that it is also about time that sociology catch up to the racialized temporalities of Black youth in urbanized space. Sociology’s reliance on measures of linear time, the linear life course, and an overall linear logic will keep it suspended in white time. Perhaps sociology is not meant to keep up with the temporalities of Black youth in urbanized space. Black youth consistently resist the disciplinary urge of sociology to suspend them in time and space by upholding several key tasks of Black studies: namely, to rewrite knowledge and unwrite racial taxonomies,¹³ challenge the truth of the current episteme, and redefine the human as a verb. By running a way, rather than away, Black youth reveal their prescience and their connection to past and present realities, as well as otherwise futurities.

“Fugitivity,” as conceptualized by Black studies scholars, does not require a person to run a way. Rather, the act of running is itself generative. To flee, escape, and abscond represent modes of acting with purpose. Fugitivity is also an opportunity to repurpose. Yet “runaway youth” have little chance of escaping the grips of what La Marr Jurelle Bruce calls the “symbiotic interrelation between material and discursive violence.”¹⁴ The stigma of being a “runaway” speaks for those presumed guilty until proven less guilty—namely, Black youth. The stigma linked to “runaways” renders motivations for running invisible, even if running a way is the only option. It does not matter what youth are running from or where they are running to. Running itself is transgressive, as it defies the designated space and time.

To inquire about youths’ motivations for running is to risk learning that Black youth have become superfluous to the concept of the Child and thus warrant no protection. As Black youth begin to share their reasons for running, we see they are breaking fast from a compost of violence largely produced by adult-led systems. So they boogie from detention and the schoolhouse. They bounce from (s)low-wage work and other planned-obsolescent space. Perhaps many Black youths at Run-a-Way were seeking the haven that many of their ancestors sought and that Saidiya Hartman describes:

And the dreams of what might be possible were enshrined in the names of these towns and villages founded by fugitives, safe at last, we have come together, here where no one can reach us anymore, the village of free people, here we speak of peace, a place of abundance, haven. Haven like communities of maroons and fugitives and outliers elsewhere, their identity was defined as much by what they were running from as by what they were running toward. (emphasis in the original)¹⁵

We need not privilege physicality, however, to understand the concept of “running.” Many youths are running a way without moving at all. As fugitives fleeing racism, settler colonialism, and anti-Blackness, they run away, both physically and psychically, from racialized violence and toward another spacetime. As fugitives of white time, Black youths are not only “on the run”; they are wanted for attempting to use time that does not belong to them. Hence, their time use is read as time theft and is deemed criminal behavior. They are charged with “walking up to no good” while walking down the street in their own neighborhood. It is not that they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Rather, they are in the wrong space according to white time, which remains the product of Black debt and dispossession. In short, Black youth are accused of stealing that which was already stolen (from them).

Black youths’ temporalities are not only transgressive but transformative. To transform time requires exercising what Robin D. G. Kelley describes as the “black radical imagination”: “We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way. It is that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I shall call ‘poetry’ or ‘poetic knowledge.’”¹⁶ Youths 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. As long as some persons remain exploited by white time, there will exist an exigent need to resist and, in the words of Toni Cade Bambara, “make revolution irresistible.”¹⁷ For adherents of Western Standard Time navigating the world through the future, the prospects of a revolution against time remain to be seen. The residence of slavery’s afterlife in the present, though, leads many Black youths to imagine the not-yet-here. As Kara Keeling notes, “The past appears with every present, harboring dimensions of itself that might challenge what has been perceived about it.”¹⁸

After the murder of George Floyd, Black youth took to the streets, not necessarily to run a way but to show the way through disorientation. They refused to be oriented to the notion that cops, cuffs, and cages keep people safe. They felt the same about school resource officers. More importantly, they were disoriented to the notion of “police reform.” The risk of dying from COVID-19 was real, but the threat of police terror was even more imminent. At the time, there was no end in sight for the pandemic. But Black youth recognized that the enduring lifespan of police terror was sure to outlive any global health crisis. If their demands were not met today, tomorrow would lose importance. In turn, they showed that direct action is itself a mode of transgressing time and funking the clock.

Engaging in direct action signals one’s refusal to have a seat, take a number, hold for the next representative, and/or wait their turn. Instead the goal was to bring the ruckus right to the front door of systems and institutions that only claim to “stand with Black lives” when their property, particularly whiteness and capital, is at risk. Thus, rather than continuing to be teased by capitalism and what is so often denied, many racialized youth from across the Twin Cities came to collect and did so through another form of direct action: shoplifting, or, as some activists called it, “reappropriation.” Other youths did not believe in charges of “destruction of property,” particularly when the “property” (e.g., the Third Precinct in South Minneapolis) was destructive. Perhaps the proper charge would then be “destruction of destructive property.” Each of these tactics are examples of insurgent time that have no interest in entertaining the status quo and/or “business as usual.”

Black and other racialized youth were prescient enough to know that you cannot treat a disease (i.e., police terror) with a symptom of that disease (e.g., databases to track “police misconduct”; national standards for accrediting police departments; body cameras; liability insurance; de-escalation training; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives; implicit bias or antiracism trainings). They knew that hiring more Black and brown officers would not only not end police terror but inaugurate and legitimate new forms of racialized violence. Black youth refuse to entertain postraciality simply because the cop brutalizing a Black person is no longer white. DEI disciples fail to recognize that “inclusion,” by definition, requires exclusion. As Dylan Rodríguez notes, campaigns like “Join LAPD” function as “counterinsurgency” strategies used to incorporate minoritized difference while simultaneously legitimating state terror against members of the same racialized groups who join the ranks.¹⁹ Hence, the inclusion of more Black and brown cops will always come at the expense of marginalized Black and brown communities. It makes sense that policing and DEI and/or antiracist education are so compatible. Both are temporally oriented toward a future of postraciality. Police and other institutions of racial terror use DEI and liberal antiracisms as fronts to mete out more palatable and seemingly race-neutral forms of violence.

Today’s remedies for racism come specially packaged in individualized, future-oriented how-to guides that do more to expand racial capitalism and the state than dismantle them. Black youth, however, are not buying. They will not be fooled by (neo)liberal antiracisms that encourage them to be the best antiracist they can be because “only you can prevent racism.” At the same time, Black youth refuse to let a largely white “reading class” reinforce Enlightenment logic by reading their way “out of trouble,” just so they can become harbingers of a postracial world.²⁰ Entertaining such a postracial future is a pretext for legitimating violence in the present. Antiracists emphasize the difference between not being racist and being antiracist; however, when being antiracist necessitates reforms to unparalleled catastrophe and the afterlife of slavery, then such a distinction is meaningless. Just as you cannot reform slavery, you cannot reform time. Any attempt to do so would be fascist.²¹ A radical praxis urges us to get at the root of temporal violence, while reforms push us to refashion time so that the watch bears a striking resemblance to the whip.

Throughout the pandemic, many Black youth knew what lay ahead and had no interest in things “returning to normal,” precisely because the “normal” so many longed to return to was fatal as fuck. So it is no surprise that Black and many other racialized youth, acting in solidarity, were largely responsible for setting things off in the Twin Cities. They demanded the abolition of police and prisons, and some were even motivated by a desire to abolish civil society.²² They checked anyone who tried to critique them for being impetuous and yearning for “instant gratification,” because the(ir) time was/is now.

Black youths at Run-a-Way knew what’s up and still know what time it is. They know their ABCs and 1-2-3s, but it is still fuck alphabet boys and fuck 12, respectively, but with the utmost disrespect. Even though they know how to count, they know they cannot count on cops. So fuck Five-O. Fuck slave patrol. Fuck watchmen. Matter fact fuck the watch. Fuck Jake. Fuck “the man.” Matter fact fuck Man. Fuck “one time.” Matter fact fuck time. All day every day. They say time heals all wounds. But can time heal the same wounds it inflicts for nine minutes twenty-nine seconds? George Floyd. Can time heal the wounds of delaying lifesaving treatment to a Black woman physician imperiled by racialized medicine and COVID-19? Doctor Susan Moore. Some might say it’s only a matter of time before Black time matters, but on the matter of time, Black youth have already rendered a decision—Ayo, fuck the clock!