Suspended in the Ethnographic Present

As urban ethnographers seek to make the mundane matter and to make sense of the lived experiences of “disadvantaged populations” in real time, they run the risk of freezing racialized subjects within what Johannes Fabian calls the “ethnographic present.”⁷ Seeking not only to make the familiar strange but the strange familiar, urban ethnographers bear tremendous responsibility for placing the lived realities of poor and racialized people on perpetual pause.⁸ The lives of poor and racialized people are then crystallized and suspended in time to create a coherent and intelligible story. To be suspended in time is to be in limbo. Time is at a standstill, and so are individual aspirations. The ethnographic present, though, is predicated on a set of unequal power relations between the observer and observed. Not only does the ethnographic present freeze an observed subject in time, but it also freezes temporal orientations. Future orientations are sacrificed in order to live in the moment. What to the observer (and consumer) is the ethnographic present is, for the observed, past tense. In other words, although urban sociologists spatially-temporally assign poor and racialized people to the ethnographic present, those people do not stay there.

“Urban jungle” serves as a metonym for poor urbanized space and as an indicator of nonnormative temporalities.⁹ “Random violence” and the need to “watch your back” invoke fear of the unknown. Black and brown youths racing bikes in between heavy traffic as if they have “nothing to lose” and without fear of what may come signals a desire to “live for the moment.” Youths navigating the streets past curfew lead outside observers to wonder how they manage to survive. Urban sociologists endorse the idea that youth have difficulty extending personal motivations beyond the present. Present orientations are products of “social disorganization,” violence, and economic insecurity. Consequently, the long-term implications of individual actions are bridges that youth will cross upon arrival and no sooner.¹⁰

Urban sociologists rely on the ethnographic present as a heuristic to make sense of deviant temporalities among youth lacking long-term goals for the life course. The ethnographic present, though, relies on two-dimensional models of sociality that risk suspending youth in time. The logic of the ethnographic present requires those residing in poor urbanized space to move from the inner city to the inert city. Once they reach their destination, they remain stuck in “stillville.” Yet images of the ethnographic present are but snapshots of space-time and ultimately fail to see the broader picture.

This chapter extends my engagement with the notion of transgression by revealing how youth’s prescience exceeds the temporal parameters of the ethnographic present. How does shifting representations of Black youth from present oriented to prescient stretch the sociological imagination by making the familiar (i.e., the ethnographic present) strange and making the mundane matter? This question remains largely unexamined within urban sociology. Instead, static representations of Black life continue to conceal vibrant and dynamic forms of sociality. A walk down the block easily turns into encounters with friends and foes, neighbors and strangers, all of whom contribute to a limitless tempo of rich social life. Instead of isolating people in poor urbanized space to the ethnographic present, urban sociologists and ethnographers may benefit from considering their own limited capacity to remain on beat to unfamiliar temporal rhythms. Scenes of poor people waiting in a local welfare office, for example, may lead a researcher to assume that time in this context is suspended. Is waiting, though, the only discernible activity in such situations? Is there room to acknowledge how submitting applications for work or welfare benefits is a future-oriented activity? What activities does physical idleness conceal? How does this activity bely someone’s location in the ethnographic present? Perhaps they are in transit, moving between the past, present, and future, as they adhere to nonlinear forms of time free from linear progress narratives.

Rather than extend urban sociology’s legacy of reifying poor urbanized space as dangerous, chaotic, and inert, this chapter contributes to an ongoing process to de-arrest Black youth from the ethnographic present.¹¹ Within urban sociology and urban ethnography, “thinking for the moment” signifies a present orientation to time and a product of an unpredictable life course marked by “social disorganization” and violence. Depictions of poor urbanized space as immutably anachronistic obscures Black youth’s ability to see the not-yet-here. In this chapter, Black youths at Run-a-Way demonstrate that their prescience exceeds the conceptual capacity of the ethnographic present.

Despite being introduced in the mid-1980’s, the concept of the ethnographic present prevailed throughout the 1990s and well into the current moment. During this period, life course scholars, urban sociologists, and criminologists utilized the ethnographic present to assess the values, worldviews, and aspirations of poor families living in urbanized space. With the family being widely accepted as a key site of socialization, Black parents, particularly Black mothers, were deemed responsible for their children’s in-the-moment thinking and abbreviated aspirations. Despite being widely taken to task by a range of social scientists and Black feminists,¹² the Moynihan Report is still revived and recited almost verbatim for many seeking to make sense of race, space, and family dynamics.¹³ For instance, Alex Kotlowitz casts aspersions on Black mothers for failing to think about both their own and their children’s futures: “She [Lajoe] rarely felt she could sail through a day and enjoy such simple moments as the coming of spring, Pharoah’s smile or Lafeyette’s playful teasing. There was no time to reflect on the past or plan for the future. If it wasn’t the shooting outside, it was her daughter’s drug habit or Lafeyette’s troubles at school or Pharoah’s stammer.”¹⁴

Kotlowitz’s book’s title—There Are No Children Here—says it all. If in fact there are no children here, there are also no parents (read: adults capable of effectively bearing and rearing children). When the Child is prefigured as white, however, it is no surprise that Kotlowitz cannot find “children” (or “qualified” parents) in poor urbanized space. The unpredictability of such space, according to urban sociologists, explains why Black youth are present oriented and why they judge the future as futile. Present orientations are thus the product of limited knowledge of the middle class or a passive acceptance of the future.

Consider the work of sociologists striving to distinguish between “risk” and “resilience” in poor communities. In Managing to Make It: Urban Families and Adolescent Success, Frank Furstenberg and colleagues examine adolescent development within poor urbanized space using the “risk and resiliency framework.” While the authors note some limitations of the framework, their conceptualization of “development” remains confined to an “iterative and ongoing process between children and the settings in which they grow up.”¹⁵ Lacking any analysis of the racialization of time or the temporalization of race, Furstenberg and colleagues attribute present orientations to an intergenerational transmission of dysfunction: “Most parents in our study devoted their attention to the here and now, believing that the future would take care of itself if their children managed to remain in school and stay out of trouble… . [P]arents were applying expectations appropriate for a past rather than a future economy… . [M]any parents simply didn’t have adequate knowledge of the middle-class world to guide their children in how to succeed.”¹⁶

Focus on the “here and now,” according to Furstenberg and colleagues, is a consequence of limited exposure to middle-class norms and values and what they describe as “functional communities.”¹⁷ Rather than acknowledging struggles to reckon with routinized structural violence, the authors believe low-income families suffer from a poverty of middle-class norms and values. They accuse families of passively letting the future “take care of itself” as opposed to actively shaping it. Consequently, sociologists treat present orientations as symptoms of unemployment, unstructured schedules, and a general disregard for time.¹⁸

Critiquing the ethnographic present’s past should not distract from its contemporary manifestations in urban ethnography. Carrying on the tradition of using culture as a proxy for anti-Blackness and racialized and spatialized violence, David Harding calls for greater attention to “cultural heterogeneity” and “neighborhood effects” to explain the social organization of violence in Black and Latinx communities in Boston:¹⁹ “Instead of worrying about violence, victimization, and involvement in crime, Lower Mills parents have the time and energy to worry about other challenges that most adolescent boys will undoubtedly face, like staying focused on school, avoiding becoming a father at a young age, and avoiding sexually transmitted infections.”²⁰

In constructing families from Roxbury Crossing and Franklin as constantly “worrying about violence, victimization, and involvement in crime,” Harding isolates them within an ethnographic present devoid of future orientations. To escape this temporal suspension, he recommends that social scientists adopt a “culturally informed theory of neighborhood effects on adolescents.”²¹ The term “neighborhood effects,” though, is specious, given its use among urban sociologists as a proxy for making sense of what Robert J. Sampson and his coauthors describe as “delinquency, violence, depression, [and] high-risk behavior,” particularly among Black youth.²² Countless urban sociologists and ethnographers have skillfully evaded accusations of reproducing culture-of-poverty discourse by deploying terms like “structure,” “neighborhood effects,” and “social isolation” in order to draw trite conclusions about the intimate connections between culture and structure.²³ I take issue with Harding not because of any alleged disregard of youth agency but because of the way he reifies the equation of Black youths’ agency with risk, deviance, and criminality. For Harding and many other urban ethnographers, Black youth and Blackness become “pure function.”²⁴ As Chad Benito Infante writes, “The most pernicious violence against Black and Indigenous life is their transformation into literary metaphor and device.”²⁵ “Living the drama” and “inner-city boys” become metonymic devices for understanding violence and Blackness. The consequence, as Calvin L. Warren suggests, is that “utility eclipses the thing itself.”²⁶

The acclaim given to Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is symptomatic of persistent racialized myopia, abjection fetish, and the fungibility of Blackness within urban ethnography. Preserving constructions of Black social life as inherently errant, chaotic, and antithetical to normative conceptions of time and future planning, Goffman writes,

Young men looking over their shoulder for the police find that a public and stable daily routine becomes a path to confinement. A stable routine makes it easier for the police to locate a man directly, and makes it easier for his friends and family to call the police on him. Keeping a secret and unpredictable schedule—sleeping in different beds, working irregular hours, deceiving others about one’s whereabouts, and refusing to commit to advance plans—serves as a generalized technique of evasion, helping young men avoid getting taken into custody.²⁷

The challenge of creating a stable routine is, according to Goffman, a product of the “War on Drugs,” surveillance, policing, and the criminalization of communities of color. Through dramatic tales of crime, gang violence, and betrayal, Goffman undermines her own critique of the structural forces conditioning Black life. Crime is not the only conduit for interpellating Black and other racialized youth in urban ethnographic studies. Time serves a similar function. “Refusing to commit to advance plans” appears to be Goffman’s way of explaining deviant temporal orientations among young Black men, including a failure to remain future oriented. Consequently, her interlocutors remain suspended in time and inured to living in the moment.

Urbanized space is conducive to the production not only of present orientations but of pathology as well. What appears to be an attempt to engage the question of positionality becomes another instance of an urban ethnographer pathologizing poor urbanized space by treating crime as infectious. In the book’s methodological appendix, Goffman describes her return to Princeton as a “culture shock”:

The first day, I caught myself casing the classrooms in the Sociology Department, making a mental note of the TVs and computers I could steal if I ever needed cash in a hurry. I got pulled over for making a U-turn, and then got another ticket for parking a few inches outside the same designated dotted line on the street that I hadn’t even noticed… . The students and the even wealthier townies spoke strangely; their bodies moved in ways that I didn’t recognize… . The Princeton students discussed indie rock bands—white-people music, to me—and drank wine and imported beers I’d never heard of… . Who were these white men in tight pants who spoke about their anxieties and feelings? They seemed so feminine, yet they dated women.²⁸

Goffman’s “shock” pales in comparison to the astonishment of readers critical of white social scientists seeking to live vicariously through racialized others. The above passage rehearses the consequences of “going native”—a (settler) colonial expression used to describe the risks of a researcher adopting the characteristics and customs of a local group or culture they study. “Going native,” however, distracts the reader from an even greater perniciousness in Goffman’s reflection—treating Blackness as both fungible and pathological.²⁹ Goffman’s return to Princeton is marked by a self-awareness of a newly acquired predisposition to crime, perpetuating the notion that “Black crime” is redundant, while “white crime” is virtually an anomaly.³⁰ At the same time that Goffman empties and occupies Black bodies, she also attempts to psychically disown whiteness.³¹ The impossibility of doing so reveals Goffman’s scholastic solecism. What does it mean for a white person to suggest that “indie rock” sounds like “white-people music”? It means a white person can treat a nonwhite life as fungible and interchangeable with their own while entertaining the fanciful prospect of renouncing whiteness.

On the Run exemplifies urban ethnography’s capacity to study Black social life from the position of abstraction. “Who feels it, knows it” is a popular aphorism in Jamaica and many other majority-Black Caribbean nations that signifies the subjective side to oppression that only the oppressed can understand. Goffman, however, uses the fungibility of Blackness as an opportunity for those who don’t feel it to claim to know it. From an abstracted position, the ethnographic present becomes a temporalizing tool used to suspend poor racialized people in time while holding constant racialization, anti-Blackness, and routinized state terror.

I am not alone in critiquing urban sociology and urban ethnography for their depictions of poor and racialized persons. I find myself in the company of other sociologists and Black studies scholars. For example, Roderick Ferguson, in Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, takes canonical sociology to task for its reading of “American modernity through the category of social disorganization” and for using African American culture as “evidence of modernity’s course and society’s disorganization.”³² Others like Robin D. G. Kelley critique the “culture wars” as a pretext for neoliberal and neoconservative debates over who can best diagnosis the condition(s) of the inner city. In Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Kelley indicts social scientists for constructing Black communities as “dysfunctional,” “lazy,” “irresponsible,” and “sociopathic.”³³ The book’s title is an allusion to “the dozens”—a competition familiar to many Black youth involving mental maneuverability, vernacular dexterity, and, most important, potent punchlines. The title serves as a comeback to the racializing logics of social science that depict the ghetto as dysfunctional—“Nah. Yo’ mama’s dysfunctional!” Freeden Blume Oeur also seeks to challenge pathological constructions of youth in poor urbanized space through a study of all-male public schools. Blume Oeur argues that in their attempts to push students toward academic excellence, both schools and communities reproduce troubling dichotomies between “deviant” Black boys destined to remain “stuck in place” and those who are actively preparing to take control of their futures.³⁴

My critique draws additional insights and inspiration from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Disabusing social scientists of the notion that “crime” and “pathology” remain the central modes of interpellating in urbanized space, Hartman centers the experiences of Black girls as catalysts for a cultural movement that radically renarrated sociological scripts for the urban poor. Hartman recovers the stories of Black girls openly rebelling against “circumstances that made it impossible to live” in New York and Philadelphia at the beginning of the twentieth century.³⁵ As she notes, “The reformers and sociologists come in search of the truly disadvantaged failing to see her and her friends as thinkers or planners, or notice the beautiful experiments crafted by poor black girls.”³⁶ Even the most prominent sociologists succumbed to the cult of perfunctory social science. Hartman draws on Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro to illustrate the tensions that emerge when the “scholar denied” becomes the scholar admitted to predominantly white space predicated on the extraction and exploitation of Black sociality:³⁷

Their eyes looked straight into his, as if imploring Du Bois for a solution. Was there some answer or remedy that might have escaped them? The sociologist was silent… . The conversations humbled him. His gentlemanly comportment and reserved New England manner—even his friends called him dear Du Bois—was off-putting, and it exaggerated the gulf between him and ordinary black folks. The distance was a requirement of the research and a studied performance.³⁸

Sociologists, too, have critiqued urban ethnographers for stigmatizing Black sociality. Alford Young, for example, seeks to “de-pathologize the image of poor black men” through a new cultural analysis:³⁹ “Cultural models, paradigms, and interpretations must be built from analyses of the experience of low-income African Americans that are not restricted to social problem solving or to illustrating the everyday realities of their lives.”⁴⁰ Young goes on to propose “elevating the African American urban poor to the analytical landscape that other groups share so that rather than these people being viewed as a special social problem case, they acquire full recognition as informers of the human experience and condition.”⁴¹ Young’s apparent commitment to liberal humanism presupposes a belief that “elevating” Black people will result in “full recognition.” Such an argument, though, rehearses what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls a “sociological analytics of exclusion” and ignores the violence associated with racially affectable others seeking to approximate the “post-Enlightenment European” subject.⁴² Young fails to consider the terms and conditions under which Black people gain “full recognition” and how the recognition of some is predicated on the misrecognition and illegibility of others. For example, the false opposition of “street” and “decent” Black folk is indicative of the way in which some racialized persons are esteemed at the expense of members of the same racial category.⁴³

The centrality of time marks my departure from previous critiques of urban sociology and urban ethnography. There exist countless studies replete with rich descriptions of Black youth reckoning with racialized social systems. The story of how Black youth reckon with time, however, remains untold. No longer will time be ignored as a tool of racial power and subordination. Rather than allow urban sociologists to continue to serve as the masters of the ethnographic clock, I center the voices of Black youth to remind social scientists what and whose time it is. Through their stories, we come to appreciate that being present is a form of prescience, and that, for many Black youth, history does more than repeat itself—it also hurts.

Presenting a racial critique of time serves as a necessary rejoinder to the ethnographic present in urban sociology. If time, as I argue, is a racialized construct, then any discussions of youths’ time use and temporal orientations must acknowledge the role of power and how some gain greater temporal value over others by dint of their racialized status. Without attending to the racialization of time and the temporalization of race, urban sociologists legitimate and naturalize the ethnographic present while locating Black and other racialized youth squarely inside it.

When “What Is to Come” Has Already Gone

While youth are believed to maintain a present orientation to time, such assessments fail to appreciate the possibility that many of them have already thought deeply about their futures and concluded that there is not a whole lot to look forward to. The stigma surrounding present orientations is one that Elliot Liebow takes to task in Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men:

From the inside looking out, what appears as a “present time” orientation to the outside observer is, to the man experiencing it, as much a future orientation as that of his middle-class counterpart… . Thus when Richard squanders a week’s pay in two days it is not because, like an animal or a child, he is “present-time oriented,” unaware of or unconcerned with his future. He does so precisely because he is aware of the future and the hopelessness of it all.⁴⁴

Age and experience certainly help “streetcorner men” recognize “the hopelessness of it all”; however, even youths can gather enough experiential evidence to figure out that pursuing liberal futures is futile. How much space and time do Black youths have to think about a future conditioned by anti-Blackness in the present? According to Kara Keeling, insofar as visions of the future are filtered through an anti-Black world, the future cannot be entertained as something radically different from the present: “From within the logics of existing possible worlds and the range of possible trajectories into the future that they currently make perceptible, a Black future looks like no future at all.”⁴⁵

Having had a preview of structural inequalities associated with “possible trajectories into the future,” Black youths must adjust their time horizons accordingly. Because the Black youths at Run-a-Way had a strong sense of what was to come, they refused to entertain false promises. For example, Kendra, age fifteen, shared why she felt Black youths may think in the moment:

In suggesting that “it’s never been confirmed that we’re gonna live another day,” Kendra does not limit the threat of a premature death to environmental risk factors but widens the definition of risk to include the threat of state-sanctioned violence. I asked whether she felt that the notion that tomorrow is not promised is a “realer” feeling for Black people and Black youth:

Yeah. Definitely. Because … Black kids don’t really … they don’t really look up to anything… . I mean, we see Black people get killed for absolutely no reason at all. Police officer is not gonna spare my life because I’m a kid. They’re not gonna spare my life because I’m a girl. I’m still Black! The color of my skin is still the same as Trayvon Martin or Eric Brown [sic]. So … sometimes I feel like I might not even have a future … or my brothers might not have a future. I mean, we can say … we wanna go to college and stuff. But how many youth have said they wanted to go to college and ended up on the street? I mean, all youth say they wanna go to college.

At the time of this interview, the Black Lives Matter movement was in full effect, and to youths like Kendra, so were anti-Blackness and misogynoir. With an athletic physique, long braids, and a dark complexion, Kendra “fit the description” sketched by many police officers. When the “description” is always already Black, Kendra must emphasize, “I’m still Black.” In other words, Kendra is still the description. What does it mean to fit what one is? To Kendra, it means that describing the future is a challenge because she has already been described as the description. The possibility that the future, in Kendra’s words, “might not really come” signals its fugitivity. Or perhaps Kendra’s future remains held within what John Mbiti calls “no time”—“what has not taken place or what has no likelihood of an immediate occurrence.”⁴⁶ As Mbiti writes, “The future is virtually absent because events which lie in it have not taken place, they have not been realized and cannot, therefore constitute time… . Since what is in the future has not been experienced, it does not make sense, it cannot, therefore constitute part of time, and people do not know how to think about it—unless, of course, it is something which falls within the rhythm of natural phenomena.”⁴⁷

Could it be that youths like Kendra find it futile to always try to capture that which is already held captive within the realm of “no time”? Not only does Kendra see her future under threat of expropriation by police terror, but she also questions liberal futurities, including the popular “college for all” trope. Is Kendra rejecting the possibility of improving her life chances over time? Or is she rejecting a future she does not want? Perhaps she is rejecting what Dylan Rodríguez calls a liberal futurity predicated on false promises of “equal opportunity,” civil liberties, and neoliberal “freedoms” that backfire as soon as she attempts to become an entrepreneurial subject.⁴⁸ Because liberalism requires universality, mutuality, and commensurability, liberal futurities stand in as the aspirational goals for all. In rejecting liberal futurities, youths at Run-a-Way also rejected key frames to colorblind racism, including “abstract liberalisms” predicated on the false equivalences of “choice,” “individualism,” and “equal opportunity.” As Kendra says, “I mean, we can say … we wanna go to college and stuff. But how many youth have said they wanted to go to college and ended up on the street? I mean, all youth say they wanna go to college.” Kendra’s reluctance to embrace such universalisms brings greater nuance to previous research examining the sources of unrealistically high educational expectations among Black students. Blume Oeur links such expectations to the myth of meritocracy and its adverse impact on Black students:

A majority of students still saw college in their future; fifteen of twenty-five students I interviewed (60 percent) mentioned college as part of their future plans. Educational researchers have found that poor youth hold unrealistically high academic expectations for themselves: many believe that they will earn a bachelor’s degree when in fact the odds against that are very high. High educational expectations are driven, in part, by an enduring meritocracy discourse in the United States, which maintains that success is primarily driven by individual work ethic. This narrative—what many call a myth—has taken on new life in a neoliberal era that further reduces achievement to a matter of individual choice. This has an especially devastating impact on poor Blacks.⁴⁹

Despite being repeatedly told that “education is the key,” many Black youths at Run-a-Way saw through the veneer of progress narratives and “education-for-all” discourse. Present-day structural violence had already foretold their futures. Kendra’s prescience belies notions that she and other Black youths are present oriented. She has received a preview of that which has yet to come and opts out of a future undergirded by empty promises. Kendra and other Black youths at Run-a-Way echo José Esteban Muñoz’s critique of Lee Edelman for prefiguring the Child as white. As Muñoz writes, “The future is only the stuff of some kids. Racialized kids, queer kids, are not the sovereign princes of futurity.”⁵⁰

According to Pierre Bourdieu, “Today is tomorrow, because yesterday tomorrow was today.”⁵¹ What Bourdieu illustrates is the fluidity and iterativeness of time. Bourdieu’s astute observation is shared by sixteen-year-old Marlon, who, when asked about the future, stated, “I think of now, not really the future… . ’Cuz it’s happening now. I dunno, just when the future comes it comes. I’m thinkin’ about now. It’s more important.” What Marlon and Bourdieu both acknowledge is that time does not stop. Hence, isolating a “point in time” is counterproductive. “The future,” Carmen Sirianni writes, “appears only as an abstract and linear continuation of the present.”⁵² The abstractness of the future does not concern Marlon. What is most clear and apprehensible is the now. Marlon knows the future will come, but until then he stays in the now.

If the present is any predictor of the future, then current voids will likely persist later in life. Black youths at Run-a-Way were perceptive enough to recognize that the protracted nature of structural inequalities made the current moment and the future largely indistinguishable. Rarely did they reject the future without offering some rationale for thinking and being “in the now.” Complicating conventional understandings of time as contained in isolated intervals of the past, present, and future, sixteen-year-old Remy views life as one continuous struggle in which the only endpoint or deadline is death itself. Responding to my question about how they think about the future, Remy said,

I don’t think about the future… . I’m in the moment. To me, the moment right now is the future. What you’re doin’ in this moment is going to affect what’s going on in the future. I see this very stressful road because my life has been hard since day one. I don’t really think about the future ’cuz people keep telling me it’s going to get better. But it’s like, if I have to go through all this shit in order for it to get better, I dunno if I wanna see it at all ’cuz I don’t wanna … I wanna stop. I don’t wanna do it no more. ’Cuz the more I keep going the more shit keeps happening. I don’t like that. So I just don’t really think about the future like that.

For Remy, contemplating the future is futile, precisely because tomorrow’s struggles are so evident today. In turn, Remy rejects what La Marr Jurelle Bruce calls “Western Standard Time” (WST) predicated on a hegemonic teleology directed “toward normative futures, toward narrow horizons of happily ever after tailored to white, heteronormative, middle-class, rationalist subjects.”⁵³ What would it look like for Remy to embrace what Bruce describes as “depressive time”?

Depressive time also centers sorrow… . Antiblack regimes of slavery, terror, brutality, degradation, and death have systematically induced sadness in black people. Then, to add insult to atrocity, agents of antiblackness and WST consistently devalue that sadness, insisting that black people just get over it and move on. Depressive time invites aggrieved subjects to mobilize their sadness, ironically by tarrying within it.⁵⁴

As a Black, nonbinary youth, Remy sees the struggle in the future because to them, “right now is the future.” Why should Remy “get over it and move on,” when “more shit keeps happening?” Though only sixteen, Remy has had a preview of their life course and knows what to expect. The foresight with which Remy assesses time is a product of multiple ways of knowing and being. By being in the moment or in the now, Remy is also in the know. In the final sentences of his essay on William Faulkner and desegregation, James Baldwin writes, “There is never time in the future, in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment; the time is always now.”⁵⁵

Perhaps Remy is calibrating their time perspective to what Michelle M. Wright calls “epiphenomenal time”:

Epiphenomenal time understands one spacetime: the moment of the now, through which we imagine the past and also move into the future possibilities (walking, thinking, talking)… . [O]nce located in the now on that linear timeline, the moment is freed for exploring a broad variety of intersecting spacetimes for Blackness, some of which contradict interpellations that make sense in other moments. Linear progress narratives are, as it were, “allergic” to contradictory interpellations, almost forcefully expelling them from discourse, especially when they fail to cohere to the cause-and-effect dynamic that drives their spacetime. Because they cannot interpellate dimensions of Blackness that offer nonlinear or nonprogressive interpretations … forcing nonprogressive narratives into linear narrative frameworks will cause a qualitative collapse of Blackness.⁵⁶

By asking not only what Blackness is but where and when is Blackness, Wright expands the possibility of interpellating Blackness outside progress narratives that inevitably require negation within an already negated category. Remy’s Blackness and queerness exceed containment within linear spacetime privileging future orientations. They refuse to entertain teleological assessments of race and racism.⁵⁷ Epiphenomenal time’s embrace of “nonprogressive” narratives and interpretations expands Remy’s ability to be in the moment of now.

Remy’s perceptiveness of what is to come illustrates the breadth and timelessness of Du Bois’s “double consciousness.” If we take seriously that Black youth are “born with a veil,” Remy may be simply narrating their biography according to the “tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”⁵⁸ Describing how their “life has been hard since day one,” Remy implies that their double consciousness and multiple consciousness began at birth. Remy must travel a “very stressful road” over their life course in the “other world” (i.e., the white world). In its current form, urban sociology as a subfield lacks the theoretical, conceptual, and methodological capacity to fully comprehend Remy’s journey.

Within existing paradigms, Remy’s comments about being “in the moment” serve as evidence of their cognitive confinement to the ethnographic present. If thinking for the moment is the problem, future orientations become the sociological solution to get Black youth unstuck from the present. As I listen again to Remy’s words, I cannot help but consider their unwillingness to “keep going” alongside the (temporal) expectations of “Black excellence.” I think about how Remy and other Black youth are rarely granted enough grace to simply be “a’ight” rather than excellent. Does “Black excellence” preclude the possibility of “Black a’ightness” when being a’ight is conflated with personal failure and thus subject to discipline?⁵⁹ Can we create space to celebrate both Black excellence and a’ightness? Or does “excellence” require the castigation of a’ightness? When Black excellence represents an exemplary reference point, a’ightness seems unacceptable. Any sense of sadness, sorrow, or resignation over the struggles of living within the context of slavery’s afterlife becomes anomalous. Black excellence is cause for celebration, while Black a’ightness is cause for refutation/renunciation/rejection. Perhaps there is a need to let Remy and other Black youths know that it’s OK to be a’ight and it’s a’ight to be OK. Black youths like Remy should not be punished by the ableist undertones of an “excellence” that denies them access to feel weary, exhausted, sad, and depressed after recurring bouts with anti-Blackness and transmisogynoir. I am not suggesting that Black excellence should not be acknowledged or celebrated, but rather emphasizing the need to consider how constructions of excellence require the production of those deemed “subpar,” “mediocre,” and/or “inferior” while dismissing the many “radiant moments of ordinariness,” as Dionne Brand puts it,⁶⁰ that are integral to Black life.

Recognizing the importance of Black a’ightness is also a sign of respect for what Kevin Quashie describes as the “sovereignty of quiet.”⁶¹ Black a’ightness is not merely an example of being in one’s feelings, but an appreciation of Black interiority. As Quashie writes, “The interior is the inner reservoir of thoughts, feelings, desires, fears, ambitions that shape a human self; it is both a space of wild selffullness, a kind of self-indulgence, and ‘the locus at which self interrogation takes place’ (Spillers, Black, White, and in Color, 383).”⁶² Quashie’s broader intervention lies in unsettling the consistent interpellation of Black culture through public displays of resistance, including violence and “risk behaviors.” When sociological narratives such as “living the drama” conscript Black youth sociality into the spectacular, the spectacle of the spectacular comes to subsume the richness of and heterogeneity within Black interiority.⁶³ As if directly speaking to urban sociology, Quashie states, “The determination to see blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life, is racist.”⁶⁴ Depictions of Black life as overdetermined by an exterior render invisible Black interiority, including a’ightness and quiet. While Black excellence relishes the opportunity to take center stage in publicness, Black a’ightness holds a meditation in the “sovereignty of quiet.”

When examining Black excellence and a’ightness in relation to time, we come to see the two maintain contradictory orientations. Black excellence exemplifies the active, forward motion of progressive time, while a’ightness is comfortable lingering in the past and/or the current moment. While linear, progressive time is quantifiable in seconds, minutes, and hours, Black a’ightness, like interiority, represents a place, according to Quashie, “where time is without measure and where change and stillness cohabitate.”⁶⁵ In the hood, “maintaining,” “doing the best I can,” and “surviving” are common responses to the question, “How are you doing?” The present orientation of “maintaining,” “getting by,” and “surviving,” though, remains at odds with the vigor, drive, and future orientation of Black excellence. This is not an attempt to interpellate Black life through abjection, but rather a refusal to use the “master’s tools,” including time. If Black excellence requires an endorsement of neoliberal multicultural logics that selectively incorporate minoritized difference while esteeming some at the expense of others, then funking the clock may also require a funking of “excellence.”

Despite my emphasis on the antagonism between Black excellence and a’ightness, I see both as intimately connected to double consciousness. One possible, though not exclusive, impetus behind the pursuit of Black excellence might be an acute awareness of the representational and symbolic violence used to depict Black life. Similarly, tarrying in a’ightness may also emanate from the weight of racial capitalism, racialized impoverishment, and other anti-Black logics and operations used to extract Black energy, life, and time. Du Bois describes double consciousness as a “second sight,” one that serves not only as a window into the world of whiteness but also as a portal to witnessing what a white-made world might do to Black youth.⁶⁶ Between the “unreconciled strivings” of being both “American and Negro” exists a temporal orientation—one that remains undertheorized within urban sociology.⁶⁷ In taking seriously the psychic dimension of double consciousness, this chapter fills many of the theoretical voids within urban sociology while revealing clairvoyance within youths’ present orientations.

In privileging future orientations as an indicator of youths’ direction in life, urban sociologists have ignored Remy’s assertion that “now is the future.” Echoing the work of queer-of-color theorists, Remy recognizes that “the future is in the present.”⁶⁸ As Muñoz writes, “Rather than invest in a deferred future, the queer citizen-subject labors to live in a present that is calibrated through the protocols of state power, to sacrifice our liveness for what Laruen Berlant has called the ‘dead citizenship’ of heterosexuality.”⁶⁹ Remy is laboring to live in the present while within the “‘dead citizenship’ of heterosexuality” and anti-Blackness. It is no surprise, then, that Remy envisions the future as so stressful. According to them, to be oriented to the future is to also be oriented to the present, and vice versa. By asserting that “right now is the future,” Remy complicates enduring representations of the time perspectives of racialized youth living in poor urbanized space. Much of this scholarship treats urbanized space as a self-generated pathogen that breeds violence and spreads uncertainty.

There are several urban sociologists and ethnographers who intentionally speak back to constructions of poor urbanized space as anachronistic zones of disorder. For example, Loïc Wacquant describes present orientations as products of economic and political marginalization. In studying “hustling as structure and strategy,” Wacquant states, “Much like the people who live from it, money from hustling ‘ain’t goin’ nowhere’ and is consumed by and in the moment: better play today when you have no assurance of having a tomorrow.”⁷⁰ Missing from Wacquant’s analysis, however, is a racial critique of time itself. Poor and Black youth in urbanized space see what stands ahead and reject not only what Wacquant describes as “advanced marginality,”⁷¹ but also white time oriented to future opportunities that remain fugitive. It is unclear whether Wacquant considers the possibility that youths privilege nowness over the future because they can foretell the future based on present forms of structural and racialized violence. When time is compressed and the future is both fugitive and flee(t)ing, it is no surprise that youths prioritize the urgent and insurgent power of now.

In spite of perceived uncertainty about what is to come, there remain fairly reliable aspects of poor urbanized space.⁷² In the ghetto, there exists the certainty of joblessness, that law enforcement will neither protect nor serve, that Black youth are presumed guilty until proven less guilty, and that the legal system will remain in contempt of justice. There also exists the certainty that the depleting budgets of social services cannot contend with the proliferating profits of carceral systems and their capacity to expropriate time and eviscerate the future, particularly for poor Black youth.⁷³

Despite attempts to resist reproducing representations of urbanized space as pathological, unpredictable, and, in the words of Elijah Anderson, “bereft of hope,” a substantial portion of urban ethnography still constructs poor and racialized communities as preoccupied with the present and relegated to a state of abjection.⁷⁴ The problem lies not just in sociologists (re)presenting Black people and Black life as devoid of agency but in the terms and conditions under which Black people become agentic within urban sociology.⁷⁵ Just as Saidiya Hartman opens Scenes of Subjection by asking, “Why is pain always the conduit for identification?,” why is abjection so often the primary mode of interpellation for Black people and Blackness within urban ethnography?⁷⁶ In other words, why are Black people and Blackness most legible within the study of “crime,” “urban poverty,” and “pathology”? Within urban sociology, this set of “ghetto-specific” conditions function as self-regenerating phenomena, inherent to and products of the ghetto. What is then of interest to the urban ethnographer is not how “crime,” “poverty,” and “pathology” came to be central tenets of urban sociological knowledge production, or even the genealogy of such constructs within the discipline, but the way in which racialized subjects “make sense of” and “cope with” these constructs as inextricable elements of Black social life.

It is far too convenient to explain the suffering and survival of racialized people in urbanized space through “adaptations,” “concentration effects,” and “cultural repertoires.” If sociology were truly committed to revealing what is hidden in plain sight, the discipline would be more cognizant of how it remains complicit in the hiding. Sociological discourse serves as a prime hiding place for racist theories on the “urban poor.” For Hartman, “the normative character of terror insures its invisibility; it defies detection behind rational categories like crime, poverty, and pathology” (emphasis in the original).⁷⁷ Terror cloaks itself in many other sociological concepts. “Social capital,” for example, functions as a proxy for culture-of-poverty tropes that discipline those poor and nonwhite for a failure to conform to racialized and classist measures of sociality. Similarly, cultural racism conceals itself within “race relations” while obscuring the violence of “self-obliteration.”⁷⁸ These sociological concepts serve to regulate, rather than accurately represent, racialized youth in poor urbanized space.⁷⁹ Consequently, “cultural repertoires” and “ghetto-specific behavior,” “social disorganization,” and futureless youth become key indices of urban sociological knowledge production.⁸⁰ For the youths at Run-a-Way, remaining present-oriented was not as temporally debilitating as urban sociology would lead us to believe. Instead of being a paralyzing force that keeps youth suspended in time, present orientations and the production of nowness help buffer the impact of colliding with a future that always already designates Black youth as temporally expendable.

“You Can Plan a Picnic, but You Can’t Predict the Weather”

Rather than assume that Black youth in the inner city place a moratorium on their own future orientations because of the “disorder” of their social contexts, this chapter reveals a prescience within present orientations. Certain predictions among the youths at Run-a-Way were eerily noteworthy and illustrative of the way that racialized people, especially Black youth, remain (in) a race against time. Tanisha, featured in the opening of this chapter, believed that then candidate Donald Trump would turn Black people into slaves “again.” To what extent is Tanisha’s expectation also preparation? What does it mean to have to defend yourself from what you are said to be emblematic of (i.e., the future)? What would it look like to frame Black youths’ present orientations within the psychic dimensions of double consciousness? Some youths I spoke with saw the future as unpredictable, but not necessarily because of the wildness of poor urbanized space.

Tariq, who at the time of our interview was sixteen years old and prepared to enter the eleventh grade, was a resident of the independent living program at Run-a-Way. Tariq was known for making efficient use of time while also realizing that the time he used was not his own. Here, he describes how his future ends up in the hands of others:

I think of the future as unpredictable. ’Cuz really anything can happen in the future. If you plan something, it doesn’t always have to happen. It’s not guaranteed to happen. It’s guaranteed that you can try, but the future is unpredictable… . Because everyone around the world makes decisions and my decisions can be affected by someone else’s decisions. So therefore, you can’t predict someone else’s decisions. So if your decisions are affected by another person’s decisions, you can’t really see that coming until it happens… . [T]here’s this saying, “You can plan a picnic, but you can’t predict the weather.”

To urban sociologists and life course scholars, Tariq’s uncertainty is a product of “environmental risk factors.” Violence within poor urbanized space, according to both urban sociologists and life course scholars, makes it impossible for Black youths like Tariq to effectively plan for what is to come. Yet Tariq’s skepticism regarding the future is a product not strictly of his “environment” but of an acute awareness of what an anti-Black climate has to offer Black youth.

In In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe uses “the weather” to illustrate how “antiblackness is as pervasive as climate.” According to Sharpe, the weather of being “in the wake” is part of “the atmosphere: slave law transformed into lynch law, into Jim and Jane Crow, and other administrative logics that remember the brutal conditions of enslavement after the event of slavery has supposedly come to an end.”⁸¹ What role does structural violence play in shaping weather patterns? When it rains, do Black youth experience a downpour of systemic forms of oppression? Though meteorological weather may be unpredictable, Sharpe’s conceptualization suggests that the forecast of anti-Blackness is quite predictable and extends well beyond five- or even ten-day projections.

When part of one’s predictions involves tragedy, however, prescience may feel more like a burden. Toward the end of my interview with Tariq, I asked him how long he expected to live.

Honestly, I expect myself to die almost every day. It sounds a bit odd to say that I expect to die almost every day, but literally anything that can happen that can cause me to die every day. About two hours ago I could have died. I didn’t, but I expect myself to die every … almost every day. Any day I go outside, I expect to die in some way. That’s just because of the whole unpredictable world we live in.

It is not Tariq’s environment or community that prevents him from planning a picnic. It is state terror—a condition far more inclement than the threat of rain or snow. Approximately eighteen months after I left Run-a-Way, police from a suburb approximately twenty minutes from the program shot eighteen rounds at Tariq while he was brandishing an airsoft gun in an empty park. Tariq was hit twice—once in his brain and once in his spinal cord. Though he survived the shooting, his allotted time at life was significantly truncated by racialized terror. “Policing” is yet another example of the limitations of sociological discourse. Talk of “policing” makes the “distinction” between “good policing” and “bad policing” theoretically possible while ignoring the question of whether “police violence” is a redundancy.⁸² It was not the chaos of the “urban jungle” that precipitated the shooting. Rather, it was Tariq’s presence in a community that is over three-quarters white.

Tariq’s mental health was the subject of much scrutiny by the police and the press. A report by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension noted his history of depression and paranoid schizophrenia. Applying what Jina B. Kim calls a “crip-of-color critique,” though, allows for an analysis of Tariq’s encounter with police through the lens of disability, race, and the role of the state in the production of racialized disablement. As Kim notes, there is an urgent need to shift the concept of disability “from noun—a minority identity to be claimed—to verb: the state-sanctioned disablement of racialized and impoverished communities via resource deprivation.”⁸³ In short, disablement is a process—one that requires the systematic abuse and neglect of Black youth by the state through educational enclosures, police terror, and racialized dispossession that results in unmet demands for mental health services in poor urbanized space.⁸⁴ In response to the shooting, nearly one hundred of Tariq’s family and friends took to the streets in protest, condemning the police for treating mental illness as a death sentence.⁸⁵ Instead of acknowledging Tariq’s mental health needs and a wailing psyche yearning to be heard, police treated the coexistence of Blackness and disability as a threat.

Tariq’s orientation to time during this incident is unclear. Locating him in the ethnographic present, however, elides clairvoyance. Within the context of what La Marr Jurelle Bruce calls “madtime,” Tariq’s actions signal a rejection of normative time and liberal futurities:

Madtime refers to any mode of doing time or feeling time that coincides with renegade rhythms of madness. Its variations are endless, including, for instance, manic time, depressive time, schizophrenic time, and melancholic time… . Madtime is multidirectional and polymorphous, errant and erratic, dazed and dreamy, unruly and askew. It tears calendars, smashes clocks, dances to the lilt of the voices in its heads, builds makeshift time machines from scraps, and ignores calls for timeliness. Furthermore, it tends to stagger, lunge, twirl, moonwalk, or sit still, rather than march teleologically forward. In the process, madtime defies the Eurocentric, heteronormative, capitalist, rationalist clock-bound time that prevails in the modern West. Let’s call that normative temporality Western Standard Time (WST).⁸⁶

What does it mean to be young, Black, and prescient within Western Standard Time? It means that Tariq can hold aspirations of finishing high school, going to college, and pursuing a career, while apprehending the many structural barriers to achieving such goals. In other words, he can plan his picnic, but when it comes to the weather within an anti-Black climate, there ain’t no tellin’ what could happen. Tariq may have been taking a stand against WST by living in the now as a way of protecting himself from liberal futurities and progress narratives that, according to Bruce, treat “madness as a liability.” Within “schizophrenic time,” the time is always now. “Schizophrenic time,” Bruce notes, “collapses everything into an exigent now, thus frustrating fantasies of triumphal teleology and thwarting the seductions of nostalgia.”⁸⁷ The “exigent now,” however, differs from the “ethnographic present” in that it acknowledges the future but also rejects it in favor of the moment. Where the ethnographic present “freezes” racialized persons through observation, nowness belies such temporal suspension. Nowness is not static but fluid.

We should not think that youths like Tariq, Remy, and Marlon are not present oriented because of the chaos of their communities. Instead, structural violence necessitates that Black youth be simultaneously oriented to the past, present, and future. Many youths at Run-a-Way maintained a prescient vision of what was to come based on intimate ties to the past and its presence today. In communion with Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe writes, “We, Black people, exist in the residence time of the wake, a time in which ‘everything is now. It is all now’ (Morrison 1987: 198).”⁸⁸ What is the power of nowness? Maybe the power we seek lies in the “ungovernable, anarchic here and now” that, according to Kara Keeling, “harbors Black futures.”⁸⁹ Tomorrow may not be guaranteed, and the future may indeed be fugitive, but to many Black youths, the past was always inching closer and closer to the present.

Repeating or Remixing History?

A popular trend among dancehall reggae and hip hop DJs alike is playing the first few lines or bars of a song and then restarting the track. The process begins when a dancehall DJ screams (in Jamaican patois), “Come again,” “Wheel up,” or “Puuuuuull up.” With this cue, the crowd is prepped to hear the song once more. Similarly, hip hop DJs and emcees at live shows will often ask to “run it back.” DJs pull up or run back a hit record to give all partygoers an opportunity to reexperience a moment in time. There exist intimate connections between race, space, time, and sound. As George Lipsitz notes, “The rhythmic complexity of Afro-American music encourages listeners to think of time as a flexible human creation rather than as an immutable outside force.”⁹⁰ To pull up or run a track back is, I argue, a form of time travel.

Just as Afrofuturism creates new temporal-spatial imaginaries for Black sociality to flourish, music serves as a catalyst to produce epistemic spacetimes that defy what is.⁹¹ While Black sci-fi focuses on future possibilities, I assess the importance of the past to Black youth. Nearly every one of the youths I interviewed at Run-a-Way considered their past to be very important. They forged substantive connections between legacies of slavery, conquest, genocide, and contemporary struggles for a more just world, and the significance of their racial histories shaped their present realities. For sixteen-year-old Shanté, who identifies as Black and Native, “slavery is real important.”

… ’Cuz those is my people. They went through literally hell and back for us. And look where we are today, we still gettin’ treated disrespectful. We still gettin’ beat for no reason. Look at how many Black kids have gotten shot by cops. We still gettin’ killed for nothin’, literally! I mean, it [racial justice movements] was worth it. We’re way better off today than how we was a hundred fifty years ago, but it still ain’t no different. It’s just a different way of disrespect. They’re disrespecting us legally now… . Like … especially the way they talk to us it’s like you act like slavery never happened. Like, y’all just did this to our same people. Like, the way cops is gettin’ away with killin’ kids, the same way white people is gettin’ away with hangin’ us back in the day. Y’all still gettin’ away with the same petty crimes. Well, not petty but ridiculous crimes.

In Shanté’s opinion, little has changed over the last 150 years, a perspective that alludes to her intimate connection to the past and the presence of the afterlife of slavery. A decade before introducing “slavery’s afterlife” as a description of the material and epistemic forces confronting Black life, Hartman offered this theoretical scaffolding: “The enduring legacy of slavery was readily discernible in the travestied liberation, castigated agency, and blameworthiness of the free individual.”⁹² “Castigated agency” is why Shanté asserts, “We still gettin’ killed for nothin’, literally!” To Shanté, the difference between the legal lynchings of the past and those of today is negligible. While those synchronized to white time have the capacity to construct the past as a blank page in history, Shanté’s biography and those of many Black people are densely narrated.

In an analysis of the social structure of time, Eviatar Zerubavel claims that marked time has a higher “mnemonic density” than “unmarked time.”⁹³ That is, particular periods in time occupy greater mnemonic space depending on their biographical significance for the individual. Racialized violence is not only mnemonically dense but temporally taxing. In other words, the mnemonic density of oppression requires a substantial amount of processing time. But what does it mean to process something that is in continuous process? Can racialized violence ever be fully processed? Echoing some of Shanté’s sentiments, sixteen-year-old Tasha described racialized violence as a recurring trend. I asked her about the importance of Black history to her present reality:

Important. Because I do feel history do repeat itself. Like history is repeating itself right now with the racist thing. Like white cops killing Black people. Like back then they used to do it and now it’s startin’ again. And you heard about the white man who went in the church and killed Black people? Isn’t he out or they’re bailin’ him out?⁹⁴

The youths at Run-a-Way did not see the present-day violence against Black people as anything new and instead described it as “history repeating itself.” Many, including Tasha, likened the police killings of Black people to slavery and the continued criminalization of Blackness. Tasha’s connection to the past makes her acutely aware that “white cops killing Black people” is not a new trend but one that is simply “startin’ again.” Social scientists indict the past for hampering racialized persons’ “progress,” but for youths like Tasha, the past is prologue, and the iterative process of being backward- and forward-looking creates landscapes of meaning for Black youths to navigate.

As the saying goes, “You don’t know where you’re going until you know where you’re coming from.” What happens, though, when where you are going looks a lot like where you have already been? While the clockwise direction of minute and second hands symbolizes progression in time, racialized temporalities are recursive. That is, racialized violence cannot be isolated to a single point in time. Instead, oppressions travel—swaying back and forth, around and around, from past to present. For some “mnemonic communities,”⁹⁵ the heavy rotation of racialized violence makes the past present.⁹⁶ As Hartman reminds us, “This pain [chattel slavery] might best be described as the history that hurts—the still-unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession, and domination that engenders the black subject in the Americas.”⁹⁷

Those responsible for making history so painful often seek to ensure that the past is always past and to a large degree nonexistent. In an ethnographic examination of identity formation, Pamela Perry finds that white students see only “ethnic” people as having a connection to the past, while their own white identity is rendered “cultureless.”⁹⁸ Without any connection to the past, white people evade accountability for what Hartman calls their “incorporeal hereditament,”⁹⁹ which is, according to Ferreira da Silva, both a “wage” and an “unpayable debt.”¹⁰⁰ Perry asserts, “Naturalized whiteness is securely grounded in and validated by the normal way of things in the present and therefore does not seek meaning in cultural or past orientation.”¹⁰¹ Thus, future orientations validate whiteness while invalidating the historical continuity of conquest and enslavement in the present. Black youth lack the luxury of time to ignore the past when it haunts them today. For youths like Remy, the past is far from gone. It is here and now:

You know how your history teacher will say, “If you don’t learn history you’ll be forced to repeat it.” Then she’ll laugh it off or whatever. I just feel like, shit, my history teacher was right ’cuz I didn’t learn about nothing. I don’t wanna hear not a damn thing. But now it’s like the stuff she was trying to tell us, it’s happening right in front of our eyes. It’s been happening! We’re watching it happen… . I literally just feel like we’re going back in time… . These days people are so openly racist it’s just blowing my mind. ’Cuz they don’t necessarily have any consequence unless we can prove that it’s keeping us from getting to things that they can get to.

Remy raises an important theme echoed by other youths at Run-a-Way. In suggesting that time moves backward, Remy is alluding to the lack of progress made toward a more just world for racialized people generally, and Black people in particular. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes, “To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”¹⁰² Rather than drowning in their history, Remy is figuring out how to navigate the current and maybe even catch a wave. They are also challenging whiteness as a cultureless identity, suggesting that their teacher’s advice also applies to white people. In other words, “If you don’t learn white history (i.e., conquest, enslavement), you’ll be forced to repeat it.”

Mark Twain is thought to have said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Eviatar Zerubavel observes, “Such rhyming implies that, while clearly distinct, the past and the present are nonetheless fundamentally similar to the point of evoking a déjà-vu sense of ‘there we go again.’”¹⁰³ The continued onslaught of state power against Black people and other racialized people living in the United States suggests that history has been “rhyming” for quite some time. The phrase-turning charm of the quote attributed to Twain is one of many diluted references to time. For example, the saying “time heals all wounds” warrants critique and intense skepticism among those whose wounds run deep in a past that continues to inform the present and a seemingly recurring history. In other words, history does not need to repeat itself or rhyme when the soundtrack of racialized violence is like clockwork and has not skipped a beat. The notion that time heals all wounds is a comfort only to those who inflict the wounds and benefit from harming others. Cumulative disadvantage theory reminds us that the passage of time is more likely to worsen wounds than to heal them. Hence, when urban sociologists construct racialized youth in urbanized space as lingering in a perpetual state of delay, it is worth asking: Are Black, Indigenous, and racialized youth “killing time,” or is time is killing them?

How else might we rethink representations of youth killing time? Why must “killing time” have such a negative connotation? Perhaps youths’ attempts to kill time are also an attempt to kill capitalism—to kill the rigid and racialized strictures of time that demand their mental, physical, emotional, and psychic labor. Killing time may be a form of self-defense, a way of trying to kill that which is trying to kill you every day. Perhaps Black youth are keeping in communion with Lucille Clifton and her famous invitation to “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”¹⁰⁴

How does remaining present oriented serve as a defense mechanism against structural violence in the future? Put another way, what potential does living in the moment hold for survival in the future? In thinking with scholars like Michelle M. Wright and Kara Keeling, how might Blackness and Black sociality engender new forms of temporality that lie beyond linear time and outside the ethnographic present? If history is repeating itself, is racialized violence on repeat? While “fast forward” and “skip” are common features on most stereos, Black people cannot neglect the rewind button, especially when particular soundtracks of oppression never seem to pause but only stay stuck on play/repeat. The creative control of sound, however, makes time travel an integral feature of Black music. I asked the youths to utilize their time-traveling talents and imagine what they would be doing in five years. Dominique, age sixteen, had this to say:

Within Dominique’s response exists both liberal and liberatory futurities. Dominque endorses liberal ideals of attending college but also emphasizes the importance of temporal liberation, or liberation from time. Perhaps they are calling for a commitment to what Damien Sojoyner describes as “black radical time,” which “places human concerns over the material demands of a Western racial capitalist infrastructure.”¹⁰⁵ Dominque also confirms Muñoz’s theorizations on queerness. As he writes, “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”¹⁰⁶

Refusing a “stopwatch for [their] life,” Dominique yearns for the freedom to enjoy the moment and escape depression. Refusing to “blithely romanticize madness,” Bruce admits that there are risks associated with depressive time and other modes of “madtime”: “I want to briefly acknowledge the risks that haunt these temporalities: manic time might rush recklessly into danger; depressive time might become so wedged in its woe that it cannot ever get free; schizophrenic time might be crushed between history’s hurt and future’s threat; melancholic time might break beneath its heaping load of lost objects.”¹⁰⁷ “Wedged in [the] “woe” of the present, Dominique remains committed to transgressing what is in favor of otherwise futurities. Despite time’s infinite oppression, they are prescient enough to see the possibility of achieving freedom from depression and possibly “depressive time.” Perhaps Dominique seeks to live in a world where time (and thus money) is no object. Their remarks are a reminder of the “mighty agency” that Bruce says is linked to a “colored people’s praxis of black time.” As Bruce writes, “The abyss may have no bottom, but blackness has no top, no limit.”¹⁰⁸

By definition, abolishing time is an anticapitalist act. It is unclear whether Dominique identifies as an anticapitalist, but they do appear to be anti-time. What would a telos of time look like? For many adults whose identities are inextricably linked to their labor or industry, the thought of a world without time is unfathomable. For Black youths like Dominique, who are emblematic of the future yet assigned to the ethnographic present, transgressing time is essential to creating another world. Transgressive temporalities and insurgent forms of time are already in full effect and often found in sound.

Sonic Spacetime

Throughout this book, I have used music as a tool to put the “tempo” in “temporality.” Since my father’s removal, music has come to serve as a sort of temporal index to help me reckon with the present past of deportation. I have a sort of sobering interest in thinking about songs that were released before and after my father’s removal. It is no coincidence that listening to specific songs warms my spirit in indescribable ways. It was not so much which song was playing, but the where and when of the song. For example, I maintain vivid memories of driving with my brother down Warren Street past the Roxbury YMCA while listening to Groove Theory’s “Tell Me” on Jam’N 94.5. My mind has constructed a sort of pre- and postremoval playlist. Without knowing the exact year a song was released, I can likely guess whether the record dropped before or after my father’s removal. This may be in part why I have such an antagonistic relationship with time and why I insist on funking the clock.

Just as the DJ and emcee control time through calls to “pull up” or “run it back,” the turntablist also possesses a unique capacity to dictate a hip hop audience’s orientation to time. “Scratching” is a technique the turntablist uses to create music within music by moving a vinyl record back and forth to produce percussive or rhythmic sounds. Scratching creates “a break” in the record at play. At parties, the turntablist/DJ may scratch a popular verse in a song for purposes of emphasis. The skilled turntablist/DJ knows what verse is likely to “get the crowd hype.” The turntablist/DJ will run a track back several times to allow the crowd to collectively experience the lyrical effect of a particular verse. Scratching, I argue, functions as a transgressive temporality that the turntablist/DJ uses to violate white time. Unlike white time, however, scratching a record does not efface history. It remakes and remixes it. As racialized people turn the tables of time and DJs spin the turntables, they place the direction of time under their discretion. Both the audience and the DJ cooperate by manipulating the tempo and temporality of a song. In turn, Blackness becomes a moderator of time. In other words, time goes when Black people say so. As the Black youths I spoke with both funked and queered the clock, they placed the direction of time under their discretion and within the context of nowness.

The Power of Nowness

On the rare occasion that my father ventured out of San Juan, car rides were always a trip. My father decided to go to the country because one of my uncles was visiting from Boston. We all packed into my father’s Nissan Sunny and began our two-hour-plus one-way journey. My father likes to drive as if he has X-ray vision and can see behind each curve of the very high mountains we climb to travel to and from the country. It is as if he tells himself that if the tires are not screeching when taking sharp turns, you are not driving right. During this trip, we had just come off one such turn and were on a much straighter path when my uncle, who was sitting in the passenger seat, emphasized the need for my father to think about the future. My father cut him off, saying, “Deh ain’t no future, mi bredda. De future ain’t is. Yuh ovahs?”

What did my father mean? This passage from Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance may offer some insights: “All we thinking about is to play dragon. All we thinking about is to show this city, this island, this world, that we is people, not because we own anything, not because we have things, but because we is. We are because we is. You know what I mean?”¹⁰⁹ In this particular scene, the novel’s protagonist, Aldrick, is arguing with a landlord, Guy, and one of his partners, Philo, over the circumstances in their village. During the exchange, Aldrick conveys the importance of playing mas (masquerade) for Trinbagonians, but also the significance of “is” to Afro-Trinidadians. According to Aldrick, material possessions do not make him and other Afro-Trinidadians people. In other words, Black people are more than beings. They are being because they is. For Aldrick, “is” becomes a pronouncement of (Black) presence and being within presumed absence.

Perhaps my father was thinking of the future, and thus of time, as less of a noun and more of a verb. I like to think he was thinking along similar wavelengths as Katherine McKittrick when she conceives of the “human as a verb” and “being human as a praxis.”¹¹⁰ Perhaps he was signaling a refusal to treat the future as a static endpoint and instead regarding it as something constantly in motion, in process, and thus alterable. So when Black youths at Run-a-Way express skepticism over the prospect of the future, they may be rejecting notions of the future that are already fixed and predestined. If the future, according to my father “ain’t is,” what is “is”? I would argue that the “is” is a site of life-giving energy that stands in contradistinction to the dead time of the future.¹¹¹ “Is” is an action word. It signals the dynamism and transformative possibilities within nowness. “Is” is what it means to conceive of “being human as a praxis.” Finally, “is” is a threat to the clock and the linear progress of time. “Is” is what tugs on time when it attempts to proceed into the future without tarrying in the now (what is) and the past (what still is, not was). “Is” is what reins time in before it can declare the past to be past, while pleading with those beaten by the hands of time to “forgive and forget.”

“Is” is then a response to the construction of those who is/are not. Still, Calvin Warren curbs my urge to bring this chapter to a close without acknowledging what he calls the “tension of the copula”—namely, the “‘is-ness’ of a [non]being.”¹¹² For Warren, “is” cannot bridge the subject (“black”) and subject complement (“being”) because “being is not universal or applicable to blacks.”¹¹³ Warren asserts that “black thinking is given a tremendous task: to approach the ontological abyss and the metaphysical violence sustaining the world.”¹¹⁴ It is a journey that few are willing to take, out of what Warren describes as a fear of nothingness. Still, I wonder whether entering the abyss and bidding farewell to the human might also reveal how integral “is” is to what Warren calls the aim “to shift emphasis from the human toward the spirit.”¹¹⁵ I also wonder whether there is room to appreciate that many Black people have already bid adieu to the human and don’t feel the urge to be or become human simply because they is.

In the final lines of Habeus Viscus, Alexander Weheliye speaks to the notion of “being human as a praxis”:

A habeus viscus unearths the freedom that exists within the hieroglyphics of the flesh. For the oppressed the future will have been now, since Man tucks away this group’s present in brackets. Consequently, the future anterior transmutes the simple (parenthetical) present of the dysselected into the nowtime of humanity during which the fleshly hieroglyphics of the oppressed will have actualized the honeyed prophecy of another kind of freedom (which can be imagined but not [yet] described) in the revolutionary apocatastasis of human genres.¹¹⁶

According to Weheliye, a habeus viscus engenders the possibility of new human genres and thus new forms of personhood beyond Man. Within this “nowtime” exists freedom beyond ontological impossibilities and neoliberal multicultural logics that treat (racial) difference as a mode of capital accumulation. Weheliye’s nowtime also contains prescience—a “honeyed prophecy” for a new and/or revolutionary restoration of human genres. Hence, it is important to distinguish this nowtime from the present-orientedness found within urban sociology.

What are the consequences of constructing those emblematic of the future as present oriented? In urban sociology, a preference for the present works to legitimate temporal, discursive, and material violence. Consider the double standard that exists when it comes to the question of who is permitted to live in the moment and remain oriented to the present or what is. When white, middle-class, working professionals heed the advice of Thích Nhất Hạnh, Eckhart Tolle, and/or John Kabat-Zinn on “mindfulness,”¹¹⁷ they are lauded for “surrendering to the present.” When poor, Black youths in urbanized space live in the present, they are not mindful but “mindless,” “reckless,” and devoid of future orientations. To “be in the moment” becomes a therapeutic kind of cultural capital for some and, for racialized others, particularly Black youth, a marker of “ghetto-specific behavior.”¹¹⁸ Despite many benchmarks for young adults being synchronized to the “stopwatch,” Dominique strives to forget about time and enjoy the moment. So what power can come from “living in the moment”? More importantly, whose moment are we talking about?¹¹⁹

Rather than endorsing “the power of now,” the Black youths at Run-a-Way emphasized the possibilities within nowness. Urban ethnography’s limited engagement with critical ethnic studies generally, and Black studies in particular, renders it ineffectual in representing the temporal orientations of Black youth. James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Christina Sharpe, Alexander Weheliye, Michelle M. Wright, and many other Black scholars have emphasized the importance of nowness for Black people. They do not endorse an ethnographic present that suspends Black people in time and the moment. Rather, nowness privileges nonlinearity and the potential to create liberatory futurities on spatio-temporal planes. Black youths at Run-a-Way center the now, despite being assailed by liberal futurities that promise a lot and guarantee little. This is what makes them more prescient than present oriented.

In this chapter, I have made the case that Black youths in poor urbanized space retain a psychic ability to see into a future that exceeds the conceptual capacity of existing paradigms within urban ethnography and sociology. Black youths at Run-a-Way invoked the part of the Black radical tradition that Fred Moten describes as illuminating a “forecast of a future in the present and in the past here and there, old-new, the revolutionary noise left and brought and met, not in-between.”¹²⁰ Urban sociologists and ethnographers are complicit in relegating Black youth to the ethnographic and not only suspending them in time but also denying them coevalness. Youths’ asynchronous relationship to white time is not, however, indicative of their preoccupation with the present. Instead, present orientations are grounded in a prescience familiar to many Black youths at Run-a-Way. As they looked through “the veil,” they saw themselves through “the revelation” of a white world that renders them outside modernity and outside white time. I frame double consciousness as a temporal orientation bestowing youth with a second sight to bear witness to a not-yet-here and comport themselves accordingly. This chapter has revealed why Black youth are wary of investing in liberal futurities undergirding white youth’s temporal orientations. Not only were futures foreclosed due to limited educational opportunities and pathways to stable jobs, but racialized violence constantly infringed on youths’ time horizons. Racialized violence, including police terror, created an inhospitable climate, making it difficult for youths like Tariq to plan a picnic.

Still, youths like Tanisha were clairvoyant enough to know what was to come. How did they know? The past told them so. Any discussions of what is require some understanding of what was. What happened and what is still happening. For many youths, the killings of unarmed Black people marked both the repetition and the mutation of history. History repeated itself each time police killed another Black person. State-sanctioned violence and legal lynchings also contributed to history’s mutation. As Shanté reminds us, “The way cops is gettin’ away with killin’ kids, the same way white people is gettin’ away with hangin’ us back in the day.” Most of the youths acknowledged the gains of the civil rights movement and the freedoms and liberties won through struggle. They also recognized that “human rights” meant little to those declared “racialized” and “rightless” by the state.¹²¹

This chapter contributes to an undoing of discrete temporal boundaries between the past, present, and future. For youths at Run-a-Way, the past was always present, and struggles in the present foreshadowed foreclosed futures. An always already present past made Black youths acutely aware of what was to come. With past oppressions residing in the present, these youths anticipated that which is not yet here. They rejected the future because they see and know what a racist-carceral, colonial state has in store for them today. Their preparedness was a product of their perspicacity and overall awareness that racial struggles are extending, not ending. Blurred temporal boundaries induced experimentation with new and often nonlinear spacetimes, such as nowness. Many of the youths tarried within the moment, knowing that the future is now. For them, it was now or never. At the same time, Dominique sought liberation by forgetting about time altogether. While it may be difficult to imagine a world without time, this chapter has revealed how these worlds may already be in the making. The architects, though, are not chronologically gifted—adults with greater age and experience— but rather those of a younger generation who remain ahead of their time.

Black youth living in urbanized space retain a unique ability to foretell their futures based on the multiplicative forms of oppression they will inevitably face over their life course. So it is not as though Black and other racialized youth have not thought about the not-yet-here. It is precisely because they have cogitated so deeply over their futures that they reject many of the oppressions that have yet to come. That Black youth, including Black queer and trans youth, choose not to entertain “deferred” or foreclosed futures directed toward “freedoms” and liberties associated with a postraciality does not make them present oriented. It makes them prepared.