“Saved” or Imperiled by the Bell?

When in school, youths orient themselves to time and space through a variety of mechanisms. Some may use the current class period to assess what remains in the school day. Others might make a mental note of a teacher’s beverage (e.g., coffee or water) to gauge where they are at in the day. Still others may try to find a window to locate the sun. Students in private school might be reminded of the time of day based on the wear of their peers’ uniforms. But there remains one temporal device guaranteed to prompt responses from students, teachers, and staff no matter the time of day: the school bell. Start and end times in school are calibrated according to the buzz, beep, or ringing of the bell. Classes, lunch, recess, and school itself all begin and end at the bell’s command. The perfunctory nature of the school bell, however, does not exculpate it from the charge of temporal violence. Defying the bell places students at risk of punishment, such as detention, suspension, or expulsion. It is then worth asking, who is saved by the bell and who is imperiled by it?²

The bell, however, is but one of many technologies that make some Black students averse to schooling. Biological racism, a colonized curriculum, and racialized discipline are key ingredients in a compost of punitive pedagogies required to keep students more captive than captivated in the classroom. In turn, the prospect of education being a life course transition remains debatable given that so many Black students, Indigenous students, and other students of color are lingering in school and thus suspended in time. With white time and “Western civilization” indexing what constitutes knowledge production, opportunities for curricular coevalness remained off limits to the Black students I interviewed. When I asked Dominique about how they used their time in school, they emphasized the importance of not thinking about time at all:

I try to forget about time at school too because it’s a lot of busywork and I hate busywork. And … I hate being told to do an assignment without, like, you know, having structure. You know? Like, I can’t do a class without structured notes. I passed my government class with ninety-nine percent because he had structured notes… . I like classes when it’s like that. Structured, I can actually look back. I actually learn better that way. And that helps it pass the time. But in, like, normal class when you’re just reciting a textbook, memorizing that section of the textbook and then taking a test. And then you’re gonna forget about it. And then you’re gonna bring it up at the end of the semester, take that test, and then walk away. But some of the stuff that we learn is irrelevant. Like, I really do not care about Alexander the Great. That is not going to shape my future. I feel … we should study more current events, stuff that actually affects us now, stuff that we can have a conversation about. ’Cuz normal people do not talk about Alexander the Great or Cleopatra or King Tut.

Being “held back,” “left back,” and/or forced to repeat a grade is one of the many ways schooling temporalizes Black and Indigenous students and other racialized students and increases their temporal debt. Though many racialized youths remain targeted for being “slow learners” or in need of segregated education, Dominique points out that it is in fact their curriculum that is not only outdated but potentially responsible for keeping them behind in school. In addition to being designed without particular students in mind, many schools were also designed to fail. “Normal” classes, according to Dominique, rely on rote memory and arbitrary learning measures that disproportionately harm Black youths. Students like Shanté yearn for not just answers but analysis of contemporary social problems. The institutionalization of rote learning and biased curricula in schools, however, remind Black youths that racism remains a life course constant. As Shanté states,

Even in school they don’t … in the textbook maybe a half a page on slavery and all they do is talk about cotton. Like, they don’t teach you nothin’ about the past, all that we been through. All they teach you about is the world problems. Like, don’t nobody care about that. We wanna know is why our people was gettin’ hanged and beaten and havin’ to slave in a field from sunup to sundown. Why y’all still treatin’ us like we work for y’all every day?

Can centuries worth of content on enslavement fit on “half a page”? What does “half a page” of such content convert to in terms of time? The answer, according to Shanté, is not enough. She critiques her school’s curriculum for neglecting slavery while denying students an understanding of the continuity of racialized violence over the life course and from past to present. She concludes with a stunning reference to what Saidiya Hartman might describe as “slavery’s afterlife.”³ For Shanté, slavery extended, rather than ended. At the same time, the school curriculum precludes the possibility of exploring slavery’s afterlife when its actual life is ignored. Expecting students to be on the cutting edge of visionary goals for building a more just and sustainable world means little if schools are not providing students with an accurate representation of what is most unjust and unsustainable. Though Devon knew he had the potential to succeed in school, he saw himself “changing the world” through a future career in music. Because the subject of racism was consistently suppressed inside the classroom, Devon felt it was imperative to use his talents as an aspiring rapper to speak on the topic through his rhymes:

In school … when we talk about the civil rights movement and slavery, it’s a very short subject… . And I feel like not enough time was being put into it and I thought where we lived, people were being beat up by police every day and there was nothing on it about … there was nothing in it in the news. And I felt like it was just not being identified enough. And so I took it upon myself to identify it in my music and to say this is actually happening whether you’d like to admit it or not.

Devon went on to intimate why teachers and administrators neglect Black history in school curricula:

Because a lot of Black culture is not necessarily violent, but there’s been a lot of fighting for what we believe belongs to us. And some of it has been through marching and peaceful and that’s what they teach you about, because it’s peaceful. The reason they don’t teach us about Malcolm X is because Malcolm X believed in “by any means necessary.” You should get your freedom no matter what it takes. And that’s not what they wanna teach kids.

Devon describes how schools are more inclined to interpellate Black culture through a lens of violence, except when violence functions as a catalyst for liberation. Beyond an emphasis on teaching and learning, school is also a site of discipline, and as Devon suggests, schools will not teach students what is necessary to experience freedom. His remarks amplify the advice of many revolutionaries committed to Black liberation, including Assata Shakur, who affirms,

The schools we go to are a reflection of the society that created them. Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free. Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika’s schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.⁴

Rather than accepting the popular logic that “education is the key,” Shakur sees schooling in the United States as a way to lock Black people into a life course devoid of resistance and self-determination. The education she describes is one defined by hegemony—whereby coercion, consent, and common sense ensure the social reproduction of racial and economic stratification. Shanté’s perceptions of school did not deviate far from Shakur’s critique. When I asked Shanté if and when she ever felt that people showed a lack of respect for her time, she replied, “Yeah, in school. All … they want you to do is just sit there and read books and fill out papers. Like, you wastin’ my time literally. ’Cuz I could be doin’ that somewhere else or I could be doin’ somethin’ better. ’Cuz fillin’ out books is not helpin’ me put food in my mouth or clothes on my back.”

According to Shanté, schools offer few opportunities to help students survive, let alone be free. Rather than being a key to success, school was, in Shanté’s opinion, limiting her life chances. Encouraging students to view education as an investment in future employment opportunities in the life course means little when exigent material needs, including food and shelter, pressure the present. Perhaps schools are synchronized to white time—a time that supports a structurally advantaged life course precluding the need to seek assistance from state services, including housing and food assistance programs. Shanté cannot help but view school as a space to waste valuable time, leaving Black youths feeling as if they are consistently beginning from behind.

Classic work in the sociology of education makes clear that schools have a greater capacity to stratify students along racial and class lines than they do to educate. In Learning to Labor, Paul Willis explores the divergent life course trajectories of two groups of youths in the United Kingdom from the early to mid-twentieth century—the lads and the “ear’oles.” Willis details processes of social reproduction in schools and the workforce, ultimately showing “how working class kids get working class jobs.” What I find most intriguing is Willis’s attention to the two groups of youths’ distinct relationships to time:

If one wishes to contact them, it is much more important to know and understand their own rhythms and patterns of movement. These rhythms reject the obvious purposes of the timetable and their implicit notions of time. The common complaint about “the lads” from staff and the “ear’oles” is that they “waste valuable time.” Time for “the lads” is not something you carefully husband and thoughtfully spend on the achievement of desired objectivity in the future. For “the lads” time is something they want to claim for themselves now as an aspect of their immediate identity and self-direction. Time is used for the preservation of a state—being with “the lads”—not for the achievement of a goal—qualifications.⁵

While the “ear’oles” treat schooling as a key opportunity to improve their qualifications through neoliberal logics of self-discipline and future projections of an entrepreneurial self, the “lads” are in no rush to be exploited by a system that demands conformity and suppresses dissent. Notwithstanding these contributions, Willis misses an important opportunity to explore why reasons for rejecting the “timetable” may differ between Afro-Caribbean youths and their white counterparts. Without examining how time is racialized and attending to particularities of anti-Blackness, Willis ignores the inordinate amount of time Black youths spend reckoning with racist teachers, peers, and curriculum.

For Black youths learning and laboring in “enclosures,” an education feels more like a lock than the key. Damien Sojoyner adopts Clyde Woods’s use of “enclosures” to describe the “historical contestations over power, resources, and ways of life that have ushered us to the present.”⁶ Sojoyner emphasizes that enclosures, like temporal orientations, are contingent on history and not static. Racialized subjection in schooling is indicative of the fact that many of the early “architects of Black education” were not Black.⁷ It is, then, no surprise that many youths at Run-a-Way recounted disparate treatment of Black and white students by teachers. When I asked him to think about examples of racism, Marcus, who is sixteen, described teachers’ preferential treatment of white students:

In school sometimes with some teachers … they favor or they have more patience with the white students than with the Blacks. Maybe based on their beliefs towards the culture, but I definitely see that in the school systems.

Though educational enclosures may not be static, racialized bias within schooling is a constant. In showing greater patience with white students than Black students, Marcus’s teachers cooperate to maintain an unequal system of time. These teachers do not, however, simply distribute time unevenly between white and Black students. Rather, they are responsible for robbing Black students of time while donating it to their white counterparts. Less patience means less time for Black students and more time for their white peers. In expanding vast temporal inequalities, racialized bias in schooling also adds to what Gloria Ladson-Billings describes as massive “education debt”—a product of the unequal distribution of schooling resources between white and nonwhite students, as well as “historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral decisions and policies.”⁸ The convergence of mounting education debt, racial time, and racialized bias within schools requires Black students to work twice as hard to get half as far as their white counterparts. If we consider the time taken through school discipline and punishment, the education and temporal debt owed to Black and Indigenous students and other racialized students exponentially increases.

As teachers and administrators issue suspensions and expulsions to nonwhite students at disproportionately higher rates than their white counterparts, questions remain concerning how students of color come to terms with lost/stolen time. Can we actually expect educational transitions in the life course to occur “on time,” when Black youths are constantly beginning from behind?⁹ Bringing attention to the role of racialization and racism in taking time away from youth compels teachers and social workers to critically examine seemingly race-neutral policies. Race and racism make education policy, and at the same time, educational policy makes race. Consider the disproportionate harm of zero-tolerance policies to students of color. Nancy Lesko’s critique of zero-tolerance policies proves instructive for considering the disparate experiences between students with the luxury of time and those targeted for temporal dispossession: “Zero tolerance policies are appealing because they suggest a return to learning-centered and orderly schools, but they impose a punitive and arbitrary juvenile justice system mentality and cannot take into consideration students’ understandings of safe and unsafe zones, both in school and between home and school. Zero tolerance means that the moratorium of adolescence will be greatly shortened for some, while others still have time to accumulate credits in the leisure curriculum.”¹⁰ As the primary targets of zero-tolerance policies, it is no surprise that Black and Indigenous students and other racialized students are left with zero time. As Anne Arnett Ferguson writes, “Time in the school dungeon means time lost from classroom learning; suspension, at school or at home, has a direct and lasting negative effect on the continuing growth of a child.”¹¹

Temporal debts in schooling are the result of racialized discipline, anachronistic curricula, and the time taken by Black students working twice as hard to get half as far as their white counterparts. Despite liberal universalisms of shared success among all students regardless of race, racial time in education ensures that many children will in fact be left behind, not just in school but in time as well. Planned obsolescent education requires earnest consideration of the concept of failure in schools. What does it mean for students to “flunk” in systems designed to fail? It means Black students will be “held back,” not just in a grade but in time. While Black youths often begin their educational journeys from deficits, their white counterparts begin with bonus time (i.e., the time impatient and neglectful teachers take from Black students). Schooling is but one of many examples of how white youths obtain temporal benefits at the expense of an increasing education debt owed to Black and other racialized students.

The “Temporal Order” of Race and Opportunity

Employment is a common life course transition that complies with the mandates of linear, progressive time. Whether it is a part-time or full-time job in high school or seasonal work, employment represents an opportunity for greater autonomy and financial independence. The school-to-work transition is not, however, a seamless one. I asked youths at Run-a-Way to estimate how long it takes to find a job in their community. Estimates ranged from a week to a year. Youths attributed protracted searches for work to racialization and racism in hiring practices. Most believed that Black and Indigenous youths and other racialized youths would inevitably spend more time trying to find a job than their white counterparts.

Black youths did not just “lose time” during their prolonged search for work. Instead, structural racism in hiring processes dispossessed them of time. Temporal dispossession involves the twin process of theft and accumulation. Similar to temporal theft, temporal dispossession involves temporal gains elsewhere. Racialized social systems reconstitute such gains, exacerbating temporal inequalities between the rich and the poor. In response to my question about how long a job search in her community would take, Shanté offered this:

Shanté’s account of searching for work as a Black youth provokes an important question: Who is stealing from whom? Shanté claims that store owners racially profile her and other Black youths as possible thieves. To what extent, though, are employers taking Black applicants’ time through countless hurdles including drug tests, unnecessary background checks, personality tests, and other dilatory tactics, all of which is uncompensated time? Before Shanté’s time is taken, it must first be devalued in relation to the time of her white counterparts. Shanté’s time, however, is not worthless but highly lucrative to employers who require Black and other racialized youths to generate a “diverse group of candidates” from which to reject or selectively recognize in order to fulfill their neoliberal multiculturalist agenda. In the words of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Every difference is opportunity.”¹²

Whether three months is an average estimate for finding work is beside the point. Shanté sees opportunities for Black youths to achieve key life course transitions as significantly different from those of white youths. When employment discrimination lengthens the time that youths spend searching for work, time itself does not increase. As the time to find work lengthens, deadlines to meet basic needs shorten. In other words, racialization and racism not only take time but compress it. In the following exchange, Devon illustrates the material consequences of temporal dispossession for members of his community. I also asked him how long it takes someone his age to find work in his community:

As Devon shows, with each unit increase in the time spent seeking work, there is a significant decrease in the remaining time to meet basic needs for survival. There is then a concomitant increase in the possibility of greater suffering among those already economically and temporally dispossessed. For many families living in poor urbanized space, financial and temporal dispossession is not a new, but a persistent, situation marked by several situational imperatives. Devon’s answer illustrates how electric bills and rent payments cannot wait even though opportunities for employment take their time and whatever time poor families allegedly “have.”

Constructions of Black people in urbanized space as languishing in time due to a lack of motivation and orientation to the future ignore the presence of dispossessing forces. Whether waiting on a job, waiting on an education, or waiting for service, “racial time” and “white time” are designed to wear Black people down. Several youths described disparate experiences between white and Black youths in their search for a job. After recounting what happened when she and her white foster sister applied for the same job at Dairy Queen, Kendra estimated that it takes Black youths about two months to find a job.

Kendra expresses dismay knowing she must work significantly harder than her white counterparts to get half as far. While it is unclear why Dairy Queen chose to hire Kendra’s white foster sister over her, other youths found themselves in similar situations. Lamont, for example, shared a way of testing for racialized bias when searching for work with white friends. I asked him whether he ever feels racially profiled.

The time to find work for Lamont is protracted not only because of delays in callbacks, but due to the extra time spent over wrestling with the ontological question of why “Keisha doesn’t get the call before Kimberly.” Though this book resists the urge toward positivist sociology, I feel there is a useful opportunity to play with some of the criteria required to establish causality in experimental research. The three criteria include (1) correlation or association between the independent and dependent variables, (2) temporal order, and (3) nonspuriousness. Let us assess the extent to which Lamont’s mother’s claim that “Keisha doesn’t get the call before Kimberly” meets such criteria. First, we can assume correlation in that Kimberly—a presumed white person—has an easier time finding a job than Keisha. Second, it seems that we can establish temporal order in that the cause (i.e., Kimberly’s whiteness) comes before the effect (i.e., a job). Establishing that Kimberly finding a job before Keisha is nonspurious is a bit more challenging. Still, there is overwhelming evidence that white applicants are far more likely to find a job than their Black counterparts.¹³ It is far too easy to play with sociological logic in this way. Perhaps there is way of thinking about temporal order more expansively when it comes to Keisha’s and Kimberly’s disparate experiences searching for work. What if “temporal order” referred not to the need to establish that a cause precedes the effect, but instead to a recognition of the overarching logic governing the distribution of time and opportunity? It is temporal order that ensures that Kimberly will always come before Keisha and thus remain on time and up to date.

“Processing time” consumes an inordinate amount of time that most Black youths already lack. Lamont knows that racism results in temporal costs for Keisha while giving Kimberly a temporal advantage. As illustrated in the previous sections, racialized bias in schooling and racial profiling in searches for employment are alike. Consider Lesko’s description of adolescence as “a crucial point at which an individual (and a race) leaped to a developed, Western selfhood or remained arrested in a savage state.”¹⁴ Lesko helps substantiate this point through a critique of recapitulation theory:

Within the framework of recapitulation theory, adolescence was deemed a crucial divide between rational, autonomous, moral, white, bourgeois men and emotional, conforming, sentimental, or mythical others, namely primitives, animals, women, lower classes, and children. Adolescence became a social space in which progress or degeneration was visualized, embodied, measured, and affirmed. In this way adolescence was a technology of “civilization” and progress and of white, male, bourgeois supremacy.¹⁵

When the life course is overrepresented as white, bourgeois, and male, it only makes sense that the social institutions designed to nurture both adolescence and adolescents would inevitably privilege some youths at the expense of others. Not only were Black youths rendered illegible within the concept of the Child, but they also failed to meet eligibility criteria established by recapitulation theory. Being denied not only coevalness but also access to the category of adolescence left many Black youths at Run-a-Way beginning from behind. Delayed starts, though, were the result of structural, not individual, failure.

Many Black youths know what it means to live, learn, and labor in setups—systems designed to fail. The schoolhouse, (s)low-wage work opportunities, and other racial enclosures are predicated on exploitation, extraction, symbolic and structural violence, and temporal harm. Being “held back” or “left back” in school. Being denied coevalness in their curriculum and their classrooms. Watching Kimberly get a job before Keisha. Being the last hired and first fired after finding employment. Working twice as hard to get half as far. These are all examples of temporal harm that leave Black youths suspended in time and consistently beginning from behind. So how can anyone expect them to abide by a time that does not abide by them? Why should they be in a hurry to be put on perpetual pause?