CP Time: Never on Schedule but Always on Time

Relegated to anachronistic space or erased from time and history altogether, Black and other racialized persons maintain a unique relationship to time. Rather than serve as an orienting force, time symbolizes a source of tremendous agony and pain. As white people amassed time through colonization and enslavement, Black and Indigenous people bore witness to the oppression of progress. In analyzing temporality within the African diaspora, Michael Hanchard describes time as a vehicle for “British racism and imperialism” in Ghana. Time helped expedite the extraction of capital, resources, and surplus value while slowing “the educational development of Ghanaian children and the training of teachers.”⁴⁷

Hanchard shows how time is not only constructed but also managed and manipulated. Temporal concepts such as “duration, pace, trajectory and cycles,” as identified by Ronald Aminzade,⁴⁸ are calibrated to white time, white people, and whiteness. Hanchard makes clear that when the hands of time resemble the hands of white people, Black people do not exist. To the extent that Black people can be temporally interpellated, they are cast into an anachronistic time and thus made vulnerable to dispossession, debt, and death. Hanchard, though, sees “Afro-modernity” as an important site of Black resistance to the violence of colonial time. Afro-modernity, he observes, “consists of the selective incorporation of technologies, discourses, and institutions of the modern West within the cultural and political practices of African-derived peoples to create a form of relatively autonomous modernity distinct from its counterparts of Western Europe and North America.”⁴⁹

In conversation with Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Hanchard emphasizes the importance of Afro-modernity as “a counterculture of modernity.” At its core, Afro-modernity negates the notion that Black people are the antithesis of modernity.⁵⁰ The antagonistic relationship between Western time and Afro-modernity is what Hanchard calls “racial time,” which he says “is defined as the inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups. Unequal relationships between dominant and subordinate groups produce unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources, power, and knowledge, which members of both groups recognize.”⁵¹

Social time was and still is racial time. Racial time demands that racialized violence remain in full effect and that affectable subjects be most harmed.⁵² Racial time took on a distinct cultural meaning for Black people living in the United States. If capital was a metonym for Black, how could Black people claim ownership over time when time was/is also money?⁵³ Disavowed from the social and from social time, Black people sought to unsettle and expose the intimate relationship between time and power. Many saw the potential to eke out openings for resistance within routinized economic exploitation and defied the logics of capital accumulation in favor of transformative temporalities such as CP Time (Colored People’s Time). CP Time derives from the incommensurable relationship between time and Black people’s racialized realities, which literally and figuratively don’t count within categories of seconds, minutes, hours, and so on. CP Time is not simply an appreciation of lateness, but a byproduct of the tension over expecting punctuality, when racialized social structures ensure that Black life chances are habitually late or absent.

As a transformative temporality, CP Time belies uniformity and is not indicative of how all racialized persons use time. More specifically, not all Black people use CP Time or use it in the same way. Nevertheless, CP Time remains an important cultural construct to understand how power works, and specifically how white time works on racialized persons. As an orientation constructed against white time, CP Time functions as a counterframe to white time and whiteness.⁵⁴ Ronald Walcott explains why CP Time (or CPT) occupies a unique niche in Black popular culture and parlance:⁵⁵

Black people always seem to be late and, in fact, have been late so often and so predictably that they themselves have coined a term for it: CP Time, Colored People’s time. CP Time is usually spoken of in tones of the profoundest dismay (by Blacks who lament their brothers’ “irresponsibility that will hold us all back”) or of outraged complacency (by whites who see this habitual lateness as yet further instance of our don’t-give-a-damn-attitude, “but really, what can you expect?”) or of amused tolerance (by the rest of us who are so accustomed to it we hardly notice it). CP Time actually is an example of Black people’s effort to evade, frustrate and ridicule the value-reinforcing strictures of punctuality that so well serve this coldly impersonal technological society. Time is the very condition of Western civilization that oppresses so brutally. (emphasis added)⁵⁶

Not only was time wielded as one of many tools of racialized violence during slavery, but as Walcott ably demonstrates, time also became a catalyst for Black resistance and fugitivity from what Fred Moten describes as “structures of subjection … that overdetermine freedom.”⁵⁷ In Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, Bonnie J. Barthold helps answer a central question orienting this chapter:

The slave owner became the archetypal owner of time. As an owner of time, he could own slaves, upon whom he imposed both the concept and the consequences of ownership but to whom he denied the right of ownership. His physical enslavement of the slave was axiomatically equivalent to his enslavement of time. Had the slave master had his way, the result would have been the imposition of timelessness on all his slaves—not in the sense of Western transcendence but in the sense of total dispossession, as in the pennilessness of bankruptcy.⁵⁸

The Industrial Revolution and the rise in technology brought forth opportunities for slave owners to confer temporal regulation on the timepiece. One of many “structures of subjection” during enslavement was the clock. Mark Smith’s work on slavery in the US South details how time (via clocks) was used to “regulate labor both socially and economically” while reinforcing the equation of whiteness as modern.⁵⁹ In short, time does not only regulate labor but also organizes racial orders. To the slave denied ontological value within the racial order, the “whip” and “watch” were synonymous.⁶⁰ Henry James Trentham’s testimony is one of over two thousand former slave narratives in George Rawick’s American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Here, Trentham exemplifies why time is such an oppressive force for enslaved people: “We hated to see the sun rise in slavery time, ’cause it meant another hard day.”⁶¹ In short, time gives a licking and keeps on ticking. To the enslaved and dispossessed, time symbolized relentless brutality and suffering. As Smith writes,

[African Americans] accommodated and resisted their masters’ attempts to inculcate a modern clock-based time sensibility during slavery… . African Americans can adjust to white time sensibilities, which stress punctuality and are future oriented, but they can also reject these same sensibilities as a form of protest against democratic capitalism, generally white bourgeois sensibilities specifically, by eschewing the authority of the clock and adopting presentist and naturally defined notions of time, a tendency that sociologists and the public alike have come to call Colored People’s Time, or CPT.⁶²

Smith’s conception of CP Time coincides with Walcott’s in that both recognize a shared analysis of white time among Black people and both emphasize the importance of violating a violent system. Renato Rosaldo takes up the concept of CP Time to illustrate efforts to resist incompatible standards of white time and temporal “Otherness”:

Those in our society who fail to conform to the painfully imposed “time-discipline” are commonly described as living by C.P.T. (colored people’s time), Indian Time, or Mexican Time… . “We” have “time-discipline,” and “they” have, well, something else (or, as we say these days, “Otherness”). The former quality of time can be described in relation to cultural artifacts such as clocks, calendars, appointment books, and the like. More significantly, it can be understood in connection with capitalists’ desire to discipline and synchronize the labor force, rationalizing production and maximizing profits, but probably not enhancing the quality of life.⁶³

I use the concept of CP Time not as an example of how time is racialized, but as an example of resistance to racializing time (i.e., white time). Though some research exists on Black resistance to time pre- and postemancipation,⁶⁴ less attention is paid to the way Black youth carry on tradition to transgress time today. I argue that Black youth, similar to earlier generations, apply revised versions of CP Time to strain, agitate, and mock the higher temporal worth and status granted to white time. It is not enough, though, to simply highlight the incompatibility between white time and the temporal realities of Black youth in urbanized space. Without illustrating the importance of creativity to challenging systems of power and domination, analyses of resistance remain incomplete. As innovative knowledge producers and culturesmiths, Black youth, especially those in urbanized space, rely on nonnormative temporalities not only as forms of resistance to power and domination, but also to ridicule the time as a racist, sexist, and capitalist construct. In doing so, youths at Run-a-Way bring new meaning to the phrase, “See you late(r).”

Contemporary forms of “infrapolitics” are situated within legacies of resistance. The historian Robin D. G. Kelley, for example, illustrates how Black workers in the early twentieth century resisted workplace exploitation through a variety of tactics including “wigging” (the use of company time and materials for personal reasons), “pan-toting” (the practice of taking home leftovers, excess food, and utensils by domestic workers), foot-dragging, feigning illness, absenteeism, and rigging company clocks to “steal time.”⁶⁵ In using such tactics, Black workers helped further expose the discordant relationship between Black labor and white time. The sense of empowerment that may accompany acts of “industrial sabotage,” should not, however, diminish the significance of subsequent retaliation and punishment. In referencing Joe Trotter’s study of African Americans in West Virginia, Kelley states that “theft, sabotage, and slowdowns were two-edged swords that, more often than not, reinforced the subordinate position of Black coal miners in a racially determined occupational hierarchy.”⁶⁶

Though CP Time represents a generative site for social movement scholars seeking to explore relations of power and resistance, investigations of Black youth’s relation to CP Time remain underdeveloped. Perhaps CP Time’s appreciation of ambiguity and contradiction makes it antithetical to positivist sociology’s relentless and ruthless quest for “truth.” The neglect of CP Time generally has left sociology in need of a more complete analysis of the socialities and temporalities of racialized youth, and Black youth in particular. Sociologists of time may benefit from exercising their own “sociological imaginations” in order to make the familiar (i.e., white time) strange and make the mundane (i.e., whiteness) matter.

Based on my interviews at Run-a-Way, it was clear that CP Time does not hold as much cultural relevancy among most youth today as it did for Generations X or Y. Most of the youths I interviewed were unfamiliar with either term, but a few likened it to what they called “Black people time” and “POC time.” During my interviews, the “CP” in “CP Time” usually required some unpacking. To make CP Time a bit more relevant, I offered the following prompt: “If I say that there’s a party going down tomorrow at ten p.m., but we’re on CP Time, what time do you think the party will start?” Most youths picked up on this hint and figured out that the party would start later. We also talked about why the term “colored people” was and still is racist, while also examining the false equivalence between “colored people” and “people of color.” I wondered whether the youths’ limited understanding of the historical connotations of “colored” was symptomatic of white, linear, progressive time’s capacity to conceal a racialized violence that is not only past but present. When the past is always present for Black youth, knowledge of history is also knowledge of now.

I’ll Get There When I Get There

To be Black in a state of white supremacy exemplifies a contradictory experience. Many youths at Run-a-Way recognized the contradiction of claiming to be on time when they were consistently beginning from behind or beginning from deficits. When I asked Devon about the purpose of CP Time, he said, “I mean, honestly, I feel like that was the best way to stick it to the man then.” At the time of the interview, fifteen-year-old Devon attended an alternative high school for aspiring musicians. Devon’s dream was, as he put it, to “transform the world through [his] music.” “Sticking it to the man” was Devon’s way of showing how CP Time becomes a route to resistance through ridicule. According to Devon, CP Time relies on humor to remind “the man” of Black people’s (temporal) self-determination. CP Time may be best summed up as “lateness with (or without) a smile.” Some join in the amusement, remaining unperturbed by the lack of respect for time. Others, including “the man,” experience intense consternation over the contradiction between lateness and punctuality.

Whether used to redefine or rupture existing relationships to white time, CP Time functions as a kind of transformative transgression among Black people and other racialized subjects. To be used by time, as opposed to using it, exposes an exploitative side of time concealed within universalist frames of social time. In fact, to some, social time may look a lot like carceral time. Before learning the meaning of CP Time, Devon inferred that it was a way to distinguish between Black and white time use:

For us, like, growing up it was how Black people spent their time compared to how white people spent their time… . There’s a really big difference. I grew up knowing that Black people time was what we do within our day and how different… . Because we spend our time … a lot of us spend our time in jail, some of us spend our time taking care of kids, single parents taking care of kids. White people take their kids to daycare and all that, which is how different it was.

Devon recognizes the structural factors that result in such qualitatively distinct experiences between Black and white people. But he also subscribes to some of the racialized scripts created by urban sociologists, political scientists, criminologists, and others invested in carceral curricula. By suggesting that a lot of Black people spend time in jail, Devon constructs the prison-industrial complex as a primary site of time use for both prisoners and nonprisoners. Devon does not, however, use the term “mass incarceration” to describe the significant number of Black people in jails and prisons.

As Dylan Rodríguez notes, critiquing “mass incarceration” as an issue affecting all is insufficient, when the “masses” are not being incarcerated.⁶⁷ In fact, the prison-industrial complex is intent on containing those already captive while exonerating the key architects of “white reconstruction.”⁶⁸ “Mass incarceration” is also not merely an issue of too many people being incarcerated. The word “mass” summons calls to “reform” the prison-industrial complex by reducing the number of currently incarcerated people or sending fewer people to jails and prisons. The problem with these proposals is that they naturalize the prison-industrial complex. According to Rodríguez, “mass incarceration narrativity” makes “incarceration” not only theoretically possible, but legitimate.⁶⁹

The equation of Blackness and “criminality” is a form of not only racialization but also temporalization. Jared Sexton helps illustrate this point when reciting a scene from the 1967 film In the Heat of the Night. In the scene, Virgil Tibbs, played by Sidney Poitier, tells Mama Caleba, played by Beah Richards, “There’s white time in jail, and there’s colored time in jail. The worst kind of time you can do is colored time.” Sexton goes on to describe “colored time” as “interminable, perhaps even incalculable, stalled time.”⁷⁰ Similar to an event horizon—the region of no escape within a black hole—the prison-industrial complex represents a spacetime that thwarts opportunities for exit and obstructs observation from the outside. Devon identifies the prison-industrial complex as a site of significant time use for Black people in the United States. In short, carceral space both stalls time and steals it from Black prisoners, while making escape virtually impossible. Consequently, racialized youth, and Black youth in particular, are forced to do time more than use it. In referencing single parenthood, Devon also alludes to the disproportionate impact of incarceration on Black families, making clear that time is racialized and gendered.

Devon and Sexton make clear that white time constructs disparate life chances between white and nonwhite people. The manipulation of white time ensures that opportunity structures are accessible to some and denied to others. White time disavows nonwhite coevalness. For example, because schools are calibrated to white time, it is no surprise that students of color are tracked into “remedial” or “slow” classes. As anachronistic educational space, “special” or “remedial” classrooms come to naturalize educational inequalities, including the unequal distribution of resources between “mainstream” classes and classrooms designated for students with disabilities. As I demonstrate in chapter 2, white time requires Black youth to use a time that does not belong to them and to risk being charged with time theft. White time then ensures that the probability that Black youth will be arrested and incarcerated is always greater than their white counterparts. Though Devon’s conceptualization of CP Time differs from its conventional meaning, he still manages to help us consider why white people use time while Black people remain used by it.

Expecting Black people to be punctual when white time guarantees they will remain “behind schedule” as a result of ongoing forms of exploitation, dispossession, and structural violence is asinine.⁷¹ CP Time reflects a temporal orientation that resists confinement within a binary of on-off time. Rather, CP Time embraces contradiction, ambiguity, and a multitude of cultural meanings. Its association with delay and being behind the clock seems, on the face of things, to reinforce stereotypical associations between race and time. Lost within such representations is, to paraphrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the capacity of the “subaltern to speak.”⁷²

“I’ll get there when I get there” is a familiar refrain to followers of CP Time. The phrase reflects an active effort to unsettle expectations of punctuality by resisting coherent meanings and intelligible standards of time. In short, Black people are going to take their time because their time is always already taken (by white time). To “get there when I get there,” then, is a call for greater appreciation of ambiguity and irony, which tends to frustrate white time and white people. In short, CP Time threatens the stability and regularity of white time while affording Black people some degree of temporal liberation.

Pierre Bourdieu holds that access to time is contingent on “power and the objective chances open to it.”⁷³ Thus, “temporal power” signifies the “power to perpetuate or transform the distributions of various forms of capital by maintaining or transforming the principles of redistribution.”⁷⁴ With little control over the means of production, how much temporal power do racialized and dispossessed people hold? How might CP Time serve as a tactic used to not only disrupt temporal power but create new modes and owners of production? And what role does CP Time play in efforts to abolish capitalism when time is money?

Claiming ownership of time takes a variety of forms. “Absolute power,” Bourdieu notes, “is the power to make oneself unpredictable and deny other people any reasonable anticipation, to place them in total uncertainty by offering no scope for their capacity to predict.”⁷⁵ CP Time forces those with the greatest temporal power to wait in submission, as those cast into temporal alterity funk the clock. CP Time, thus, helps provide some semblance of freedom and a belief in a collective power to resist temporal discipline, in favor of ambiguity. In doing so, Black people express a refusal to be bound within a temporal system that eviscerates the potential for self-determination or collective well-being. As suggested, however, CP Time need not be understood only as a form of agency and/or resistance, especially given the many consequences of following CP Time (e.g., school detention, work termination, stigmatization). Rather, CP Time is functional for those who must contend with institutionalized oppressions that deny them both time and space.

As a strategy of resistance to existing forms of temporal power, CP Time involves the power of persuasion—particularly persuading others to wait. “Waiting,” as Bourdieu asserts,

implies submission: the interested aiming at something greatly desired durably—that is to say, for the whole duration of the expectancy— modifies the behavior of the person who “hangs,” as we say, on the awaited decision. It follows that the art of “taking one’s time,” of “letting time take its time,” as Cervantes put it, of making people wait, of delaying without destroying hope, of adjourning without totally disappointing, which would have the effect of killing the waiting itself, is an integral part of the exercise of power.⁷⁶

CP Time promotes indeterminacy of presence/attendance, allowing Black people to control their schedules and those of others. For many Black youths at Run-a-Way, it was only a matter of time before their time mattered, and for fourteen-year-old Quincy, Black time already mattered most:

In Quincy’s response, we find several rich elements of CP Time, including ambiguity, resistance, and transformation. Quincy is adamantly opposed to abiding by a time that doesn’t abide by him and other Black people. The party may start at ten, but it goes until Black people say “when.” The cumulative impact of and unfolding chronicle of Black captivity, dispossession, debt, and death obviate any expectation for Black deference to white time. Quincy demonstrates the possibility of creating while defying. The ambiguity of what can be produced does not deter Quincy from resisting. Rather, ambiguity is a source of momentum, because while the pathway to liberation may not be clear, the chance to be free from enslavement and “slavery’s afterlife” is better than no chance at all.

But what other powers does CP Time hold beyond resistance and ridicule? Upon closer examination of Quincy’s words, we are reminded of Walcott’s earlier conceptualization of time as “the very condition of Western civilization that oppresses so brutally.” CP Time is, then, also an opportunity for Black people, including Black youth, to heal from temporal violence and the violence of white time. Quincy’s refusal to listen is part of that healing process. Quincy is refusing the directives of not only the slave driver, the overseer, the officer, the missionary, and the teacher, but also the clock orienting them all.

CP Time and other racial temporalities need not only exist as responses to dominant narratives. In some instances, what may be read as “oppositional” may be experiments in alternative socialities centering spontaneity and a sort of coordinated unpredictability. For example, the anthropological linguist Susan Phillips reveals how the rhythm of daily life among the Ilongot tribe creates ways to be beholden to one another as opposed to time:

They [non-Indians] try to learn from Indians at what time the event will begin. Often the person questioned will say he doesn’t know, but if pressed, he may give a specific time—e.g., 8 P.M. or “some time after 9.” The non-Indians will arrive at that time, only to find that “nothing is happening” yet, and no one seems to know when something will happen. They wait anywhere from twenty minutes to several hours before the event begins.”⁷⁷

In his analysis, Rosaldo argues,

Far from being devoid of positive content (presumably because of not being rule-governed), indeterminacy allows the emergence of a culturally valued quality of human relations where one can follow impulses, change directions, and coordinate with other people. In other words, social unpredictability has its distinctive tempo, and it permits people to develop timing, coordination, and a knack for responding to contingencies. The qualities constitute social grace, which in turn enables an attentive person to be effective in the interpersonal politics of everyday life… . [A]mong the Ilongots zones of indeterminacy, particularly in social visits, promote a human capacity for improvisation in response to the unexpected, and this very capacity can be celebrated as a cultural value.”⁷⁸

Does improvisation or the celebration of “cultural value” constitute “temporal power” or something else? Black people throughout the diaspora recognize that CP Time is both an inside joke and an acknowledgment of Black people’s capacity to remain in physical, psychic, and emotional communion with one another, despite their “stranger” status and geographic boundaries.⁷⁹ While CP Time forces adherents of white time to wait, it proves less consternating for Black people, who respond with what Walcott calls “amused tolerance.”⁸⁰ “I’ll get there when I get there” also means “I’ll see you when I see you.” When encountering one another, most Black people know that if it is “good to see you!” then it is also “good to be seen.” Though only sixteen, Sean has apprehended the importance of Black temporal traditions and demonstrates his proficiency in our discussion of what he calls “Black people time”: “I dunno, I think it’s called Black people time. I don’t know what that CP thing is. I know what Black people time is. So Black people time is you a couple … you a little late.”

Sean punctuates his remarks with a dose of humor that both ridicules and resists white time—the inside joke being that “a little late” to Black folk actually meant a lot late to others. Sean’s personality always brought life to our one-on-one conversations and radiated throughout the milieu of the program. During free time, Sean commandeered the center’s small boom box, tuned into whatever station was “the Twin Cities’ Home for Hip Hop and R&B” at the time, raised the volume high enough for all on the second floor to hear, and proceeded to “cut a rug”—the literal one in the center of the living room of the emergency shelter program. Sean invited both peers and staff to join, but most seemed too shy to participate. Humor and performance characterize both Sean’s personality and CP Time or “Black people time.” Just as Sean took center stage to show off his dance moves in front of peers and staff, CP Time is a pronouncement of one’s arrival before familiar and unfamiliar audiences.

Others may arrive late, seeking less fanfare and without much expression at all. Yet all are expected to appreciate ambiguity and not act “brand new” when someone is, as Sean puts it, “a little late.” Ambiguity proved to be an orienting theme for many youths at Run-a-Way. Some, like sixteen-year-old Lamont, offered less explanation for following CP Time:

Lamont’s remarks are dense as much as they are terse, and they capture an important feature of CP Time—it is best to “get there when you get there.” By suggesting that his lateness “just happen like that,” Lamont conveys a refusal to remain bound within temporal parameters and allows his life to unfold organically according to his own idiosyncratic schedule. When asked whether he has a personal schedule, Lamont’s response was, “No. I just go by the day.” At the time of our interview, he was in the independent living program and had just applied to Job Corps after being expelled from school for fighting.⁸¹ Lamont’s idiosyncratic schedule is versatile and conducive to improvisation and shifting plans based on impulse. When one’s schedule is as flexible as Lamont’s, time itself bends in a variety of ways. Lacking access to consistent meals, shelter, medical care, and income warrants some degree of flexibility in one’s schedule.

Staff at Run-a-Way often described the program as an interim placement for youths “in limbo”—a transition phase before moving to a more permanent placement such as a home, a foster home, a group home, residential placement, a hospital, or a juvenile detention center. Youths were in limbo because many lacked clarity regarding where they would go after Run-a-Way. Some, especially those without a home to return to, did not learn about their next placement until just a few days before they moved. Most, however, came to Run-a-Way because of family challenges and planned to return home after meeting program expectations, including taking part in group activities and setting educational goals, as well as participating in individual and family therapy.

Transience made it difficult for youths to develop lasting relationships with staff. There were, however, some exceptions. Finesse, who was eighteen years old at the time of our interview, moved up the ranks from the emergency shelter program to independent living, establishing enduring relationships with numerous staff members and youths at Run-a-Way. The independent living program, located on the third floor of the building, was where older youths could focus on improving activities of daily living (ADLs) in order to eventually find their own apartment. Because the independent living program allows youths to stay there for up to one year (and in some cases longer), Finesse was one of a select number of youths whom I saw regularly during my time at Run-a-Way.

Finesse identified himself as “Jamaican and Irish” and described himself as having “white skin with Black features.” He and I bonded over similar racialized biographies and our mutual love of hip hop. At the time, Finesse was an aspiring rapper who was shot in the leg just before coming to Run-a-Way, while hanging out with a group of friends. He does not believe he was the intended target of the shooting, but he admitted to having ties to the Crips, which sometimes led to tension with other youths at Run-a-Way. It was not Finesse’s first time at Run-a-Way. Before being shot, he volunteered as an informal personal trainer for several youths in the emergency shelter program. Like many of his peers, Finesse returned to the program after continued challenges at home. When I met him, he was confined to a wheelchair and was unable to leave the program due to safety concerns. Within five months, however, Finesse was getting around with crutches while his injured leg remained protected by a cast. Despite not finishing high school, he had a good-paying job at the Mayo Clinic. His boss kept his position secure until he was able to return after the shooting. Still, Finesse lost a significant amount of time at work and went months without pay. He had a passion for his job and thrived as a trainer. He even tried to share some of his personal-trainer knowledge with his younger peers at Run-a-Way. In their eyes, Finesse was a “real cool dude,” partly because his job involved working with the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Finesse was also known for his sense of humor, as demonstrated in our conversation about CP Time. Before I could provide an example, Finesse said, “I know what you’re talkin’ about. You’re talkin’ about how … maybe it’s different than what you were gonna say, but when I hear that what I’m thinkin’ is like Black people are always late type shit… . ‘I’m around the corner’ but they really be like forty-five minutes away… . That’s what I was thinkin’ of. When you first said ‘CPT’ I thought you were talkin’ about the buses in Chicago.”

Finesse possessed a magnetizing sense of humor and a tacit awareness of the importance of ambiguity to CP Time. Ambiguity is also integral to fully capturing what Michelle M. Wright describes as “the multidimensionality of Blackness.”⁸²“In any moment in which we are reading/analyzing Blackness,” she argues, “we should assume that its valences will likely vary from those of a previous moment.”⁸³ Her book Physics of Blackness is Wright’s provocation to ask not only “What is blackness?” but also “Where and when is blackness?”⁸⁴ Based on Finesse’s calculation and according to CPT, Blackness, and more specifically Black people, is both “around the corner” and “forty-five minutes” late. To suggest, however, that all Black people abide by CP Time would undermine Wright’s emphasis on heterogeneity and contradiction. Rather, my aim is to challenge misreadings of CP Time based on the incompatible metrics of white time.

According to Wright, “linear progress narratives” are highly “allergic” to contradictions.⁸⁵ Given the connection between linear progress narratives and whiteness, this makes a great deal of sense. Seldom does whiteness accept ambiguity as an answer because, like linear progress narratives, it yearns for coherence and remains intolerant of contradiction, making it antithetical to women-of-color and queer-of-color epistemologies. Existing as a nonwhite, racialized subject within whiteness is itself a contradiction—one that frustrates and strains yearnings for intelligibility. Similarly, Wright’s emphasis on the heterogeneity of Blackness belies coherence and linearity.

It is ironic that whiteness is so intolerant of ambiguity and contradiction when, as W. E. B. Du Bois observed, slavery and colonialism contradict white America’s putative commitment to liberal, democratic, and universalist virtues.⁸⁶ As Wright notes, “In Souls [of Black Folk], although the Negro American is not reconciled, split, he is not contradictory: his desire, according to Du Bois, is perfectly logical. Instead the (racist) white American is being contradictory.”⁸⁷ Du Bois believed that to the extent that Black people lead contradictory lives, they do so in part because white America has violated its own claims to universal rights and freedoms.⁸⁸ Hence, Du Bois consistently inverted whiteness and centered Black sociality, while making white time contradictory to Afro-modernity and CP Time. I have so far demonstrated how attuned youth are to the pace, cycles, and rhythms of CP Time. To what extent, though, do Black youth actually move to the beat of CPT?

CP Time as Praxis

Here, I focus on what youths do to remain off white time rather than on it. Abiding by CP Time signifies a shift from external conceptions of time (chronos) to an internal/experiential dimension (kairós). The notion of “time-as-thing,” according to Bourdieu, “is the product of a scholastic point of view.”⁸⁹ Shifting to the experiential dimension of time, Bourdieu adds, “Practice is not in time but makestime (human time, as opposed to biological or astronomical time.)”⁹⁰ As noted earlier, CP Time is as transformative as it is transgressive, and Black youths at Run-a-Way were adept at making time while also destroying it.

Though few were familiar with the phrase, many youths at Run-a-Way had some experience applying the basic principles of CP Time. Gerard, a sixteen-year-old in the emergency shelter program, was somewhat reserved but also quite charismatic and capable of seizing any opportunity to be the center of attention. Having a darker complexion meant that Gerard was often mistaken for Somali, but he self-identified as Black and Native. I asked him what time the party would kick off if it allegedly started at 10 p.m. CPT. After I clarified the difference between CP Time (CPT) and central standard time (CST), Gerard said, “Colored People time, like … it’s gonna be [pause] when you say it’s at.” Gerard helps expand conceptualizations of CP Time by reminding us of the importance of self-definition and self-determination. While clock time, linear time, modern time, and other indicators of white time may organize most forms of social life, CP Time creates the temporal caesurae that Black people require to control not only time but the pace of social life in any given setting.

I met Gerard on two different occasions at Run-a-Way. Our first meeting was characteristic of his stay in the program: transitory. Gerard returned home within a couple days of our first meeting. He spent a significantly longer period of time during his second stay. We built enough of a rapport that Gerard’s mother gave me permission to conduct our interview at their home in Near North, a majority-Black community in Minneapolis still under intense police occupation, socially and economically dispossessed, and defiantly vibrant. Further along in our interview, Gerard admitted to following CP Time, while legitimating lateness as personal opposition to that which was “lame”—punctuality. I asked him whether he identified as a follower of CP Time. He replied, “Absolutely… . ’Cuz I always … I always end up at parties really late. I like doing that, I don’t know. I don’t … I never go somewhere early, that’s lame.”

According to Gerard, lateness prevents “lameness.” Having the latest fashions may not mean much unless one’s outfit includes being “fashionably late” as an accessory. To Gerard, being fashionably early is not a thing. Being “fashionably late,” though, is fairly conventional conduct for parties. So it is somewhat disingenuous to suggest that Gerard’s taste for lateness is that unusual. But Gerard did not just transgress the social time of parties. In fact, his relationship to school and work was marked by an unwavering commitment to insurgent time:

When white time is the dominant metric in work and schooling, it is clear that Gerard’s penchant for lateness cannot be divorced from space and place. Many Black youths in urbanized space recognize that they often learn, labor, and live in spaces designed without them in mind.⁹¹ Gerard’s remarks are reminiscent of Damien Sojoyner’s conceptualization of school as an “educational enclosure” that suspends Black youth in time.⁹² School, for example, is not simply incompatible because of a biased curriculum or the mismatch between students of color and the teachers they learn from. Instead Gerard sees school as a waste of time because, as he states, “You’re teaching me something I already know.” Not only is time wasted, but in Gerard’s case, time is appropriated by the educational system. What does it mean to attend school on time, only to learn that you aren’t going to learn anything at all?

Punctuality was also not a priority for sixteen-year-old Shanté. Money, however, was:

I’m always late though. I’m never on time to nothin’, even when I had to go pick up and drop off [drugs]. I was never on time. And that was bad though. They [other dealers] used to be so mad. “What are you late for? You takin’ all day.” I was doin’ other stuff, gettin’ other money. You ain’t there when you supposed to be, even though you know you supposed to be there. I knew but I wasn’t there… . I was like, they ain’t goin’ nowhere ’cuz they need my money.

Shanté’s history with the “family regulation system” made her one of the savviest youths at Run-a-Way and clearly ahead of her time.⁹³ Shanté was so prescient and well versed in the logics of capitalism that she regularly endorsed the notion that “time is money.”⁹⁴ Compared to some of her peers who may “act out,” Shanté usually chose to “cool out.” Shanté’s “cool pose,” however, belied androcentric assumptions about young Black men coming of age. Not only was Shanté capable of anticipating and preempting racialized violence, but as a young Black woman, her “multiple consciousness” provided a standpoint on and analysis of Black women’s and femmes’ resistance to simultaneous and multiplicative oppressions.⁹⁵

Shanté was one of approximately ten youths at Run-a-Way with experience in the “fast life.”⁹⁶ While more male-identified youths than Black girls and femmes disclosed selling drugs, Shanté’s accounts suggest that she was as experienced as boys at Run-a-Way, if not more so. Despite the high risk of arrest and the potential of violence from peers, customers, and police, Shanté appeared to march to the tick of her own clock and transgress time. She was not, however, naive, acknowledging that “dudes are quick to shoot a girl.” Yet still, she mustered the courage to take her and other people’s time and make “other money.” To Benjamin Franklin and others moved by the “spirit” of capitalism, Shanté’s disregard for time reads as one of the highest forms of temporal treason. As Franklin observed, “After industry and frugality, nothing contributes more to the raising of a young man in the world than punctuality and justice in all his dealings; therefore, never keep borrowed money an hour beyond the time you promised, lest a disappointment shut up your friend’s purse forever.”⁹⁷

To the extent that time is money, Shanté is indeed keeping “borrowed money,” albeit in the form of seconds, minutes, and hours. But she expressed little concern about her customers shutting their purses because, in her words, “they ain’t goin’ nowhere ’cuz they need my money.” Examining Shanté’s relationship to time while living the fast life is reminiscent of Kemi Adeyemi’s work on slowness as a practice among Black queer women in the neoliberal city. Adeyemi writes, “The question of slowness as a racialized queer aesthetic or practice may very well open the door for more, and more critical, reviews of how economic and cultural capital govern belonging in and to the neoliberal city, but also deeper understanding of how Black queer subjectivities within, and Black queer people’s attachments to, the neoliberal city are staged through specific negotiations of temporal orders.”⁹⁸

What does it mean for Shanté to practice slowness while living the fast life? For Benjamin Franklin, practicing slowness may inch closer and closer to the profane, but for Shanté, her time is sacred. Tarrying may be antithetical to the logics of capital accumulation, but Shanté proves that in taking her time, she is in fact taking the time of others in order to make more money. As a burgeoning entrepreneur, Shanté needs little instruction on the relationship between supply and demand. To those forced to wait all day, their time is spent. But for Shanté, her ability to make “other money” on top of what she is about to earn makes her right on time. Slow money may be better than no money, but taking time while collecting fast money is an irresistibly lucrative prospect for Black youth targeted for temporal dispossession over the life course.

Shanté is not only negotiating the temporal orders of the neoliberal city but asserting her role as a moderator of time. Not only does she funk the clock, but she also queers it. Though Shanté identifies as “straight,” her relationship to time does align with what J. Jack Halberstam describes as alternative temporalities among queer subcultures. As Halberstam writes, “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to the logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience—namely birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”⁹⁹ Halberstam calls attention to the potential of queer and trans persons to transgress boundaries and dichotomies that fail or refuse to affirm the fullness of their identities. Similarly, Kara Keeling describes how queerness appears “as a structural antagonism of the social,” including social time.¹⁰⁰ Shanté refuses social time and what Halberstam calls the “temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance” in favor of a queer time: namely, the fast life.¹⁰¹ Abiding by queer time, though, increases the risk of the criminal legal system converting, and perhaps queering, survival strategies, including selling drugs, into “crime.”

In Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected, Lisa Cacho recounts the death of her cousin Brandon and his refusal/failure to follow conventional pathways to the “American Dream”:

In some ways Brandon lived in a “queer time and place,” and in others he might even be considered a “queer subject.” Even though his experiences weren’t necessarily comparable or similar to other queers of color, a queer of color analysis “makes some sense” of his life without condemning or celebrating who he was or who he could have been… . For Brandon, the failure to meet heteronormative and neoliberal expectations (and his reluctance to even try to attain them) was compounded by his racial background as Chicano/Mexican American. He was not just a lazy kid without a high school diploma who drank too much and lived off his parents. When Brandon defied normative investments in heteropatriarchy and American enterprise, he gave credence to racial stereotypes, which is partly why he also could not be fully valued through a politics of racial normativity.¹⁰²

As I will demonstrate in chapter 6, the fast life is queer insofar as it refuses compliance with conventional life course transitions and trajectories and liberal futurities predicated on freedoms and rights that backfire when asserted by Black youth.

Youths’ support for queering time, however, varied. While many shunned punctuality, others had little patience for lateness. As stated earlier, not all Black people follow CP Time, and as Remy notes, consistency and punctuality take precedence over being “fashionably late.” I asked Remy to define lateness.

As a sixteen-year-old Black and Native gender-nonbinary youth with an abiding commitment to transformative justice work, Remy was deeply connected to their community. Our connection extended beyond our time at Run-a-Way through our mutual involvement in antioppressive organizing. Remy’s consideration of how other people perceive time suggests their broader awareness of relationality and the subjective dimensions of time. Remy’s claim that “we all livin’ on our own timeframe” helps us further distinguish between chronos and kairós, or institutionalized time—organized around clocks and calendars—and personal “timeframes.” With Remy’s emphatic call for punctuality, it seems only right (and perhaps right on time) to put them in conversation with Shanté.

Despite living the fast life, Shanté’s habitual lateness suggests that she is comfortable “getting there when she gets there.” In a scenario where Remy is waiting on Shanté, the potential for tension seems great. It is possible that if their paths were to cross under different circumstances, Shanté could be the person to whom Remy refers when speaking about expecting a delivery. In this situation, Shanté may not see herself as late, but as Remy suggests, she undoubtedly is.

CP Time as a “Hidden Transcript”

How might we shift understandings of lateness from a defiance of deadlines to a byproduct of oppressive protocols that continue to discipline Black youth, including Black girls and femmes? In my work, racialized and gendered standards of beauty, particularly hairstyle, proved to be a significant concern and source of time use among many Black girls. The following fieldnote from August 6, 2015, offers an example of how two sixteen-year-old girls, Shanté and Tasha, resist white time while also producing a spacetime that centers aspects of Black womanhood:

I arrived at 3 p.m. The staff met in the activity room to review the “pass-ons.”¹⁰³ There were “no new updates” for most of the youth. However, the pass-ons note that Shanté and Tasha stayed up until 2:30 a.m. doing hair. Tasha, who wears her own hair in a small afro, spent the night giving Shanté [a] new weave.

Staff did not impose any consequences for the “curfew violation.” Time, however, remains a tool used to uphold racialized and gendered standards and regulate Black girlhood. The expectation to “look presentable” holds a specific meaning for Black girls, and as a man with straight hair, my knowledge on the subject of Black women’s hair is not experiential or rooted in any standpoint. Instead I can only speak from a position of abstraction based on the little I learn from Black girls and women themselves. Black girls and women, though, remind me that the expectation to look presentable does in fact take time. The amount of time Black girls spend sitting in a single position getting their hair done/did is a process. Brushing, detangling, stretching, sewing, braiding, and the use of products not only takes time but takes significant physical and emotional strength. To construct Shanté and Tasha as passive temporal subjects, however, obscures their capacity to transform punitive standards of beauty into a potentially enjoyable activity. By doing hair, both girls establish an important bond while exploring the potential of desire and pleasure as sites of resistance. While enjoying each other’s company, they join in the co-construction of insurgent time. They take pleasure in beautifying each other and defying white time because of its failure to affirm Black girlhood.

Black women’s hair remains an intimate part of their identity. Like double consciousness, Black women’s hair care is a physically, psychically, and emotionally expending activity. Shanté and Tasha may know they are not their hair, but they also know that misogynoir fails to make this important distinction. In response to onerous expectations for “presentability,” a number of Black girls at Run-a-Way kept their hair wrapped or covered in a shower cap during the day. Aware of the many racialized and gendered expectations for hair presentation, Black girls like Shanté and Tasha found it necessary to escape to their bedrooms—one of the few sites at Run-a-Way where Black girls found solidarity with one another through mutualism—to expose their hair. Negotiating the pressures of “good hair,” Eurocentric standards of beauty, and misogynoir take time. My aim here is not to debate the extent to which Tasha and Shanté resist racialized and gendered protocols, but to reveal how the girls resist temporal strictures by both femming and funking the clock.

Resistance, though, is a part of many Black girls’ repertoires, and Shanté and Tasha may be rehearsing their own version of “infrapolitics.” They are well aware of the risk of being “written up” (penalized) for staying up past curfew, yet they still recite a “hidden transcript” or “offstage” discourse to challenge “public transcripts”—“the open interaction between subordinates and those who dominate,” in the words of Erving Goffman.¹⁰⁴ As “weapons of the weak,” hidden transcript literacy rates tend to be higher among poor, racialized persons.¹⁰⁵ Consequently, hidden transcripts present the greatest threat to dominant groups. In violating curfew, the girls carve out space and time within the broader context of an impatient white, androcentric time that consistently spurns Black girlhood.

The consequences of violating “public transcripts,” including the program curfew, varied among staff. Dwayne, for example, is one of several Black staff members in the independent living program, and he describes himself as “laid back” when it comes to curfew violation: “No one ever abides by the nine thirty [weeknight] bedtime.” Youths in the independent living program adhere to a “plus-minus” system determining privileges and penalties. If they break curfew, they receive a “minus” on weekly progress sheets, resulting in a deduction in their weekly allowance. Abiding by curfew, though, gives them a “plus,” thus increasing their chances of receiving their entire allowance. Some youths expected staff to show some sympathy for their tardiness by offering an occasional grace period. Such favors, however, were not so easy to grant. With cameras located on every floor and in various locations outside the building, both youths’ and staff members’ movements were consistently monitored.

There was also the issue of “consistency.” White staff called for consistency as a show of fealty to “order” in the program. Staff framed consistency as being in the best interest of the youths. They expressed concern over sending mixed messages and being accused of bias or favoritism. With most of the administrative and managerial staff being white, Black direct-care workers were careful about letting some youths slide for curfew violations. Dwayne, however, would occasionally make an exception for youths he saw as “doing the best they can.” Dwayne negotiated with youths, bargained with staff, and, at the same time, funked the clock. But youths often struck a deal that required them to perform an additional chore or study for one hour longer in order to get paid. Thus, Dwayne’s advocacy may have funked up the clock only so much. While successful in deferring and averting the threat of punishment, such negotiations still demanded time from racialized youths. With time being money, it is no surprise that youths fulfilled their half of the bargain by spending time in service of capital (i.e., their weekly allowance). Though the temporal parameters regulating curfew hampered a sense of freedom and discretion, both Black staff and Black youths worked together to challenge “public transcripts” by regularly rehearsing “hidden” ones.

It’s Me/We O’Clock

As I have argued, inclusion into social time, by definition, requires exclusion. Based on an appreciation of subjective/experiential interpretations of time, “social time” signals inclusion within a collective that shares temporal benefits. Upon further analysis, however, the construction of the “social” belies unity, equivalence, equilibrium, mutuality and any possibility of creating a time enjoyed by all. The synchronicity between social time and white time requires the systemic marginalization of racialized subjects from the existing temporal order and the social itself. The neglect of racialized time perspectives within a sociology of time results in major empirical delays and shortcomings.

What concerns me as a scholar of race, time, and critical theory is a serious dilemma within the sociology of time: the overrepresentation of white time as time itself.¹⁰⁶ What good is seeking to understand the temporal perspectives of the “other” when white time remains the central reference category? When temporal conventions are synchronized to white time, racialized subjects will inevitably be late, precisely because they are always already constructed as behind time or outside time altogether. Moreover, white time requires the exploitation and extraction of nonwhite life in order to function. By paying unconditional deference to white time, social scientists legitimate the elision of race, racialization, and racialized subjects from analyses of time and temporality.

Black youth reckon with white time in a variety of ways. JT, for example, is capable of meeting a friend at four o’clock in the morning but is less invested in getting to school on time because, in his words, “no one’s ever late.” Sean is also not that worried about being a little late, even if “a little late” is actually a lot late. For Gerard, being late holds weight and is key to maintaining a particular level of cool. Others, like Shanté, recognize the need to maximize their time while reducing the time of others. Youths like Remy, however, abhor lateness and demand punctuality. In Quincy’s case, time is contingent on Black people’s presence. In short, the party and, to some extent, time itself do not start until Black people say “go.” Regardless of whether youths I spoke with knew the definition of CP Time, most appreciated the need to transgress time and funk the clock.

What makes CP Time and other transgressive temporalities generative and functional is a collective appreciation of lateness. While it’s a source of consternation and agony for some, lateness is an acceptable and functional part of racialized temporalities. Exhausted by the many social institutions synchronized to white time, Black youth find relief in spaces where lateness is not only acceptable but appreciated and endorsed. I argue that transgressive temporalities and insurgent time are functional precisely because they allow Black youth to maintain in school, at work, and in other spaces predicated on the detention and suspension of both time and personhood. Transgressive temporalities and insurgent time help free Black people from white time and the torment of lateness. In this sense, CP Time and other transgressive temporalities hold the power for Black people to heal from temporal violence. When adherence to white time requires Black exclusion, dispossession, and social death, Black people recognize that being on time may involve just as many consequences, if not more, as being late. Black youth, like many other racialized subjects, are in no hurry to be exploited. Hence, they will take their time, while potentially taking the time of others.

Abiding by CP Time is an opportunity to shake, break, make, and take time. In short, CP Time is subversive and productive. By transgressing white time, youth also produce new socialities not dependent on antagonism. They are adept at controlling and manipulating time according to their schedules. In short, time cannot proceed without their permission. Regardless of the second, minute, and/or hour, the timepieces of Black youth are all set to the same dial: “me/we o’clock.”

Though sociologists have had ample time to consider the role of race, racialization, and racism in analyses of social time, existing scholarship suggests that, ironically, they remain at an impasse and thus behind their own chronotopic clock. This chapter cannot make up for the time lost within such empirical voids. It does, however, bring the discipline of sociology up to date with racialized temporalities of those consistently “at risk” of academic racism and neglect within white time.