The Temporality of Whiteness

In Black Reconstruction in America, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that white laborers, by dint of phenotype (and the social value ascribed to such a phenotype) benefited from a “public and psychological wage.”² Du Bois’s prescient formulation of whiteness paved the way for critical race theorists, critical whiteness theory, and countless sociologists to explore the way in which whiteness works as a set of power relations between poor white workers and their Black counterparts. By taking Du Bois’s notion of a “wage” literally, David Roediger shows how poor white laborers capitalized on their whiteness while forfeiting the opportunity to forge alliances with their poor Black counterparts in favor of solidifying a higher position within a constructed racial hierarchy.³ In offering allegiance to their capitalist bosses, poor white laborers failed to recognize that their class interests were more reflective of those they worked with (Black people) than those they worked for (white elites).⁴ In short, poor whites were “tricked” by their own whiteness and the future orientation of white time.⁵

Cheryl Harris describes whiteness as a “consolation prize” that white people redeem in case of (nonwhite) emergency (i.e., ontological threats to the episteme).⁶ Regardless of how challenging the stressors of life may be, white people will always be winners, precisely because whiteness is everywhere they want to be. Harris expands on the covetous relationship between whites and whiteness by suggesting that whiteness evolved “from color to race to status to property.”⁷ This is in part why Saidiya Hartman describes whiteness as an “incorporeal hereditament or illusory inheritance from chattel slavery.”⁸ It is what Hartman calls “the property of enjoyment.” Referencing Black’s Law Dictionary, she notes that to “enjoy” entails “the exercise of a right, the promise and function of a right, privilege or incorporeal hereditament. Comfort, consolation, contentment, ease, happiness, pleasure and satisfaction.”⁹ Whiteness provokes an orientation toward the future while ignoring the presence of the past, including the interminable “inheritance from chattel slavery.” White people attempting to distance themselves from this inheritance are actively seeking to evade accountability for what Dionne Brand describes as the “cumulative hurt of others”:

Only the brazen can say, “I was not here, I did not do this and feel that.” One hears that all the time in Canada; about what people feel they are and are not responsible for. People use these arguments as reasons for not doing what is right or just. It never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrived. But one is born into history, one isn’t born into a void.¹⁰

It is clear that the clock of social justice is not synchronized to the time of slavery. The equation between time and money requires an acknowledgment of the temporal benefits that accrue concomitantly with the “wages of whiteness.” As a public and psychological wage, whiteness provides both unconditional reassurance and insurance to whites, guaranteeing that even when times get tough, whiteness will be there. As Harris maintains, whiteness undergirds the “settled expectations of whites,” which are legally affirmed through an anti-Black juridical system.¹¹ The unlimited protection of whiteness, according to Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, is subsidized by a “white habitus”—“a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings and emotions and their views on racial matters.” As a racial critique of “structuring structures,” white habitus opens a window to whiteness.¹²

Similarly, “the white spatial imaginary” represents a cognitive frame entertained by sponsors of whiteness who describe affirmative action as “reverse racism,” interpret personal success as a product of a strong, individualistic work ethic, and are generally more concerned with fairness, once the terms and conditions of existence for certain groups make fairness impossible. Within this solipsistic space, there is little room for self-interrogation of the structured advantages woven in whiteness. Personal successes and gains are then deemed “natural,” ahistorical, and part of a “self-actualized achievement” as opposed to products of the institutionalization of whiteness in education, employment, housing, the criminal legal system, and public policy.¹³ Despite its ubiquity, whiteness and its consequences remain hidden in plain sight.¹⁴ This is partly why Charles Mills sees whiteness as a “political commitment to white supremacy… . Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.”¹⁵

Though implied in critical whiteness scholarship, the temporal orientation of whiteness is not typically centered as a primary site of analysis. It is not enough to ask, “What is whiteness?” Like Michelle M. Wright’s proposal for examining the physics of Blackness, perhaps there is a need to ask “when” and “where” whiteness is. In answering the “when” part of this question, countless scholars have established that whiteness signifies that which is future oriented and modern.¹⁶ The “where” part of the question is more obvious given the white-supremacist context in which asymmetrical ontologies form. Sara Ahmed takes a phenomenological approach to studying the “what,” “when,” and “where” of whiteness and views it as the “what” that is “around.”¹⁷

The phenomenologist Helen Ngo invokes Shannon Sullivan’s conceptualization of “ontological expansiveness” to highlight the spatial and, by extension, temporal dimension of whiteness: “Similar to Sara Ahmed’s thinking on a ‘phenomenology of whiteness,’ Sullivan looks at how white people tend to act and think as if all spaces—whether geographical, psychical, linguistic, economic, spiritual, bodily, or otherwise—are or should be available for them to move in and out of as they wish.”¹⁸ To fully apprehend the implications of ontological expansiveness, we must consider those consistently under threat of ontological reduction/dissolution. As shown in chapter 2, many Black youths must account for the fears and anxieties of white people. Not doing so makes them vulnerable to white violence. Not only do white people take up space, but their ontological expansiveness takes time from Black and other racialized people. In becoming more possessive of and possessed by whiteness, white people are simultaneously dispossessing nonwhite people of the chance to claim any spacetime for themselves.

Where many critical phenomenologists are concerned with “how whiteness is ‘real,’ material and lived,” as Ngo puts it,¹⁹ my intervention comes through an examination of how whiteness infringes on the time perspectives of Black youth relegated to a spatio-temporal abyss. The association between whiteness and future orientations explains the equation of Black youth in poor urbanized space with present orientations. As I demonstrate in chapter 8, however, rather than being a paralyzing force suspending youth in time, present orientations mark a site of nowness, in light of a prescient vision of what is to come. Remaining ahead of their time, the youths I worked with found ways to invert the temporal terms of whiteness and their own racialized-temporalized positions by depicting their white counterparts as cultural appropriators and behind what was most up to date. In the end, Black youths at Run-a-Way ensured that their temporalities were most culturally relevant, while casting whiteness into a “played-out” past.

This chapter not only intervenes in existing literature on the sociology of time and whiteness but also presents new directions in youth resistance scholarship. Resistance to white time, like many forms of dissent, runs the risk of deeper embeddedness in the systems and structures that remain the target of criticism.²⁰ As the youths I spoke with repurposed time to their benefit, many reinscribed linear conceptions of temporality rooted in whiteness and androcentric thought. “Counter-frames” to the future orientations of whiteness, to use Joe Feagin’s term, were still couched in what Wright describes as progress narratives embedded in linear time.²¹ Wright critiques progress narratives for endorsing a return to an “origin” or singular point in history where Blackness begins, rendering Black (queer) women illegible.²² Despite the rhetorical limitations of linear progress narratives,²³ Black youths at Run-a-Way invoke these counter-frames in a spirit of resistance by remembering a past under continuous threat of evisceration by the future orientations of whiteness.²⁴ While their resistance may be situational, the content of these counter-frames illustrates not only how temporal power of whiteness works but how it is contested. In the following section, youths explain why they believe white youths’ lives are calibrated to vastly different temporalities than their own.

“They Got All the Time in the World”

How did Black youths at Run-a-Way assess their life chances given that opportunity structures remain calibrated to white time? They were poised to speak about what they perceived as disparate temporalities between themselves and their white counterparts. I am not seeking to validate youths’ perceptions according to empirical standards. In fact, US Supreme Court cases like McCleskey v. Kemp make clear that attempts to litigate racism and racialized violence are futile when racial bias remains anomalous, in the absence of clear “evidence of conscious, discriminatory action.”²⁵ In a similar analysis of the case, Joy James writes, “Where one cannot prove intent, racist violence is merely a theoretical possibility or improbability on the part of the state. Such improbability was insufficient ground for the court to issue a stay of execution.”²⁶ Still, Black youths do not need the courts or judges to prove that anti-Blackness exists. Consider the tautological error of attempting to make the case that anti-Blackness exists within an anti-Black structure like the legal system or the law itself.²⁷ Why is the experiential evidence of Black people never surmounting? Are the “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” as Hortense J. Spillers puts it,²⁸ too difficult to decipher? How can the courts and the legal system not read their own writing? The indelible mark of state terror left on Black bodies, Black flesh, and Black psyches is a reminder that “who feels it knows it.”²⁹

Not only did these Black youths know and feel anti-Blackness, but they also saw clearly how anti-Blackness remained a central organizing principle in the social identity of whiteness. As they show, understanding whiteness or white culture does not entail formal study. The oppressive ubiquity of whiteness makes it the most common educational default, one that Black and other racialized subjects have no choice but to learn. In this crash course, some nonwhite people choose to appease whiteness. Some inhabit it. Others challenge or resist it. In my research, I observed Black youths interacting with whiteness in some of these ways while also redefining the terms of this relationship. To operationalize Black youths’ relation to whiteness, I asked them to describe how their life chances differed from those of their white counterparts and how such perceptions shaped their relationship to time. Below is part of my conversation with seventeen-year-old Tanisha. Before I could finish my sentence and ask whether she had more or less time than white youths, Tanisha interjected with this:

While the extent of Tanisha’s contact with “rich” white youths is unknown, she speaks with confidence and in detail about what their lifeworlds look like. With opportunity structures already established in their favor, white youths, according to Tanisha, hold significant levels of privilege. Enhanced life chances were linked not solely to institutional opportunity structures (e.g., employment, education) but also to social/familial ones. The intergenerational transmission of wealth led many Black youths at Run-a-Way to believe that white youths benefited from the luxury of time, while they and others like them remained in a race against it.

When I asked sixteen-year-old Dominique about differences in time use between white and Black youths, they presented a picture of disparate schedules for both groups:

Dominique unveils a budding sociological imagination by exposing the social constructedness of time. They also answer an orienting question of this book: Whose time is it? According to Dominique, time is “man-made.” In their opinion, time is not only man-made but also white-man-made.³⁰ White people, according to Dominique, seem to have a better relationship to time and, in their words, are more “set to the system.” In further exploring the racialization of time, I asked Dominique about other differences in time perspectives.

Notice how Dominique immediately links time, when marked as white, to education. This reflects not only Dominique’s earlier point that time is man-made but also the idea that education is controlled by white people. White space is inextricably linked to white time, and both present a threat to Dominique’s Black and trans identity. The temporal constraints of whiteness force Dominique and other Black youths into more than a race against time—they are also racing to survive. In imagining the possibility of a “nocturnal” existence, Dominique invokes important connections between time and marginality.

J. Jack Halberstam emphasizes the importance of queering time through “nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity.”³¹ Queer time reflects the heterogeneity of time and serves as a response to what Halberstam conceives of as “family time”: “the normative scheduling of daily life (early to bed, early to rise) that accompanies the practice of child rearing.”³² Insofar as Dominique desires to live in a spacetime when and where “the party doesn’t end,” they are effectively queering linear time and reproductive family time in favor of nocturnality. Queering time may be both a cause and effect of what Kara Keeling calls “queer temporality,” which “names a dimension of time that produces risk … that dimension of the unpredictable and the unknowable in time that governs errant, eccentric, promiscuous, and unexpected organization of social life.”³³

Multiplicative forms of marginalization make adherence to such “normative scheduling” an anomalous virtue and virtually anomalous to queer and trans people of color. Coping with anti-Blackness, homophobia, and transphobia demands an inordinate amount of time from Black queer and trans people. Like racialization and racism, anti-Blackness and transphobia, including transmisogynoir, steal time by forcing Black queer and trans subjects to process multiplicative forms of violence. The threat of being clocked as Black and trans,³⁴ for example, takes time. “Clocking” is, interestingly enough, a reminder of the violence of time and the clock itself. Healing from cumulative forms of racialized and sexualized violence sometimes requires new spaces of sociality where, in Dominique’s words, “the party doesn’t end.” This may take the form of actual parties or social gatherings that occur when most people are asleep.

Surviving while Black, queer, and/or trans sometimes necessitates laboring outside the logic of capital accumulation and bourgeois time. In a critique of David Harvey’s description of the gender politics of time/space, Halberstam explains why queer and trans survival strategies remain at odds with “chrononormative” logics of what counts as “labor”:

All kinds of people, especially in postmodernity, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive family time as well as on the edges of labor and production. By doing so, they also often live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers, and the unemployed. Perhaps such people could be productively called “queer subjects” in terms of the ways they live (deliberately, accidentally, or of necessity) during the hours when others sleep and in the spaces (physical, metaphysical, and economic) that others have abandoned, and in terms of the ways they might work in the domains that other people assign to privacy and family.³⁵

In marking time as white, Dominique provides a racial critique of time that is missing from Halberstam’s work. Living outside “reproductive family time” and what Elizabeth Freeman calls “domestic time” does not offer refuge from white time—a persistent threat to the life of Black queer and trans youth.³⁶ Each additional murder of a Black trans woman gives Dominique legitimate reason to feel as though time is robbing them of life. Perhaps Dominique does not feel like they have enough time to live because white time is predicated on the extraction of Black life.

Black youths at Run-a-Way were acutely aware of the benefits conferred by whiteness, including accrued time. I asked sixteen-year-old Shanté whether she has more or less time than her white counterparts.

Shanté’s response helps answer Erykah Badu’s question when she sings, “Time to save the world / Where in the world is all the time?”³⁷ Like Tanisha and Dominique, Shanté views white youths as endowed with proprietary claims to time. Shanté identifies several structured advantages characteristic of a “possessive investment in whiteness” while extending Lipsitz’s conceptualization by showing how an investment in whiteness subsidizes temporal capital. Because time is money, “temporal capital” reads as a redundancy. I use the term not simply to signal the commodification of time, but rather to illustrate whiteness’s worth and exchange value. In other words, temporal capital grants white people access not only to modernity but, as Shanté notes, to higher credit scores. Hence, a possessive investment in whiteness reflects a possessive investment in time. Among the many privileges conferred by whiteness, time may be conceived of as material and immaterial capital maintaining whites’ “settled expectations,” in Harris’s formulation. Shanté reveals how these settled expectations mutually reinforce the unsettled experiences of Black youth. In other words, white youths “got all the time in the world” because white people have taken all the time in the world by amassing tremendous amounts of wealth through global capitalism, enslavement, conquest, genocide, displacement, dispossession, and ecological destruction. With all the time in the world, a higher credit score is just one of many bonuses for white people. Black youths, however, don’t “got it like that” and instead must receive a temporal and temporary loan before actually using time.

Less Time to Work Twice as Hard to Get Half as Far

The protracted estimates the youths at Run-a-Way gave for completing school and finding a job, as illustrated in the previous chapters, suggest that they were aware that the paths toward such life course transitions were filled with roadblocks and detours that limited their life chances. If Black youths must work twice as hard as their white counterparts to get half as far, does this mean they have half the time to accomplish the same goal? In the following narrative, sixteen-year-old Lamont explains why he feels he must do more with less (time):

Lamont feels forced to work 100 percent harder to achieve some sort of parity with white youths. Working 100 percent harder may not always mean that you are working twice as hard. In some cases, youths like Lamont may already be working significantly harder than his white counterparts. Hence, when he works 100 percent harder, he may be working at least twice as hard as his white counterparts to achieve similar goals. The need to “catch up” to white youths “always ahead” in time signals Lamont’s awareness that race is temporalized. Lamont has “less time to do more,” due to the cumulative advantages associated with whiteness, as well as the cumulative struggles for Black youths. Lamont describes an intergenerational transmission of wealth and privilege, best exemplified in what Robert Merton calls “the Matthew Effect” (or the “cumulative dis/advantage hypothesis”),³⁸ which posits that advantages or disadvantages of individuals and groups cumulate over the life course, explaining why “the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.”³⁹ In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro illustrate the relationality of wealth and economic and temporal dispossession:

Whites in general, but well-off whites in particular, were able to amass assets and use their secure economic status to pass their wealth from generation to generation. What is often not acknowledged is that the accumulation of wealth for some whites is intimately tied to the poverty of wealth for most blacks. Just as blacks have had “cumulative disadvantages,” whites have had “cumulative advantages.” Practically, every circumstance of bias and discrimination against blacks has produced a circumstance and opportunity of positive gain for whites. When black workers were paid less than white workers, white workers gained a benefit; when black businesses were confined to the segregated black market, white businesses received the benefit of diminished competition; when FHA policies denied loans to blacks, whites were the beneficiaries of the spectacular growth of good housing and housing equity in the suburbs. The cumulative effect of such a process has been to sediment blacks at the bottom of the social hierarchy and to artificially raise the relative position of some whites in society.⁴⁰

Oliver and Shapiro reveal not just the intergenerational transmission of wealth but also the way in which such transfers require the systematic withdrawal and theft of opportunities and resources. It was clear to many youths at Run-a-Way that the opportunities that racialized youths lacked, white youths possessed in abundance. I asked Miguel, a seventeen-year-old Latino youth, whether he had more or less time than white kids:

In addition to school, Miguel is one of many students who hold down part-time jobs while still earning a high school diploma. Contrary to depictions of racialized youth in urbanized space as incapable of planning or thinking long-term, Miguel has a well-structured routine built around his school/work life. Miguel also identifies employment as a key source of time use. While his peers may be doing homework at home, he must do his homework on his way to work. When forced to do homework on the bus on the way to work, is Miguel using time or being used by it? When school and work are synchronized to white time, racialized youths will inevitably be late. Miguel cannot possibly keep up in school when white time requires many migrant youths to work after-school jobs to make ends meet.⁴¹ As Miguel shows, white time demands deference to temporal standards to ensure that white wealth increases at the expense, extraction, and exploitation of nonwhite life.

“White People—Do You Believe in Black Privilege?”

To youths at Run-a-Way, whiteness, white identity, and white culture were synonymous. In some cases, they found ways to resist whiteness, white identity, white culture, and white time simultaneously. Take, for example, an exchange during a shift change meeting in the emergency shelter program. Around three thirty in the afternoon every day, staff and youths gather in the program’s living room to recount the day’s events and run down the evening agenda. Staff usually begin the discussion with the “question of the day,” such as “What is your favorite color?” or “If you had a superpower, what would it be?” As the youths begrudgingly answer, most staff members awkwardly wait for the ordeal to end. At the conclusion of one shift change meeting, Remy eagerly asked, “Can we talk about race?” The three staff members present looked sheepishly at each other, as if engaged in a telepathic deliberation over how best to respond to the question. Eventually one halfheartedly said, “Yeah, let’s do it.” Remy proceeded by asking, “White people—do you believe in Black privilege?” The looks on the faces of the white staff members conveyed regret for their invitation. Their best defense was to ask, “What do you mean by ‘Black privilege’?” Remy then explained the problem of whites’ claims of “reverse racism” in the wake of accomplishments by an “exceptional” group of Black people. Remy then went on to disabuse believers in “Black privilege” of the absurdity of such claims by reminding them that systemic racism keeps Black people locked into the criminal legal system and locked out of educational and employment opportunities.

While not explicitly naming it, Remy conceptualized whiteness as a normalizing orientation of the world and its way of functioning. If whiteness is, as Lipsitz asserts, “a condition,” then Remy was questioning what they believe is a symptom of that condition: the notion of “Black privilege.” The question was intended not simply as a corrective but also as a screening tool to assess whether any of the white staff members actually subscribed to such beliefs. What seems most instructive about Remy’s conceptualizations of whiteness is that they were interrogating its egocentric character, as it allows many whites to use white culture and white identity as a reference category for all social life. Remy also made an important rhetorical move by questioning the links between whiteness and time. If whiteness is synonymous with modernity, then it makes no sense for white people to entertain a backward concept like “Black privilege.” By screening the white people in the room, Remy sought to make sure that “Black privilege” became antiquated before it became relevant.

The Wackness of Whiteness

What strategies do Black youths use to keep up with the times when the time is always right for white and wrong for them? With whiteness being associated with those who are future oriented, where are Black and other racialized youths positioned and where do they position themselves on the temporal spectrum? Black youths at Run-a-Way refused to entertain the notion that they somehow lagged behind their white counterparts. Instead it was their tastes, worldviews, trends, and culture that remained both culturally and temporally relevant. When I asked fifteen-year-old Tasha if she had ever felt targeted based on her race, she described how she responded to an anti-Black question from a white peer in school: “I used to when I was little … yeah. ’Cuz I’d be the only … ’cuz I went to a mostly all-white school and I had poofy hair with my glasses on. And they used to just look at me like, ‘Why is your hair like that?’ I’m just like … like why isn’t your hair like this?”

Tasha’s clapback is both dignified and self-affirming. She checks her white peers while simultaneously making whiteness wack and reminding herself that she is stunningly fabulous and fabulously stunning. The apparent consternation of Tasha’s white peer is a product of whiteness’s discomfort with contradiction and ambiguity. Tasha’s hair represents an ontological threat to Eurocentric standards of beauty, which causes her white peer to go haywire while also short-circuiting whiteness. At sixteen, Tasha seems acutely aware that racialized violence is a life course constant—one that does not come and go but resides in the afterlife of slavery. By flipping the script, Tasha places her white peers outside a spacetime familiar to her and other Black youths. As Tasha relocates her white peer to an alternative spacetime, she also limits the increase of what Shannon Sullivan describes as “ontological expansiveness.”⁴² Tasha’s response is but one example of ways in which Black youths resist temporal protocols in order to make white time “late.”

Inverting white logic through ridicule is a long-established tradition among Black scholars. In search of explanations for the hubris and inflated worth associated with whiteness, W. E. B. Du Bois asks, “But what on earth is whiteness that one should desire it? Then always, somehow, some way, silently but clearly, I am given to understand that whiteness is the ownership of the earth forever and ever, Amen!”⁴³ Du Bois poses such a simple yet generative question—one that mocks whiteness in several ways. First, he questions why anyone would want to be possessive of whiteness. Second, he critiques whiteness itself for being so possessive that it must claim ownership of the entire world. Finally, what appears to be a rhetorical question is Du Bois pointing out the “psychological wage” of whiteness,⁴⁴ particularly its potential to possess white people. To be possessed by whiteness is to risk becoming possessed by time.

In African Religions and Philosophy, John Mbiti devotes an entire chapter to the “concept of time” and offers the following critique of foreigners socialized and synchronized to white time: “When foreigners, especially from Europe and America, come to Africa and see people sitting down somewhere without, evidently, doing anything, they often remark, ‘These Africans waste their time by just sitting down idle!’ Another common cry is, ‘Oh, Africans are always late!’ … Those who are seen sitting down, are actually not wasting time, but either waiting for time or in the process of ‘producing’ time.”⁴⁵ Mbiti highlights whiteness’s intolerance for ambiguity. Whiteness and white people require coherence and answers. Not knowing what Africans could possibly be doing sitting down drives white people to consternation. What white people perceive as stillness, tarrying, skylarking, and loitering might be a form of temporal manipulation, production, and/or destruction.⁴⁶ Each maneuver is made in the spirit of funking the clock and funking with whiteness. Michelle M. Wright describes the way that prominent Black scholars depict whiteness as backward and Blackness as most modern. She references James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, revealing the novelist’s “rhetorical trick,” where he “frames modernity as closer to Blackness than whiteness.”⁴⁷ Other scholars have effectively flipped the script on whiteness by refusing to absolve it of the “problems” it creates. “The Negro problem,” for example, does not reside in Black America, but within enslavement, Jim Crow, residential segregation, police terror, racialized violence, whiteness, and white America.⁴⁸

By turning the fundamental principles of whiteness on their head, Black scholars have also defied the mandates of modernity by locating whiteness and white people within anachronistic space. I am interested in exploring how Black youths at Run-a-Way carry on this tradition of repurposing time to ensure that their styles, tastes, and worldviews are most culturally relevant and up to date, while leaving behind whiteness in a played-out past. As youths reconfigure the terms and conditions of whiteness and time, they become producers of new temporalities and reposition themselves on the temporal spectrum. In this section I highlight some of the strategies Black youths use to not only keep up with the times but also ensure that no matter what they do, they are always on time or up to date and that their sociality is never late.⁴⁹

Despite the coevalness of whiteness and modernity and future orientations,⁵⁰ Black youths at Run-a-Way found a way to invert whose culture was up to date. They viewed their white counterparts, as well as white culture, as behind time, lame, or just plain wack (uncool). Fashion trends, musical tastes, and social media content (e.g., Facebook posts, tweets, memes, Vines) all represented (temporal) status symbols. As the youths centered nonwhite sociality, they transgressed time while demanding others keep pace. The following fieldnotes help illustrate the wackness of whiteness.

We are all in the case management office. Melissa, 16-year-old black girl, stops by and asks Steve, a white male in his late forties, “When are you going to stop wearing those sandals?” Steve is wearing a pair of black Birkenstock sandals with white socks. “I wear these from April ’til October,” he replied. “Uugghhhh!” Melissa replies with exasperation.

—Fieldnote from July 16, 2015

After dinner, we returned to the floor. Steve informs the youth that they can participate in one of two activities: (1) mini-golf (2) trip to the park to play ultimate Frisbee. When the youth asked Steve if he was coming, they mentioned that he can’t leave wearing his Birkenstock sandals.

—Fieldnote from July 24, 2015

Attending to the minutiae of youth sociality helped me interpret what they deemed most relevant and up to date. Black youths tend to know the latest fashion trends and, according to their footwear index, Steve’s Birkenstocks were not up to date. Birkenstocks are not typically marketed or sold in poor communities of color. Despite their hefty price tag, the sandals hold little weight among Black youth. Similar to the way nonwhite people are relegated to anterior time when in predominantly white institutions, Steve and his footwear are rendered illegible within the spacetime of youths at Run-a-Way.

Whiteness was tantamount to wackness in other leisure and labor spaces at Run-a-Way, including the “dance floor” of the basement conference room:

We gather in the basement conference room for the evening activity. Staff expect youth to play Nintendo Wii Fit as their physical activity for the day. Among the many games to choose from, the most popular seemed to be “Dance, Dance Revolution.” Before beginning the game, Lisa, a middle-aged white staff person, tells youth she was warned not to participate. When someone asks why, Gerard [sixteen-year-old] interjects, saying, “Unacceptable! White people can’t dance.”

—Fieldnote from July 28, 2015

One of Gerard’s favorite words was “unacceptable,” and he used it effortlessly to mock many white staff members. The stereotype that “white people can’t dance” is reminiscent of the 1992 film White Men Can’t Jump. It is an allusion to stereotypical representations of white people as having less physical prowess than nonwhites generally and Black people in particular. Gerard was not just mocking white people and whiteness but reorienting the when and where of whiteness. He located white time outside the realm of what is most relevant and up to date. In mocking white people’s inability to keep pace with the latest dance trends, Melissa and Gerard also funked the clock by temporalizing whiteness behind the spacetime of Black youth. Both of them created an interesting racial-temporal inversion by locating whiteness, white people, and white time in the anterior and “premodern” space typically reserved for Black and other racialized persons.

The coherence between whiteness and modernity loses strength as Black youths link an incapacity to keep up with the latest and timeliest trends to white ineptitude. Inverting the relationship between whiteness and modernity, fourteen-year-old Shanice suggests that what is most inept is white people emulating those they view as “worthless.”

Shanice loves her Blackness and the Blackness of others. A love for Blackness, Black life, and Black people warrants defense. Shanice feels obligated to protect Blackness from the consistent threat of whiteness and what Joe Feagin calls the “white racial frame.” Protecting Blackness from whiteness comes in multiple forms, including “counter-framing.”⁵¹ According to Feagin, counter-frames originally formed as survival strategies but later developed into tools for analyzing and resisting racialized violence. Shanice’s counter-frame calls out the irony of whiteness co-opting the exact culture it deems backward.

Cultural appropriation was a recurring theme among the Black youths at Run-a-Way. Many endorsed the idea that white people view Black culture as what Andrea Smith terms “inherently violable” and hence theirs for the taking.⁵² Consider the following remarks from Remy when they were asked how they perceive white youth in relation to time:

I dunno. Sometimes I feel like they should just stop with whatever they’re doing. I don’t really think about what white people wear or how they do things or the things that they’re up to date really. I don’t really care. But I guess I just don’t think about it too much. And if I am thinking about what white people are doing modernly, I am looking to make sure that what they’re doing isn’t appropriating someone else’s culture. ’Cuz to white people, someone else’s culture from years back, they think that they can just make it their own and all of a sudden it’s some new thing… . They act like it’s a new thing when really it’s been someone’s culture since day one and they’re taking it from people who actually own that culture and it’s their life, they do it every day and they’re taking credit for it.

Remy cares less about whether white people are up to date than about whether they are stealing from Black culture. Frank Wilderson asserts that, “as a general rule, it is difficult for Black people to make anything and to hold onto it for more than thirty seconds before the world takes it for its own purposes.”⁵³ Cultural appropriation is one thing, but cultural misappropriation makes the wounds of such theft even rawer. George Lipsitz describes the “misappropriation of memory” familiar to 1950s sitcoms like Mama.⁵⁴ Such television programs sponsor a romanticized past that never was.⁵⁵ Both Shanice and Remy express concern about white exploitation of Black culture, but to witness their culture displayed in contradictory ways evokes even greater disdain for such theft.

Black youths at Run-a-Way were acutely aware that Black culture’s appeal to whites (and other non-Black people) meant that Blackness itself had significant value, despite broader attempts to lessen its worth. There is an unspoken understanding among many nonwhite people: when white folks start doing something, that is a cue to stop doing that thing. Similarly, Black youths at Run-a-Way knew that when white people begin to adopt their style, they must stop it because it is officially played out. Johannes Fabian argues that the commodification of Black culture for a white audience requires a temporal shift from the “primitive” state of “the other” to the “civilized” state of the self:

Resources have been transported from the past of their “backward” locations to the present of an industrial, capitalist economy. A temporal conception of movement has always served to legitimize the colonial enterprise on all levels. Temporalizations expressed as a passage from savagery to civilization, from peasant to industrial society, have long served an ideology whose ultimate purpose has been to justify the procurement of commodities for our markets. African copper becomes a commodity only when it is taken possession of by removing it from its geological context, placing it into the history of Western commerce and industrial production. Something analogous happens with “primitive art.”⁵⁶

While the concept of “temporalization” was not a part of everyday parlance at Run-a-Way, youths like Remy saw how cultural traditions go from worthless to worthy over time. As time elapses, that which is “primitive” is refined and redefined as “modern.” Temporalization requires spatialization. Hence, African goods and resources, as Fabian notes, must first be spatially placed on the “dark continent” before being relegated to a past retrievable only through Western civilization’s benevolence.

Exemplifying that which is modern and future oriented, whiteness plays a significant role in temporalization. Whiteness usurps the “primitive” or “backward” under the guise of “development” or “progress.” Aware that what is “new” is not always true, Remy demands that white people be held accountable for cultural appropriation and their attempts to temporalize Blackness. Despite the trick of temporalization to make intimate cultural traditions appear new and innovative, many Black youths have immense pride in their cultural past and take back what was stolen. Quincy, for example, uses contemporary fashion trends as a link to and site of enslavement and Black resistance:

It’s just stuff that, you know, seems to make the culture of white people mad. Like, the shoes I’m wearin’ right now … the Timberlands. The tree that they put on it symbolizes when they used to burn Black people. And if they didn’t realize—the white people that make the shoes—that Black people are the person [sic] who put your shoes out here [made them popular]. Like, the only reason your shoes are runnin’ for two hundred and three hundred dollars is because Black people are wearing them. Like, I can see a couple white people wear Timberlands but I can go into my school that’s seventy-five percent Black people and … every one of them has a pair of Tims. Like, they don’t see that. If we weren’t here they wouldn’t be able to do what they are doing now. Like, if … one hundred years ago if they didn’t have us, where would you be right now? So I’m just sayin’, like, that’s what white people need to realize that if we weren’t here, where would you be right now? Like, if I wasn’t wearin’ your style of shoes, where would you be right now? You would be nowhere, ’cuz … the shoes didn’t even become a brand name until 1973 and these shoes wasn’t really even all that [in style] ’til the 2000s ’til the Black people started wearing them … and even when we wear them, we have respect. We … we cover up the tree. Like … there’s a tree on the boot heel. We can’t cover that [one] up, but I have a big face one and I cover that up when I wear them. ’Cuz … even though I’m gonna buy your shoes, I’m gonna respect my kind, my people. So yeah. That’s what they need to realize. Where would you be if we weren’t here right now? Where? Yeah.⁵⁷

As I have argued in various parts of this book, white life and white time are subsidized by Black life, Black debt, and Black death. Quincy makes clear that the accumulation of white life, white time, and white wealth also requires racial capitalism. Thus, he reminds white people of the “unpayable debt” owed to Black people.⁵⁸ Capital accumulation within the fashion industry, as Quincy notes, is predicated on Black extraction and dispossession. The Black community’s patronage of white-owned corporations, however, is not reciprocal.

Coincidentally, in the 1993 New York Times article that sparked the controversy over Timberlands, Carl McCaskill, the president of Cheryl Johnson McCaskill Communications, a public relations firm in New York,

was repeatedly surprised by the lack of cooperation from outdoor apparel companies when he approached them with ideas for recycling some of those dollars back into programs intended for black and Hispanic youths.

“When I think about it, I get disgusted,” Mr. McCaskill said. “I think it’s so stupid for the kids to continue to wear it.”⁵⁹

Ironically, the incessant quest toward conspicuous consumption and the attainment of material markers of temporal status gives way to the construction of those residing in poor urbanized space as guided by a set of distorted values and priorities. Quincy and many of his peers, however, see things differently. Rather than completely withdraw their financial support from white-owned companies like Timberland, Black youths like Quincy linger in the contradictions of capitalism by supporting corporations that do not necessarily support them in what Robin D. G. Kelley calls their “pursuit of leisure, pleasure, and creativity.”⁶⁰ Though seldom credited for their production of surplus value, Black youths in urbanized space consistently resist whiteness by making and remaking various forms of culture while also defining the temporal terms of what is most up to date. By asking, “Where would you be if we weren’t here right now?” Quincy is given license to temporalize whites as backward for exploiting Black culture with impunity.

The importance of counter-framing should not lead us to overestimate the transformative potential of mocking whiteness and white culture within such a localized context as Run-a-Way. Rejecting whiteness and white culture often backfires in “white space.”⁶¹ As Black youths transition to adulthood, they remain in a race against time not simply because they reject mainstream opportunity structures, but because opportunity rejects them. Black youths at Run-a-Way discerned notable differences between the temporal squeeze they felt when seeking opportunity and the leisurely timetables of their white peers. In the race against time, these Black youths saw themselves as beginning from delayed starting points compared to white youths. Perceiving their starts as delayed left many of them feeling that time was compressed. They saw their white peers as joint owners of a time that they could only borrow.

White time has strict eligibility criteria that excludes Black youths as prospective investors. With time being money, the intergenerational transmission of wealth signifies an intergenerational transmission of (available or free) time. Coming from mostly poor and working-class backgrounds, Black youths at Run-a-Way were temporally bankrupt. Not only did they lack time, but they also began from temporal deficits. They regularly stewed over multiplicative forms of oppression that left them behind in the race against time. Compared to the abundance of time they believed white youths possess, they saw their timetables for achieving conventional benchmarks (such as school) as compressed.

Using whiteness and white life as reference categories, time-use studies ignore the time taken and accumulated by racialized violence. Time diaries may be useful for enumerating the daily time use of white youths, but how do these diaries account for the time used by racism and racialization?⁶² It remains unclear whether time diaries can capture the experiences that do not fit neatly into the margins of printed time intervals. How does a time diary calculate the time Lamont spends working (at least) twice as hard to get half as far? How do time diaries quantify the time Black youths lose when learning, living, and laboring within the many social institutions designed without them in mind? How do time diaries accurately detail Miguel’s time use when his travel time by bus is also his study time? Can a time diary capture the time Remy spends disabusing white staff of “Black privilege”?

Systemic racism and the labor required to reckon with racialized violence are not measurable within seconds, minutes, days, or years. Not only do time diaries fail to enumerate Black youths’ time use, but there remain serious holes in white youths’ schedules as well. How do we account for the time white youths save in schools by learning from a curriculum that constructs them as individuals without culture yet also the default racial category?⁶³ How much time do white youths save by not having to learn about the lived experiences of their racialized counterparts? If there are more white youths who, proportionally, occupy positions of class privilege than Black youths, should we be that surprised that white youths have more time?

Though processing acts of racialized violence, including whiteness, offers little financial return for racialized laborers, this work is highly generative for racialized social systems. Racialized violence yields significant material and immaterial profit. Profits derive from any of the following: enslavement, stolen land, convict leasing, the prison-industrial complex, the overrepresentation of racialized youth in congregate-care settings (e.g., foster care, group homes, residential programs), the mutually constitutive relationship between poor urbanized space and wealthy suburbanized space, and white people relying on Black people to set trends while denying them compensation as trendsetters. In the end, white people depend on the physical, emotional, and psychic labor of nonwhite people to maintain a modern and future-oriented temporal position in the race against time. White people have the “luxury of time” precisely because they steal time from an exploitable class of youth.

When in a race against white time that offers less time to get half as far as the winners, finding a way to “run your own race” is a challenge. Black youths at Run-a-Way preferred to redefine the race by transgressing time and creating what J. Brendan Shaw describes as “radical ruptures in contemporary scripts of progress.”⁶⁴ In this race, Black youths had already declared themselves the winners because whiteness was wack and incapable of keeping pace with Black sociality. While constructing whiteness as wack may present a negligible threat to white time, “resistance is revelatory” (to paraphrase Robin D. G. Kelley),⁶⁵ and the existence of these counter-frames shows that Black youths recognized that being most up to date was more a matter of being off white time than on it.