6
Transgressing Time in the Fast Life
Thirteen of the thirty youths I interviewed at Run-a-Way participated in the fast life. Like “CP Time,” “the fast life” was an antiquated term to which only a few of the youths could relate. “Trapping,” which involves making, selling, and/or distributing drugs, proved to have far greater relevance. “Trap” has multiple meanings. It is commonly associated with the space (i.e., the trap house) used to make and prepare drugs for sale. “Trap” may also refer to the ghetto, a space that exists in relation to its mutually constitutive counterpart: the suburbs. Among the various status symbols associated with trapping and the fast life are drugs, cars, designer clothes, jewelry, vernacular dexterity, money, and weapons. According to Elijah Anderson, the fast life involves “living on the edge.”1 Disturbing as it may appear to those with legitimate opportunities for success, the fast life holds a captivating appeal for both prescient and present-oriented youths.2
To view the fast life as merely a legal transgression is to ignore its commitment to violating time. In this chapter, I conceive of the fast life as an example of insurgent time—a brazen act of defiance among racialized and dysselected groups toward (s)low-wage labor. The fast life presents lucrative opportunities outside planned-obsolescent systems. Because time is money, the fast life holds immense value, especially to those financially and temporally bankrupt. Youths surviving in racial enclosures have little patience for typical nine-to-five jobs that shortchange them both financially and temporally. The fast life, however, is transitory, and the notion that those who live it will likely end up dead or in jail is widely accepted in poor urbanized communities. Still, the prospects of the fast life may prove more appealing to those tired of hearing that “slow money is better than no money.” Slow money may be better than no money, but is it really better than fast money? Some may say yes. Black youths at Run-a-Way seem to say it’s debatable.
As a sort of icebreaker to introduce the topic of time, I presented the youths with several time-related expressions and asked whether there was any particular saying that most resonated with them. “Time is money” was by far the most identifiable phrase among the youths I interviewed. The equation of time and money is not strictly linked to the need to address exigent circumstances. Black youths saw time as money because job opportunities were habitually late. I asked eighteen-year-old Finesse about the easiest way someone his age could earn money in his community.
Finesse: Sellin’ drugs. That’s the easiest. Unless you can finesse … I mean, I was blessed with a real good mouthpiece. I can talk my way into anything, you know, so it’s like … you got like three choices. You can finesse your way into getting a job that’s gonna pay you decent enough money to live on. You can sell drugs. You can rob people. And that’s like, growin’ up that was the types of people that I seen in my hood, you know.
RM: So you talked about the easiest way—what would you say is the fastest way?
Finesse: Sellin’ drugs. Definitely. Sellin’ drugs or, for females … I mean, I guess for males too, sellin’ your body if you know some people that are into that sort of thing.
To Finesse and several other youths at Run-a-Way, selling drugs was both the easiest and fastest route to earn money. Finesse identified three “choices” to make money. “Finessing” one’s way into getting a job reflects Elijah Anderson’s notion of “code switching,”3 where poor and marginalized Black youths comport themselves according to largely white, middle-class norms and etiquette in order to safely and effectively navigate situations, contexts, and social institutions. What makes code switching distinct from “performances” and “fronts” is that the codes that youths switch between are highly racialized.4 Hence, the “presentation of self” is a product of racialized scripts, including the one that measures Black youths using what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”5 “Overdetermined from the outside,” in the words of Frantz Fanon,6 Black youths must finesse their way into legitimate work, revealing the continuity of slavery within emancipation. Not all racialized youths, however, can finesse their way into legitimate opportunity structures. Members of this further dysselected category, according to Finesse, may find their way to the fast life.
When communities are designed to fail, it makes sense that some youths would characterize them as “maybe environments.” Asked about the fastest way to earn money in his community, Lamont responded, “I say trap. Fast money.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
Lamont: Because it’s hard to get jobs out here now, you know what I’m sayin’. Well, even though it’s like seasonal jobs right now, it’s just still hard to get a job. You know what I’m sayin’, if you don’t have a high school diploma or GED you’re not really finna’ to get a good job, you know what I’m sayin’.
RM: Do you feel like it’s harder for certain youth than others?
Lamont: I say it’s harder for Black, you know what I’m sayin’, colored youth … you know, from experience… . It’s more white people than Black people with jobs. And … I don’t have a work history because I never worked… . I’m not tryin’ to be racist or nothin’, but plenty of white people … they had a job and worked since they were like fifteen, fourteen. So they’d get hired quicker than … a person that never had a job before.
Anticipating obstructions in attempts to earn a high school diploma or find a job leads many youths to find expedited paths to making money. Though only sixteen, Lamont doesn’t need to guess who is the last hired and first fired. This asymmetrical-temporal relation between Black and white applicants and workers confirms his belief that white people remain employed far longer than their Black and other racialized coworkers.7 The cyclical problem of seeking work without prior employment experience and within a job racket is a futile pursuit. The absence of conventional life course transitions engenders an alternative relationship to time and opportunity structures. While Shanté also identified selling drugs as the easiest way to earn money in her community, when asked about the fastest way, she said, “A faster way. Drugs, that’s easy, but fast way: it would be sellin’ yourself.”
Shanté was one of three girls and one gender-nonconforming youth who alluded to having been sexually exploited and trafficked during their life course. Being in “the life” as a Black girl, femme, and/or trans, however, troubles existing analyses of the gendered dimensions of the life course,8 because misogynoir is irreducible to either sexism or racism. Involvement in “the life” requires girls to spend an inordinate amount of time processing multiple forms of violence that exceed containment within the conceptual limitations of a transition or trajectory.9 Life course scholars and criminologists conveniently avoid the role of state terror in shaping life course transitions and trajectories. Instead, arrest and incarceration become volitional life course transitions. When state terror punishes not just dissent but defense, survival strategies become liable to arrest and incarceration. Historically, police and sociologists have collaborated to create the exact crime they fight and study, not respectively.10 Saidiya Hartman makes this point exceptionally clear by detailing how Black girls and women defied the linear life course through “wayward” acts:
What the law designated as crime were forms of life created by young black women in the city. The modes of intimacy and affiliation being fashioned in the ghetto, the refusal to labor, the forms of gathering and assembly, the practices of subsistence and getting over were under surveillance by the police as well as sociologists and the reformers who gathered the information and made the case against them, forging their lives into tragic biographies of poverty, crime, and pathology. The activity required to reproduce and sustain life is, as Marx noted, a definite form of expressing life, it is an art of survival, social poesis. Subsistence—scraping by, getting over, making ends meet—entailed an ongoing struggle to produce a way to live in a context in which poverty was taken for granted and domestic work or general housework defined the only opportunity available to black girls and women.11
Hartman exposes the “open rebellion and beautiful experiments produced by young women in the emergent ghetto—a form of racial enclosure that succeeded the plantation.”12 How might selling drugs signify an “open rebellion” or “beautiful experiment” in refusing so-called equal opportunity, freedoms, rights, and liberties that serve more as a pretext for punishment than as pathways toward upward social mobility? Finesse, Lamont, Shanté, and several other youths maintained a clear vision of the particular way their life courses unfold and believed that selling drugs or selling themselves was the fastest and easiest way to earn money in their communities.
Given that transgressing time may involve expedited and potentially illegal survival strategies, what if, rather than viewing selling drugs as “going down the wrong path in life” or a “commitment to a life (course) of crime,” there was greater acknowledgment of the level of resourcefulness among Black and other racialized youths forced to do more with less (time)? When forced to work twice as hard to get half as far, you “work smarter, not harder.”13 Constructions of Black and other racialized youths involved in the underground economy as impetuous ignores the unyielding pressures of time associated with beginning one’s life course from behind. I argue that youths’ involvement in the underground economy is not only a legal transgression but a temporal one as well. Because of the dilatory payoff associated with (s)low-wage labor, the insurgent time of the fast life is a competitive substitute for the typical nine-to-five job. Prepared to begin a long and hard road filled with roadblocks, Black youths in urbanized space learn various shortcuts and detours along the life course. Some are efficient. Some are transgressive. Some exemplify both.
The Hard Road to a Fast Life (Course)
Educational enclosures and (s)low-wage work have little purchase for youths who read more as temporally consumable than as temporal consumers. The fast life helps bypass conventional sites of time theft by functioning as an “accelerated life course” with which the standard life course paradigm cannot keep pace.14 Devon described the fast life this way. “The fast life? Well, where I grew up, the fast life was the person that sold the drugs, you know, had all the fancy cars and basically had a chance of dying at any moment because of what he did. That was the fast life. Because if you were in that type of business … your life was gonna end pretty quickly.”
Devon associates the fast life with truncated life expectancies. To live the fast life is to abide by an insurgent time, one that rejects patience in favor of nowness. Mandated to work twice as hard to get half as far, Black youths participating in this underground economy prefer to work smarter, not harder. If Black youths must work twice as hard to get half as far, they have less time than their white counterparts. Working smarter and not harder gives them the opportunity to recoup their lost and stolen time. But the fast life is not a long-term solution for addressing the enduring forms of racialized violence over the life course.
The fast life is fast, hence its name. It is fast in the sense that it may not last. Fast-life pursuits therefore require special orientations to time. Acting according to perceived temporal positions is what Robert Merton calls “socially expected durations.”15 Merton contends that people make decisions based on the perceived length of experiences and their personal life expectancy. Socially expected durations serve a specific purpose for seniors and the terminally ill, who tend to calibrate their decisions based on perceptions of their own mortality. The possibility that Black youths in poor urbanized space hold similar socially expected durations as those approaching the end of life warrants concern and critique. What I wish to make clear is that participation in the fast life is both a survival strategy and a chance to defy social death—even if selling drugs accelerates actual mortality.
According to Richard Settersten, the pressure to meet certain developmental deadlines is more salient among marginalized youths whose life chances seem already “foreclosed.”16 Settersten finds that, in addition to other marginalized teens, Black and Latinx youths enter adult roles at earlier ages than their white counterparts.17 What prompts earlier deadlines among nonwhite youths, however, remains absent from Settersten’s analysis. Perhaps Black and other racialized youths are attempting to get a head start on “beating the odds” and defying the then and there of anti-Blackness and other forms of racialized violence. The fast life represents the most convenient and sometimes the sole detour along a hard road riddled with roadblocks. When I asked eighteen-year-old Finesse about who usually participates in the fast life, he paused and then said, “People that really got no other choice. I never heard nobody gettin’ into [the] trap that wanted to be in the trap. You know? Nobody wakes up and is like, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go sell some crack.’”
According to Finesse, structural violence inures people into the fast life. Questions surrounding youths’ “motivations” for entering the fast life ignore their limited chances at life. In centering the experiences of racialized youths with state repression, Lisa Cacho adopts Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death” to describe a “desperate space, overwrought with and overdetermined by the ideological contradictions of ineligible personhood.”18 Cacho questions the utility of rights-based discourse for the “racialized” and “rightless”—those “ineligible to personhood,” unprotected within the realm of deservingness and innocence and denied a right to life. In turn, “total powerlessness, natal alienation, and generalized dishonor,” as Patterson puts it,19 become life course constants for the “racialized” and “rightless.”
Constructing the fast life, or trapping, as a crime ignores the importance it holds for those who rely on it as a survival strategy when conventional opportunities come slowly or not at all. Sean was more familiar with the notion of trapping. When I asked him to describe trapping, he broke it down this way: “Trapping is like you’re from the trap. You’re out there doin’ what you have to do to make money and to live, what you’ve gotta do. That’s like gangbanging, all type of stuff. It could even be sex trafficking. None of that is me.” Though Sean himself does not trap, he recognizes that those who do are doing what they “have to do to make money and to live.”
Trapping as a form of survival is no overstatement. In fact, when I attempted to have a heartfelt conversation with my father about his time in the fast life, I began by saying, “I know you sold weed to support us …” He immediately cut me off with a vexed response: “Ah ain’t do dat to support you! Da’is wuh ah do to survive. Yuh ovahs [overstand]?”20 My father’s words left me feeling both hurt and intrigued. He did not mean to put me down or make me feel unimportant. Perhaps he was trying to prevent me from feeling as if I and my siblings were responsible for him selling weed. He did not want us to feel guilty or carry any burdens because of his deportation. Rather, he was trying to make clear that if he could not survive, neither could we. To diminish my father’s claim that selling weed was survival is to deny the existence of those marked for social death. The “survival” my father referred to was different from trying to “make a living.” He was referring to surviving the hunt, the hunter, and the threat of captivity.
The equation of crime and survival is not an exaggeration. As Steve Martinot notes,
To continually remove a sizable number of people from a community in this way constitutes a massive disruption of its social coherence… . As a community gets the reputation for criminality, businesses close and leave, decreasing the possibilities for a communal economic life. A general financial obstruction of community asset accumulation ensues, leading to further impoverishment and misery. The “collateral damage” of this process is that crime itself actually becomes a major (if not the only) means of survival for those growing up under such forms of induced economic famine.21
My father was not about to die of “economic famine.” He needed to eat and to ensure that his kids were also fed. He knew hustling guaranteed food on the table, while the American dream would surely leave him and us hungry. You can’t eat dreams. Previous ethnographic research on the experiences of Black youth in urbanized space suggests that the American dream remains exclusive, elusive, and illusive.22 In studying the experiences of Black teens in urbanized space, Linda Burton, Dawn Obeidallah, and Kevin Allison make the case that exigent needs and obstructed opportunities impair youths’ vision of what is possible over their life course. In response, the authors argue that Black youths pursue a “revised American Dream” oriented toward the fast life.23
This revised American Dream features prominently in the chorus of “Fast Life” by Kool G. Rap and Nas.24 In the song, the rappers signal an acute awareness of the American Dream and the need to still plot and scheme to achieve it. Kool G. Rap and Nas reveal that the fast life and the American Dream are not so much contradictory as complementary. Both concepts endorse neoliberal notions of the entrepreneurial self and prize investments in property. A key difference between the two is that the state reveres one and reproves the other. What makes the fast life transgressive is not just a connection to illegal activity but its threat to existing temporal and temporal-capital protocols for “success.” Seeking faster routes to escape racialized enclosures and opportunities designed without you in mind requires a transgressive relationship to time.
When I asked Tanisha how long it takes kids her age to find a job, she recounted her brother’s struggles to find legitimate work:
Tanisha: It depends on if you’re experienced with the job or if it’s your first time or if you’ve been fired a lot. But probably it’d take a month or at least two or three weeks.
RM: Does that seem like a long time?
Tanisha: Um, kinda. ’Cuz my brother … he was tryin’ to … like, my sister was tryin’ to help him find a better way and she got him a job with her at a Burger King and he decided to do it to stay out the streets but … they started him off with two hours a week… . And then they kept givin’ him those hours and he was like, “I’d rather just keep doin’ the same stuff I was doin’ then just to come to a place for two hours and get paid like eight dollars or seven dollars an hour.” So he stopped. And then he ended up in jail.
For Tanisha’s brother, the fast life represented an appealing alternative to precarious labor, and when labor is precarious, time is precious. Tanisha’s brother saw little incentive in working a job offering a negligible return on his temporal investment. To what extent did he perceive work in the streets as a greater temporal investment than time in the formal economy? Rather than seeing the fast life as a waste of time, perhaps youths like Tanisha’s brother treat time as a highly coveted resource and optimize it by forgoing slow money in favor of more efficient and insurgent paths.
After reminiscing over their own fast-life ventures, “ol’ heads” are quick to insist that “slow money is better than no money.” But the dilatory procedural tactics of employers leave Black youths wondering, “How slow can they go?” Opportunities for slow money are either habitually late or nonexistent for Black youths in urbanized space. Given the legacy of slavery and its afterlife, equating “slow money” with “slave money” is not hyperbole. According to Paul Gilroy, “In the critical tradition of blacks in the West, social self-creation through labour is not the core of emancipatory hopes. For the descendants of slaves, work signifies only servitude, misery and subordination.”25
Participation in the fast life serves as an opportunity for Black youths to revise their life course trajectories in accordance with demands to work twice as hard only to get half as far. The fast life, however, is not strictly a response to structural inequalities. Such dialectical interpretations of youth resistance obscure the role of desire and the pursuit of leisure in youths’ decision to participate in the fast life. As Robin D. G. Kelley contends, “The pursuit of leisure, pleasure, and creative expression is labor, and … some African-American urban youth have tried to turn that labor into cold hard cash.”26 Kelley helps invert mainstream conceptions of labor and what is labeled “productive activity” for youth. The appeal of working less and achieving similar or greater levels of financial success as workers in the conventional labor market is an irresistible incentive, especially for youths with limited work experience.
Child development scholars treat a desire for immediate reward as “maladaptive” behavior and antithetical to “delayed gratification.”27 Others attribute demands for instant payoff to children’s lack of “environmental reliability.”28 Both theories deny that delayed gratification is a racialized concept privileging white middle-class life.29 In turn, scholars wield delayed gratification as a tool to scold “impatient” nonwhite youths for wanting, while ignoring the white youths who tease and taunt them with what they have so often been refused (e.g., symbols of wealth and privilege). Perhaps instant gratification signals poor youths’ awareness of what is (not) to come.
I would be remiss not to acknowledge that participation in the fast life is not a defining life course transition for all Black youths in urbanized space. Still, the opportunity to make in one week what many people make in a month is a compelling proposition to those required to work twice as hard to get half as far. The mutually constitutive relationship between urbanized space and suburbanized space prompts consideration of how the fast life and conventional work opportunities are to a large degree codependent.30 The fast life is predicated on the proliferation of jobs and youths’ exclusion from them. Put differently, the slow, leisurely life course integral to the development of a white, suburbanized habitus depends on the evisceration of opportunity for many racialized subjects in poor urbanized space.