Why Is the Time Always Right for White and Wrong For Us? How Racialized Youth Make Sense of Whiteness and Temporal Inequality

Abstract

Independently, the study of whiteness and the study of time are important interventions in sociology. A solid foundation for any empirical investigation of the relationship between whiteness and the racialized temporalities of racialized youth, however, has yet to be set. Drawing on data from 30 in-person interviews and ethnographic methods, the author explores how racialized youth interpret time in relation to whiteness and the experiences of white youth. The data for this research are based on more than one year of fieldwork at Run-a-Way, a multiservice center for youth. Results show that racialized youth view white youth as having more time to take advantage of educational and employment opportunities. As a result of the perceived temporal advantage held by their white counterparts, racialized youth expressed feelings of temporal inequality and disparate life chances. Forced to work twice as hard to be half as good, youth saw their time horizons as compressed. The author shows how racialized youth lose time through physical, psychic, and emotional labor required to process racialization and racism and illustrates the various structural mechanisms that steal their time. Despite the temporal inequalities between them and their white counterparts, youth at Run-a-Way discovered ways to invert the terms of temporality to ensure that their culture was always most relevant and “up to date.” Although whiteness is linked to modernity and that which is future oriented, racialized youth viewed their white counterparts as behind time, lame, or just plain “wack” (uncool).

A Theory of Racialized Organizations

“…Indeed, “working times, eating and sleeping times, free times, commuting times, waiting times, and ultimately, of course, living and dying times” (Mills 2014:28) are all partially determined by the disproportionate representation of non-Whites at the bottom of racialized organizational hierarchies. All of these cases racialize time by shaping future orientations (Mahadeo 2018).…”

How American college students understand social resilience and navigate towards the future during covid and the movement for racial justice

“…Bourdieu (1979) points to the socially stratifying nature of time -- arguing that class background inculcates orientations towards the short and long-term future, which shape how actors evaluate their possibilities and strategies of action within a given context. Accordingly, Mahadeo (2019) examines temporal inequality by class and race, finding that unlike their white upper-middle class counterparts, marginalized teens of color view their temporal horizons to achieve standard benchmarks of success as compressed due to myriad structural challenges. Similarly, Weinberger et al (2017) argues that members of the upper-middle class experience the future as expansive and full of options, causing them to delay getting married or starting a family.…”

It Is About Time: Interracial Couples and Racialized Wait Times in Dining

“…The watchfulness creates time to slow and become thick, and individuals experience time negatively (Ledbetter et al, 2013;Wexler, 2015). Racialized "wait time" is experienced comparatively and within the context of "accumulated historical experiences" (Feagin, 1991, p. 114), not as a one-off slight (Mahadeo, 2018). Racialized "wait time" is not a problem businesses will fix or be able to manage by introducing new technology or other distractions.…”

“…Cumulatively, these activities, ideas and institutionalized practices cemented whiteness as a global phenomenon. How we understand and perceive time depends upon the context in which we experience the present, remember the past and imagine the future (Feagin, 1991;Mahadeo, 2018). The experience of waiting is perceived in a context in which time is a weapon of White supremacy, the enactment of inequality (Foucault, 1977;Mahadeo, 2018;Mills, 2014).…”

“…As was the case in the majority of reviews, the "wait time" was meted out to this couple, made more negative because they could observe White diners not having to wait. These experiences accumulate and inform future expectations and create a racialized lens through which "waiting" is perceived (see Mahadeo, 2018). Rather than relaxing, unwinding and building nice memories during this leisure activity, this couple becomes watchful while building memories steeped in the exclusionary practice of "wait time" as a form of border patrolling.…”