We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education. Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in the expressions, images, or entire fields. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before time itself was declared racist.
Zakia Essanhaji, a professor of “organizational ethnography” at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is the latest to make the case against “white time.” Her recent paper titled “Academic time theft: stealing time, producing racialized inclusion in Dutch academia” builds on prior work condemning time as racist.
Rutgers Women’s and Gender Studies/Africana Studies Professor Brittney Cooper has also written about how time is racist. Mainstream media has positively cooed at the suggestion, including an interview with NPR. Cooper claimed that “white people own time” after framing the concept of time in “histories of European and Western thought.”
There is also apparently black time: “Time has a history, and so do black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn’t have a political history bound up with the plunder of indigenous lands, the genocide of indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland.”
Likewise, in “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Jamaican academic Charles W. Mills described the “Euro-chronometer” as a Western-centric, linear timeline.
These works are often heavily laden with jargonistic narratives. In one study from Brazil, academics argue that “thinking of time outside and against the Euro-chronometer requires decolonial epistemologies that have the potential to disrupt racist chronologies.”
Professor Essanhaji continues this scholarship by “drawing on critical race theory and decolonial scholarship on chronopolitics and white time.” She applies with earlier work “to academic time theft to theorize how universities extract, fragment and defer the time of academics of colour through racialized institutional processes.”
“White time is not simply the time of the privileged, but the power to define temporality and progress itself. It is the colonization of time, known as the system of modernity/coloniality. As Vazquez […] argues, this system is maintained by erasing cyclical or relational understandings of time, ensuring that time is perceived as racing towards unattainable, more modern futures. In that sense, white time is both prescriptive and pre-emptive, foreclosing alternative futures and experiences of the past by delegitimizing other temporalities.”
Academics have long argued that non-white histories and figures are often “erased’ in scholarship. Such arguments have led to a move away from Western works or classics in favor of non-Western sources in higher education. However, the time scholarship suggests that the very construct of time has been shaped and furthers white domination and privilege.
In Professor Essanhaji’s work, this scholarship is used to challenge the demands placed on minority academics in publishing and other measures of academic achievement. Again, the work is heavily layered with jargonistic language. Here are her findings:
“The analysis identifies three mechanisms of academic time theft. First, prolonged uncertainty operates through racialized precariousness that keeps academics of colour in a condition of academic probation through insecure contracts and housing precarity. Second, ongoing disruption emerges through everyday racism that fragments attention, diverts emotional and intellectual labour, and interrupts academic continuity. Third, recursive evaluation operates through the continual resetting of inclusion and promotion criteria, producing perpetual states of “not yet” recognition and deferred academic futures. Together, these mechanisms sustain racialized temporal regimes in which academics of colour are positioned as perpetually “almost there” while white institutional time remains uninterrupted.”
These authors largely cite each other with little attention to countervailing viewpoints. It becomes a closed, self-perpetuating system as academics invite one another to speak at their universities and feed off one another. Few academics are willing to challenge such scholarship. Indeed, as we have discussed, departments have largely purged their ranks of conservative or contrarian voices.
As shown in this latest scholarship, the work in this area jettisons such “colonial” or “white” forms of analysis in favor of storytelling:
“I depart from a critical race perspective, employing counter-storytelling to construct (counter)narratives grounded in the lived experiences of people of colour. This method recognizes the connections between the historical impacts of colonialism and contemporary exclusions within organizations. By highlighting the experiences of people of colour navigating the university’s racism, I seek to provide rich accounts that reflect on how time is racialized and experienced in Dutch universities.”
There is a faux statistical framing based on “data” that is largely the subjective descriptions of minority academics:
“Initial open coding focused on participants’ descriptions of inequality across social, material and affective dimensions, including social, material and affective inequalities. While time was not predefined as an analytical category, it emerged inductively through participants’ recurring temporal framings of inequality.”
When one tries to drill down on the “data,” it appears entirely anecdotal and subjective, often turning on one or a handful of “narratives.” These stories are used to claim that academic measurements of success, driven by “white time,” are unfair to minority faculty: “these mechanisms position academics of colour perpetually as ‘almost there’ while their academic futures remain deferred.”
The thrust is that minority faculty should not be subject to traditional or accepted pathways for tenure or promotion:
“Academic time theft is not an incidental by-product of exclusion but a structural mechanism through which universities sustain white institutional time. It works by continuously delaying, interrupting and recalibrating what counts as academic legitimacy, ensuring that the labour of academics of colour remains productive for the institution while their progression is indefinitely postponed.
…To ensure that people of colour have academic futures, researchers and policymakers must break with the white temporality of academic work within which progress for some is enabled and for others is ongoingly deferred.”
Academia has already embraced narrative-driven scholarship in many departments as an alternative to traditional academic analysis. The Critical Legal Studies movement, for example, has challenged conventional scholarship as too restrictive and exclusionary. Few academics today dare to challenge such scholarship on the merits. To do so is to risk being labeled as reactionary or, even worse, racist.
This latest scholarship further challenges the time and structure for advancement for minority faculty as inherently racist. The question is whether the appointments and promotion process is at risk of losing objective and consistent measurements of scholarship.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Not all inmates are found in the asylums.
This makes sense. There was a BBC segment on this topic today. How time is divided into hours, days, months, and years is a product of culture, traditions, and local climate. When one culture imposes its system is time measurement on another culture, part of the culture gets erased.
Turley and MAGAs mocks this only because they don’t want to understand it.
We’re all out of Africa.
No longer holds. You need to update your clock to 2025 and 2026
“Rethinking Human Origins: Why the Out-of-Africa Model No Longer Holds”
https://samuelgabrielsg.substack.com/p/rethinking-human-origins-why-the
“In a groundbreaking study, researchers have used genetic data from diverse African populations to rewrite the narrative of human origins, challenging the long-held “Out of Africa” theory.”
https://thisweekinsciencenews.com/blog/2026/05/26/ancient-dna-challenges-the-out-of-africa-theory-of-human-origins/
But these same grievance mongers readily adapt to cellphones, the rule of law across the globe, western medicine etc. Their selection of time is just a picayune little tantrum by the losing side.
Sally: Your point makes no sense. First, how does a culture impose its system on another? And, more to the point, how does a ” part of [their] culture get erased?” Are you really buying that nonsense?
If you have a lunar based culture, a calendar that is not tied to the moon will erase many traditions and culture.
“If you have a lunar based culture . . .”
That is a type of *time* measurement. Try again.
Wake up Sally, time is no more racist than the moon, space, or gravity. Your acceptance of this nonsense only encourages the grievance industry.
Re: “This makes sense”..,,, This makes sense too. Complexion and culture not withstanding, time rolls on at a never ending and increasing rate, swallowing up those who walk slow. Waystoemahtyme, ya’ll.
I’m pretty sure that the earth’s rotation and circum-solar revolution rates were fairly well established before this whole Hominid thing came along.
And I’ll bet you “believe” in science.
Some cultures don’t care much about the sun for the moon is much more important. Islam is like that. If your culture is based on annual weather patterns and planting seasons you will have more sun based calendar
Sally: How does any of this drivel get converted into “racism?” Words have meanings and when when a word like “racism” gets misused and applied to anything that the grievance industry can dream up, we lose – as a society – the ability to truly identify wrongdoing.
The existence of anything is not based on what some biped thinks about it. The universe would do just fine if none of us existed.
Time keeping is celestial.
“When one culture imposes its system is time measurement on another culture, part of the culture gets erased.”
Now do starvation, disease, illiteracy.
Oh please. . .if someone wants to meet you at 4 pm, is that not time?
“they don’t want to understand it” 😂
we need drastic defunding of higher education…too many West Hating Lunatics!
Sounds like someone was denied tenure and has been struggling.
The 4 oldest civilizations in history were Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China or their precursors. They were all “non-white”. Our numbering systems are not Roman or Greek or even European but further east. It all started with them. Also our concept of time. So blame them.
Is this conversation even necessary today or even salient to anything. More academic drivel. “Full of sound and fury yet signifying nothing”.
Move on to something important like Football or Futbol.
Re:”Move on to something important like Football or Futbol”.. Australian Rules Football, please.
Just another example of how higher education is anything but education.
Time is not racist any more than the recent Supreme Court case on temporary protected status of certain immigrants is not racist.
That decision is completely racist.
Only six-ninths racist.
Are you a boomer? For some reason, I’m picking up a strong boomer vibe.
Why does it seem that any discovery by, utilization of, or inculcation into, white culture of anything ( no matter its origin) has to now be condemned as if it has been “infected” by white culture. It is not only incoherent and erroneous, but purposefully designed to eventually erase white culture. The most pitiful part of this is that much of it is being promulgated by white pseudo-intellectuals who have become the indoctrinated handmaidens to this pernicious global push to eradicate the very culture that has provided the very foundations of global existence at this point in earth’s history. Freedom, free enterprise, the individual as the cornerstone, the rule of law – all of the structures within which these poor, misguided souls exist to spread their noxious blather, underpin their very existence yet they will remain willfully blind to it in order to maintain their programmed screed. The Chinese, the Sumerians, the Maya, just as examples, knew of time and utilized its measurements to plot the stars, so why is it now considered an evil creation of white culture? I do think these blinkered blatherers may come to rue the day that they erased western culture and they now live in a barbarism of islam, african culture and the remnants of Amazonian savagery sans electricity, clean water, the rule of law and countless other basics of western culture.
We should not be too hasty in dismissing scholars of racism. For example, in “A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance*”, William Manchester explores the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. He focuses on the “medieval mind” as a product of a period of darkness and ignorance that eventually gave way to the enlightenment of the Renaissance. Hardly twelve hundred years ago, the people of central Europe had no concept of clock-measured time. They were so impoverished and uneducated that they often sold their clothes in the summer, and entire families slept in a single room. Naturally, the motions of intimacy occurred within touching distance of everyone. Thus, future targets for the designation of “racism” may well be private bedrooms and a lack of schooling. This class of scholars clearly has much work left undone—provided they can find the time. And what, exactly, is wrong with anecdotes? My children use them all the time, and lawyers have been known to rely on them in the courtroom.
* This is a great book, BTW.
Maybe we should ask Kamala Harris what this means. She speaks word salad. But wait! Who can interpret her answer?
Dathon could probably do it. After all… “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” 😉
Like malleable artists’ clay, we are allowing ourselves to be kneaded, shaped, and molded by academic publications/mass communications/media (great example: NPR) to fit their agenda-driven purpose. The more they control the dispensing/dissemination of selective information to the masses, the more they get the “attention,” the greater the danger.
The general public is daily being fed an overwhelming diet of left-wing ideology, palatably presented as “progressive” and superior.
The ironically humorous part of this is that the controllers of these entities are the ones raking in the very profitable and “capitalistic” benefits of their endeavors, including political power.
Lin,
Oh, it may be “progressive” but it most certainly not superior.
While they pat themselves on the back or each others back’s for their so-called intellect mumbo jumbo, the rest of us just look at them like something we found under a rock.
“But we treat time as though it is timeless”. Time is timeless, and this quote is priceless. 🙂
Next time Prof. Essenhaji is invited to speak in Munich, I suggest he walk. Don’t get on that airplane! You’ll experience a timeless mode of human transportation that echoes though the ages. That silvery vehicle that travels at 1000 km/hr is an instrument of white time, right down to the scheduled takeoff and landing, the encroachment into “bird space” (going back to flying dinosaurs), and the sale of tickets. Reject those affronts to traditional humanity!
And go barefoot! If your ancestors walked barefoot, you should too!
Pbinca,
If it were not for time, Prof. Essenhaji’s computer, access to the internet would not be possible.
After reading this nonsense, i can identify with the little boy who yelled, ” The emperor has no clothes.” If this crap passes for “scholarship,” our educational system is in big trouble.
Agree. Sounds like a Kamala word salad, continuing the racism/victimhood in every facet of life.
our education system has been in trouble since affirmative action took over universities. I was pursuing a BA in the late 60’s – early 70’s and witnessed teachers being harrassed by minority students chanting that if they did not get an A, it was because of racism. The universities crumbled under the demands (partially because of subversive progressives applauding this gross misjustice to merit) and colleges became just a automatic stamp of approval for all minorities. We did this to ourselves back when LBJ ushered in his “great society” that is in the process of destroying our society and replacing it with an unworkable and doomed to fail socialism and mind-numbing indoctrination and dumbing down of the population.
“eternal triflers”
Ridiculous.
This is nothing new. I’ve run into this mindset in the past. Those that worked for me in the military got LoRs and extra-duty until they learned that military time means TEN MINUTES EARLY. Those worked for me as a civilian just got fired.
As for REALITY, there is just time. Not White time, not Asian, not Hispanic time, not Black time, just time. Be on time or suffer the consequences.
As side note, last time I flew some stupid White woman decided to stop at Starbucks. She got to the gate after boarding closed and got bumped because Airlines don’t play that game anymore. She was pissed, because while the plane had not left the gate, boarding had ended. Karen thought she was special because she in first class.
Karen found out that not even First Class is special.
I indoctrinated my children with the saying “ if you’re not early you’re late.”. Now that I have school age grandchildren they know my mantra as well. It works regardless of race.
So basically this is an excuse for being late with your homework.
edwardmahl,
Or being on time to . . . anything.
Professor Turley,
Your mistake is calling this nonsense, “scholarship.” It’s just another example of the lack of discipline and minimal standards of intelligence now existent in the bloated and increasingly irrelevant American academic “community.” The destruction of the university as a seedbed for ideas and debate is now complete. Two generations of intellectual flyweights have now completed the transformation of “academia” into an ideological grist mill that is self-sustaining on its path to secure the destruction of the American experiment in freedom.
I believe Professor Turley is using the term somewhat tongue in cheek.
This is not “scholarship”. It is gibberish. These people should be fired and required to find something else to do. It is a waste of time to read such foolishness.
The racial grift continues. Spewing a bunch of racist jargon, these race grifters have managed to embed themselves in academia, and are now able to forcefeed students racist tripe disguised as deep thoughts. Now let’s hear how the calendar is racist, and how days and months are an affront to BIPOC people.