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.”
Should she be allowed to argue such a thing?
She can argue anything she likes no matter how far down the rabbit hole it is. But she is NOT immune to criticism and ridicule of her positions.
How about the mentally-ill village idiot? Give ‘m a mic and an audience?
Universities have lost common sense judgment when wackos like this get to publish as faculty.
Dystopian gibberish.
Sorry. I can’t process the word salads of the Dutch academia vis a vis conflating racism with time. Tip: Go to Kalshi and predict that Kamala is the genesis of this nonsense.
If you still support a president who is all about violation and predation, then nothing you type here has
any credibility.
Bill Clinton is still president? Who knew?
Animals have been eating each other for hundreds of millions of years.
Being eaten sounds horrifying to me.
Why didn’t a loving God come up with a better way to keep animals energized and animated, one
that is less horrifying and hellish?
Always ask what an absurdity is intended to achieve.
Here the Absurd Ones make it easy: Concoct excuses for minorities to be chronically late and unproductive, and give them the unearned. (While, of course, retaining the time constraints for non-minorities.)
“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.”
Into plain English: A minority professor can show up to class whenever he damn-well feels like it. A minority academic will be given promotions and tenure without the (racist) constraints of publishing within a certain period of time. No articles or books for ten years? No problem. You’ve been “oppressed.” Minority students will be granted infinite extensions (and an unearned grade).
Ditto the excuse making for minorities in the workplace, which is what “organizational ethnography” focuses on. Don’t you dare reprimand a minority employee for being chronically late (lest you and your company be smeared as “racist”). A minority fired for constantly missing deadlines? Now you’re talking a multi-million dollar cause of action.
As Karmelo Anthony has shown us, committing coldblooded first degree murder is a right if you are black.
An ancient problem: form over substance. It’s like the plastic food in the window of a restaurant in Japantown, SF.
Stringing a bunch of big words together into a meandering woke complaint does not constitute learning, research, or truth.
Total meadow muffins.
I am glad our family are not being exposed to the current college education. I hope more and more parents investigate and realize what BS is being taught in certain schools and consider other schools including trade schools.
I recently read an article, where either USC or UCLA had a large amount of the law students claiming disability, so they would be allowed more time to complete exams. This implies to me that the individuals are not prepared, qualified or even meant to be in that class or occupation. Any individual that cannot handle the reality of time based projects, jobs or appointments, needs to self evaluate their own personal traits. Coming up with “White Time”, “Brown Time”, “Black Time” or any other time is an excuse for personal failings.
My mother taught me that you are never late if you are 20 minutes early. Being early in finishing your projects at work or school, as well as for an appointment, shows that you are serious about the job or project and considerate of other people. A trait that I think is lacking in some portions of today’s society.
Watch time suddenly become an imperative if their paychecks are late.
These people are not academics and this is not scholarship. Stupi stupid stupid.
Unfortunately, these people are considered academics by the AAUP even though I agree with you 100%.
Just as a side note, what is the percentage of University Professors that belong to the AAUP?
(asking for a friend)
“. . . what is the percentage of . . .”
What percentage of journalists belong to the AP?
Yet it, too, because it sets policy for the industry, has an outsized influence.
(Why do you keep flogging that nonsensical point?)
It’s high TIME the musings masquerading as scholarship from these morons are ignored
When will the Dutch be held accountable for the proliferation of the slave trade? Afterall it was their merchant ships that facilitated the expansion of the slave trade worldwide.
Let’s go Dutch on today’s topic.
I’ll stick to the stated topic involving the theory of “time” and you stick to your view of slavery.
Wow. And all along I thought time was related to earth’s daily orbit around the sun. Laid out by Copernicus. Wasn’t he a white man?
And didn’t his heliocentric theory displace the ages-old geocentric theories of early Egypt (Ptolemy), Greece, and China, where earth was supposedly the center?
And let us not forget the ancient Sumerians who gave us the 60 minute our, the 60 second minute and an ability to calculate the movement of the stars, all based on time. Time has been measured by countless civilzations, including the Maya (who had absolutely no connection to western culture) and to make such a statement just illustrates the constipated mind set of the progressive left. Indoctrinated, blinkered and totally ignorant of their own ignorance.
true, but Sumerians built their concept of time around the MOON
“. . . I thought time was related to earth’s daily orbit around the sun.”
Get with the program.
Astronomy is also a Euro-centric, racist construct.
Clearly, you need some “time” in a re-education camp.
Ahhhhh!!! The polysyllabic word salad of it all. Must be something in the jeans.
It is sad that academic work comes down to formulating a thesis through complicated language, using a lot of adjectives. The idea is that if one writes complicate prose, it proves the existence of intellect. In reality, it does the opposite. The art is to convey a message in clear and comprehensible language. What appears from the text is that Zakia Essanjahi, essentially, is complaining that she is still an assistent professor, and has not been promoted. She blames whiteness (whatever that may be) and the promotion criteria based on Western academic standards at the Western university she is employed by. She should be grateful that she is employed at all at an academic institute while producing useless research of a narcissistic nature.
Adding insult to injury, the Dutch taxpayers are forced to fund this continual complaining dressed like research.
Wow!! I wonder if she knows that Albert Einstein was a member of the Jewish community. She just might make THAT relative to her argument.
“Time is racist:” Another BS opportunity to create one more entity in the Grievance Studies list.
Bah haha – the racist Matrix!!!! And this Fool teaches young minds? The world is being run by Idiots like never before and we are all on a collision course for disaster as these little morons become the new leadership! The Chinese will win by attrition as the West becomes the land of STUPID!!! Haha.
One question for the academics – let’s say you’re right, now what?
I think you mean jargonistic, not jingoistic.
Let’s be honest it’s just more jealousy and envy for the greatest, most industrious and intelligent race God birthed.