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.”
The reality underlying so much of the above by assorted wokester-type profs is this: the West’s concept of Time is dynamic whereas the rest of the world cultures’ concept of Time is that Time is repetitive and cyclic, i.e. that things (i.e. human events and human history) just keep going on and around; whereas the Western concept (drawing on ancient Greek, Roman, Hebrew thought and also Christian thought) conceives of Time to be moving forward, drawn by a purpose (‘telos’ in ancient Greek), dynamic rather than repetitive. Thus it should not be surprising that the Western concept of Time involves development in all its complexities while reviews of other cultures’ concept of Time become ‘historical’ in the limited (but, yes, still ‘real’) sense that they offer a very limited usefulness for the understanding of the dynamism of human events in the dynamism of ongoing history. Chez Odysseus.
Grok: The post is largely accurate in its characterization of the scholarship it critiques, and its skepticism holds up well against standards of hard science and rigorous empirical inquiry. It identifies a real pattern in certain corners of the humanities and social sciences (particularly critical race theory-influenced, decolonial, and interpretive fields) where concepts are extended into unfalsifiable territory using jargon, selective narratives, and self-referential citation networks. However, it slightly overgeneralizes by framing this as a dominant “academic cottage industry” competing across all of academia—it’s concentrated in specific subfields rather than physics, math, or core empirical sciences.
Next I suppose Professor Turley will try to deny that Rorschack tests are filled with racist images and deny that bar codes are programmed to give blacks structural disadvantages.
Rorschack was not a test, unless you were an evil criminal, or just a criminal, and then he killed you. Color was not considered in his application of justice as he saw it.
I must admit: I read this article twice with multiple breaks to wake up from temporary unconsciousness, and still don’t understand it. I’m sure some academics love this because of the big words and arcane concepts all strung together in long sentences. But the author of the “scholarly work” didn’t write to explain, clarify, persuade, or stimulate. She wrote to use phrases and words to impress herself. All I can say is that she attempted to prove that time is racist against the usual suspects because of something or other. I think I’ll attempt a PhD thesis on how gravity is racist and use her “work” as a template. Just substitute “time” with “gravity.”
Exhausting
FOREIGN CONQUEST OR HANDING OVER THE KEYS?
Anti-white, woman of color, Muslim from Morocco, Zakia Essanhaji, and anti-white, feminist, rotund woman of color from Africa, Brittney Cooper, came into the West not to assimilate, endeavor, accomplish, and create wealth, but to parasitize the welfare state; it is bizarre and incomprehensible that their flagrant, unadorned, rude, disrespectful, and boorish parasitism of their hosts is tolerated in the least. Exactly why did America fight “WW Eleven” for the Netherlands, and whose country is this? What the —- are one or both of them doing here in the land of the free and self-reliant? Certainly, the American Founders did not open the door for them.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Naturalization Act of 1802
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790, 1795, 1798, 1802
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof….
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“Suppose 20 millions of republican Americans thrown all of a sudden into France, what would be the condition of that kingdom? If it would be more turbulent, less happy, less strong, we may believe that the addition of half a million of foreigners to our present numbers would produce a similar effect here.”
– Thomas Jefferson
______________________
“[Consider another people who had been more generous with their immigration policy]. Prudence requires us to trace the history further and ask what has become of the nations of
savages who exercised this policy, and who now occupies the territory which they then inhabited? Perhaps a lesson is here taught which ought not to be despised.”
– Alexander Hamilton
__________________________
“The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.”
– Alexander Hamilton
_________________________
“[There was no particular need for the U.S. to encourage immigration] except of useful mechanics and some particular descriptions of men or professions. The policy or advantage of its taking place in a body (I mean the settling of them in a body) may be much questioned; for by so doing, they retain the language, habits, and principles (good or bad) which they bring with them.”
– George Washington
What stupid irrelevant nonsense.
Jews were publicly ridiculed in Germany.
Anons here are publicly ridiculed here. I-diot.
Are political dissidents of a dicttatorship usually ridiculed before they are punished?
Is ridicule usually the first step?
They’ve been dancing around this for a while now, but it’s clear what they really mean: “Accountability is racist.”
Primitive humans couldn’t avoid accountability; if you didn’t hunt or gather, you didn’t eat. Modern society has inadvertently created space for these “parasites of unaccountability”. They produce nothing but misery and division, but expect to be highly paid for it.
If the entire world was the same race, these people would still see oppression everywhere, setting themselves up as the saviors, where their pronouncements are so self-evident that they are above question. In other words, zero accountability. Good work if you can get it. The rest of us have to live with being constantly measured by our accomplishments.
Jargonistic language: “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullsh*t.”
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. 
The concept of absurdity, which fueled comedy for decades, seems to have completely vanished from the minds (I’m using that term extremely broadly) of these woke fools. Do they think that National Lampoon publications and productions are serious depictions of the real world?
Absurd, is your comment.
Scholars have spent their lifetimes studying nonsense and gibberish.
Modern (pseudo) scholars spend their lifetimes spouting it.
Whatever. More “anti-colonial” psychobabble. The solution to her problem is to relocate to a part of the world that shares her worldview. The sooner, the better.
Wake up, little Susie,* wake up
Wake up, little Susie, wake up
[Verse 4]
The [publication] wasn’t so hot
It didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked
Our reputation is shot
-Everly** Brothers
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
*Suzie is a white name; academics of colour can sleep in.
**does Everly mean Time forever?
Wouldn’t it be simpler to say truing in your work on time is racist?
This isn’t about time so much as it is about redefining what the west sees as success. They want you to believe that societal advancements are not earned, just like individual advancements are not earned. This is no longer just a philosophical discussion about the nature of a society/culture and their measures of success (advanced, primitive, etc.) but now moves into a political movement to lower everyone’s standards of success so everyone can keep up. The classic equal opportunity is not even… we need equal results.
The fact that western culture is time driven (time is money) and adherent to work schedules (9-5) and work deadlines (need this done by Friday) is what is being attacked here, using an old philosophy that never seemed to intend it to be used at the micro level. They want the west to basically “lower their standards” because these concepts are less tied to other cultures.
Seems like a great argument “against” multi-culturalism!!
WTF? It’s hard to critique concepts that are so buried in incomprehensible gibberish.
Sounds like these people are trying to make racism a good thing because so many ‘racist’ things are genuine virtues or are otherwise praiseworthy.
The Bible contains much nonsense and gibberish, but many of you still revere it.
Well bless your heart.
Piss on you
That’s right. An anonymous troll knows more about the Bible than billions of people over thousands of years, including scholars who have spent their lifetimes studying it. He figured all that out in five seconds reading an atheist website. He’s brilliant! Brillaint, I tell you!
And a drunk old man from AK thinks he’s christ. After 80 years his altar is the Turley blog. What a old deranged f-ool.
Your attempt to deflect suggests that you also disagree with this “racial versions of time” nonsense. Good for you.
All of it pure academic gobbledygook. The only thing it argues for is reducing academic funding by at least the amounts used to support Essanhaji and Cooper and others like them. They need to get out into the real world and experience time firsthand.
This is laughable. If your “theory” can’t be described in simple language it is because you are using overly complex and flowery language to a). Look smart when you are not, b). Avoid having to answer straightforward questions, or c). Avoid any and all accountability. This all sounds like, “I am lazy and if you call me on it, you’re racists.” These people need to be forced to get real jobs that require real results but sadly, most would simple starve to death.