White Time

Abstract

Abstract This chapter advances a provisional theory of white time as a temporal force field that exerts regulative, normalizing powers that shape the racial order of things as well as subjective experiences of time, or temporalities. The chapter surveys the philosophical and historical roots of contemporary modes of understanding and inhabiting time. It then analyzes Euro-colonial temporal ordering as a colonizing force where the conquest of space is tied to domination of time. Specifically, it examines the racial subjectivity required to apprehend time and space as available to be possessed as productive of segregated time generally and white temporality specifically. It introduces a theory of white time abetted by law and policed by the historically entrenched norms of white supremacy. Drawing from critical race theorist Cheryl I. Harris’s influential concept of whiteness as property and Aboriginal anthropologist Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive, the chapter consider white temporality as a mode of apprehension, in the multiple senses connoting perception, objectification, arrest, and anxiety. In short, the time of whiteness is a possessive tense—and a highly imperfect one at that.