EDITORS' CORNER
OPINION: Yeah, it’s nutty but if there’s enough student interest in such nonsense, let colleges offer it. If not, can it.
A professor at a Dutch university is backing up nutty Rutgers Women’s and Gender Studies/Africana Studies Professor Brittney Cooper in claiming that time — yes, time — is racist.
Back in 2019, Cooper said (among other things) in an interview that white people believe time is linear, but for blacks it “doesn’t exactly work that way” due to past racial trauma and a present “filled with racial animus.”
Zakia Essanhaji (pictured), a professor of “organizational ethnography” at Holland’s Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, discusses in her recent paper titled “Academic time theft: stealing time, producing racialized inclusion in Dutch academia” how “universities reproduce ethnic-racial inequality through the temporal organization of academic life.”
“Drawing on critical race theory and decolonial scholarship on chronopolitics and white time,” the paper’s “purpose” reads, “it introduces the concept of academic time theft to theorize how universities extract, fragment and defer the time of academics of colour through racialized institutional processes.”
Chronopolitics involves struggles over whose time is deemed significant, whose timelines gain legitimacy and hegemony and who is positioned as “ahead” or “behind” in narratives of progress. Colonialism is a clear illustration of chronopolitical domination. European empires imposed their temporal frameworks, what Mills refers to as the “Euro-chronometer”, on colonized peoples, portraying themselves as temporally advanced while relegating non-European societies to the status of primitive, static or backward. According to Mills, we must therefore speak of racial time, particularly white time.
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. In academia, white time structures who belong in the present and future and who are rendered as out of sync with institutional time, a theme explored next.
According to her faculty page, Essanhaji’s research “combines critical race, feminist and decolonial perspectives” regarding “diversity politics, the dynamics of whiteness, and institutional change within academic contexts, with a focus on the intersections of ethnic-racial and gender inequalities.”
Naturally, I wish higher ed didn’t subscribe to such overly verbose nonsense. And while I agree with the National Association of Scholars’ David Randall that state governments “have the right to determine what is being taught in a civics class,” I also concur with his critic John Wilson.
Wilson, a former fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, said if colleges want to offer elective courses — “that no students are forced to participate in” — like those based on the silliness espoused by Essanhaji, then what’s the big deal?
If students freely sign up for this stuff, great. Whatever. But if/when the courses prove to be a waste of university money, officials shouldn’t hesitate to pull the plug — despite the inevitable whine fest that will follow.
