Funk the Clock: Transgressing Time While Young, Prescient and Black

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore how racialized youth in urbanized space reckon with time. I specifically study how race, racialization and racism condition the time perspectives of black youth in urbanized space. I draw on data from thirty in-person interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted over the course of one year with youth at Run-a-Way – a shelter and outreach center for youth in the Twin Cities. I make the case that whiteness and white life prefigure time, thus denying the coevalness of racialized youth, particularly black youth. Thus, “time use” among racialized youth is a misnomer. Racialized youth are more likely to owe time than own it. In using time that does not belong to them, several black youth in this project detailed the way their “time use” is read as “time theft” and thus criminalized. Youth’s accounts suggest that racialized violence is responsible for significant time theft. In other words, racialized violence takes time. Racialized violence proved to be less of a life course transition and more of a life course constant. Despite the overrepresentation of white time as time itself, I show how racialized youth at Run-a-Way turn the tables on time, ensuring their temporalities were most culturally relevant and “up to date,” while casting whiteness into a “played-out” past. I make the case that urban ethnographic representations of racialized youth in poor urbanized space as “present oriented” elide their prescience. Because they choose not to entertain liberal futurities directed towards “freedoms” associated with whiteness and a “post racial era” did not make them present oriented. It made them prepared. In sum, my research forges new directions in the study of race and time by examining how time is racialized, how race is temporalized, and how racialization and racism condition youth’s perspectives on time.