“I don’t want to do time, I want to save it”: Carcerality of time and Black temporal resistance

Abstract

The criminalization of Blackness has led to premature death, high incarceration rates, and psychological stress, all of which impact Black people’s temporal horizons. Working in conversation with scholars who empirically documented how Blackness is criminalized and time is racialized, this work explores the degree in which carceral understandings of time provide a framework to better comprehend Black people’s temporal experiences. Data for this study include in-depth interviews with six students and 16 graduates from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) across six universities in the southern United States and 22 months of observations at a HBCU in southeastern United States. The results indicate that the respondents experience temporal traps that restrict the temporal possibilities of Black people and temporal stasis as they feel trapped within an ongoing history of anti-Black violence. They narrate a desire to “take their time” and “save time” to resist the dominant temporal order. The operative “take” signifies the creating of temporal possibility through uncoupling time’s relation to racial structures and “save” signifies freeing time from the structural demands of white supremacy.