The racial politics of time | Brittney Cooper
Cultural theorist Brittney Cooper examines racism through the lens of time, showing us how historically it has been stolen from people of color, resulting in lost ...
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What if I told you that time has a race, a race in the contemporary way that we understand race in the United States? Typically, we talk about race in terms of black and white issues. In the African-American communities from which I come, we have a long-standing multi-generational joke about what we call "CP time," or "colored people's time." Now, we no longer refer to African-Americans as "colored," but this long-standing joke about our perpetual lateness to church, to cookouts, to family events and even to our own funerals, remains. I personally am a stickler for time. It's almost as if my mother, when I was growing up, said, "We will not be those black people." So we typically arrive to events 30 minutes early. But today, I w...
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What if I told you that time has a race, a race in the contemporary way that we understand race in the United States? Typically, we talk about race in terms of black and white issues. In the African-American communities from which I come, we have a long-standing multi-generational joke about what we call "CP time," or "colored people's time." Now, we no longer refer to African-Americans as "colored," but this long-standing joke about our perpetual lateness to church, to cookouts, to family events and even to our own funerals, remains. I personally am a stickler for time. It's almost as if my mother, when I was growing up, said, "We will not be those black people." So we typically arrive to events 30 minutes early. But today, I w...
