Stalling White Time: Lived Experience, Whiteness, and Temporal Methodology in Educational Inquiry

• In Event: 15.019 - Unveiling White "Post-Truth": Applying Innovative Methods in Critical Whiteness Work

Abstract

Time is an escapable aspect of lived experience. As we move through our social worlds we do so with a sense of lived time. This is what gives certain moments a feeling slowness or fastness. Everyday experiences unfold according to a particular pace and velocity that contributes to the overall meaning of it. In this way, our sense of lived time is fundamentally bound up with meanings embedded in social worlds setting the stage for our experiences. This, inevitably, includes whiteness.

Charles Mills (2014) suggests that the western social structure is temporally ordered by White Time. White Time curates a social reality in which those deemed white exist as privileged temporal subjects with superior access to “working times, eating and sleeping times, and … living and dying times” at the expense of non-white subjects (28). In other words, White Time creates an existential situation where the time of white peoples is worth more than peoples of color.

Mills conception of White Time resides firmly at a structural level, leaving lingering questions as to what White Time really looks like at the existential level. This type of questioning will always be relevant to educators concerned with putting antiracism to work in the classrooms. In order to consider the everyday impacts of White Time we must first have A) an illustrative and conceptual engagement with the existential aspects of White Time as they correspond with the structural aspects, and B) a way to methodologically deploy such a conception within studies of race and education. This paper is aimed at these goals.

Through the use of the phenomenology of time, and race, feminist, and queer theory this paper delineates the connection between the structural temporal regime of White Time and its impact on quotidian classroom interactions, as well as the impact on those studying classrooms (Al-Saji, 2013, 2014; Alcoff, 2006; Fisher, 2011; Merleau-Ponty, 2012; Mills, 2014; Ortega, 2016; Stoller, 2011; Weiss, 2011). To illustrate these dynamics I draw upon data from a six month long immersive case-study of a 9th grade geography classroom. I focus in on a single representative interaction featuring a moment where a Latina student offers up an answer to a question in a classroom conversation just to have it passed over in favor of a white male student who simply echoes her statement. Through this interaction I draw out the ways that even mundane aspects of lived experience in a classroom are racialized, and how this racialization is fundamentally predicated on the presence of White Time. Moreover, I also use this interaction to show how the common deployment of lived experience in educational studies on whiteness ultimately strips it of its spatial, and temporal specificity by placing it into an analytic ‘time-out’ (Erickson, 2004). In response I suggest a methodological incorporation of phenomenology as a way to expand the analytic repertoire in whiteness studies.

Author

• Gardner R Seawright, The Prairie School