A Brief History Of Showing Up Late For Work

Our Diversities The "W" Word 32 Comments

“White Time”.

Zakia Essanhaji, a professor of “organizational ethnography” at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, is the latest to make the case against “white time.” Her recent paper titled “Academic time theft: stealing time, producing racialized inclusion in Dutch academia” builds on prior work condemning time as racist.

Rutgers Women’s and Gender Studies/Africana Studies Professor Brittney Cooper has also written about how time is racist. Mainstream media has positively cooed at the suggestion, including an interview with NPR. Cooper claimed that “white people own time” after framing the concept of time in “histories of European and Western thought.”

There is also apparently black time: “Time has a history, and so do black people. But we treat time as though it is timeless, as though it has always been this way, as though it doesn’t have a political history bound up with the plunder of indigenous lands, the genocide of indigenous people and the stealing of Africans from their homeland.”

Or, you know, the history of the earth’s travel around the sun.

32 Replies to “A Brief History Of Showing Up Late For Work”

  1. Paying professors is also racist.

    That prof should be working in a mine a a member or the proletariat.

  2. Multiculturalism has never worked anywhere! I’m also doubtful about certain ‘religions’ that are clearly incompatible with others, and in fact try to eliminate the competition!

  3. Orwell was right:

    “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
    ― George Orwell

  4. “But we treat time as though it is timeless,…”

    Wow. Profound.
    Worthy of repetition.
    By drips and drivellers.

    1. “The significance of the passage of time, right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.” – K.Harris, black woman.

    2. Because we wouldn’t want to emulate cultures that have actually…you know…been successful, right?
      Far better to adopt the mindset of cultures that would still be in the Stone Age if Whitey had not intervened.

    3. Time keeps on ticking, ticking, ticking into the future. I have this on good authority.

  5. Such academics are to western civilization what sugar in your gas tank is to a running engine.

    2. “Why are they always so fat?”

      I’m guessing mental illness. Because it takes a lot of work to maintain that much extra weight.

    4. I was on a project, found a rounded cobble, 6″ × 1.5″ with 98% of it’s cortex intact in a soil layer dominated by loamy clay and angular gravel. On either end, the cortex was knocked off.
      Crew chief came by, examined it, and threw it into the back dirt and called it an “Indian love stone.” Snyde, arrogant, slutty grad student from, yep, Rutgers. (An Indian love stone is a *ucking rock.)
      So, I picked it out of the back-dirt, tagged it, bagged it, and went about my day. It was a classic example of a hammerstone.

  7. The fact that Asians are seldom – if ever – included in these narratives is blatant racist. So, for argument’s sake, if an old Japanese lady is punctual, how much different is this old Japanese lady from the brutish white man who keeps time? And pronouns! Pronouns!!! (I think Ionesco would agree.)

  8. When I was a manager, I would start every meeting exactly on time — I mean within the second. You could be late if you wanted, but you would walk into an ongoing meeting. I was tired of punctual employees having their time wasted by tardy one.

    And it worked. Employees showed up on time without me having to nag them.

    I guess that made me really, really white. Maybe ultra white.

    1. My late sister had her Master’s degree in Adult Education and was a credentialed Evaluator. She also did a lot of work in Human Resources. With respect to Canada’s indigenous population, “They had a loose attachment to the workplace” – HR Speak. In other words, sometimes they showed up and sometimes they didn’t, but they were always there for the paycheque on Friday.
      I worked with a number of Indigenous women at a house cleaning company and this adage was so true. Then they would get mad because the size of the paycheque reflected the actual hours which they worked. This was clearly explained in the orientation meeting and during the training period.

    1. I took both typing and physics in high school. In both classes I was told, “It’s space time!”

  10. “Time has a history, and so do black people.”

    Yes, that is true. Historically, showing up for work on time and all that White stuff is what we do because it’s BETTER than starvation, disease, feudalism and clan warfare.

    We tried all that. It sucks, so we stopped doing it in the 1500s.

    1. Equatorial peoples … who have never struggled for a living, but run about naked in the sun and pick bananas to their hearts content … have never had to worry about time or industriousness. So yeah, this woman is right … Africans are on an entirely different clock. One that is ONLY suited for their equatorial lands. So keep your equatorial time to your hearts content … back at the equator and tropics

      1. “Equatorial peoples…”

        I’ve heard this argument before, about “warm country” people (Africans, Jamaicans, Mexicans, Italians, Greeks) having it easy because of the hot weather, so their cultures are lazy.

        Two things about that, first being that South Africa/Rhodesia have roughly the same temperate climate as N. America. It’s not that hot.

        The other thing is I never hear that “warm country” thing applied to Asians. Vietnamese, Philippine, Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean… those dudes show up on time with some hustle. They out-hustle Europeans. Same hot country/jungle thing going on as Africa, completely different cultures.

  11. When the impala or gazelle herd runs through the valley at 7AM every day to escape the lions, hyenas, and cheetahs, and the local tribe doesn’t believe in time and so sleeps to 8AM, who do they blame their hunger on? or do they eat the lions, hyenas, and cheetahs as they fill their bellies on the impalas and gazelles they managed to kill?

  12. Lucky for her tribe, she’s not planting crops. This shit only works in a university setting, because … Door dash.

    1. LOL
      First … they thought chicken came from packages at the grocery store.
      Now … they believe Chik fil a comes from a subcompact EV … driven by Muhammad

      PS … A brief History of … Kate’s still got it

  13. sillly me. l have contemplated the concept and behaviour and properties of time, asking Qs like ‘what was it like before time existed?’ and there certainly was a ‘time’ like that or . . . . . .
    WE NEVER GET TO THE PRESENT. anyways, how the rate at which time passed is flexible proven by space trips accompanied by atomic clocks. and the idea that ‘now’ right here is different that ‘now’ somewhere billions of kms distant.

    but l missed this one.

  14. Johannes Fabian wrote “Time and The Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object” in 1983. It was required reading by ’88. This stuff moves at glacial speed,
    Fabian’s error is that he views the idea of the primitive as a construct of the perception of comparative (cultural) evolution over time. Perhaps time is indeed a nonsequetor in comparative cultural analysis but removing it as a conscious effort toward contemporaniety still leaves you standing toe to toe with a primitive. And no, that’s not racist either.
    What makes it racist is that nobody has written anything in the last 40 years that’s worth a shit.
    But just to piss them off, the appropriate reply is to say how old this stuff actually is:
    Time is racist? That’s so 80’s.

  15. “the stealing of Africans from their homeland.”

    Yes, by other Africans…who then sold them to white orArab slavers.
    What about it?

    1. But for the slave trade which gave them value, they would have been eaten or annihilated.
      Ever notice how they never mention that Barack Obama’s Kenyan tribe were/are slavers?

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