Rutgers professor claims that ‘time’ is racist

  Over the last several years we have seen political correctness run amok on college campuses. We have seen college theme parties either cancelled or apologized for after the fact on the grounds they were insensitive to one particular group or another.

 I have done several posts on this but that one that comes to mind first tonight is Stevenson College. This college apologized for serving Mexican food at a space themed party because comparisons could be drawn–they said–between space aliens and illegal immigrants.

  It has been awhile since I have written a post about something like this but then along comes Rutgers professor Brittany Cooper claiming that “time” is a white man’s concept and therefor must be inherently racist. Here is more:

According to a report from The College Fix, Cooper spoke with NPR last week about how white people “own time.” In the interview, Cooper made the case that white Americans have solely been responsible for conceptualizing the notion of “time.”

“If time had a race, it would be white,” Cooper said. “White people own time.”

Yes. So when I say time has a race, I’m saying that the way that we position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought. And a lot of the way that we talk about time really finds its roots in the Industrial Revolution. So prior to that, we would talk about time as merely passing the time. After the Industrial Revolution, suddenly, we begin to talk about time as spending time. It becomes something that is tethered to monetary value. So when we think about hourly wage, we now talk about time in terms of wasting time or spending time. And that’s a really different understanding of time than, you know, like seasonal time or time that is sort of merely passing.

And here is the kicker:

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. When white, male European philosophers first thought to conceptualize time and history, one famously declared, Africa is no historical part of the world. He was, essentially, saying that Africans were people outside of history who had had no impact on time or the march of progress.

So there you have it, how can you even argue with that logic?

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium