Charles Mills – The Chronopolitics of racial time.

In radical political theory, the demarcation of the social and the political is blurred.
Government apparatuses are directly embedded on the social. Foucault’s recognition of the
“capillarity” of power, extending through and through society, is representative of this view.
Social time and political time are intertwined in this way too. In a critical stance, Mills notes
what he calls “racial time”, and in this context he examines what “white time” is.

“An online call for papers for May 2020 conference sponsored by the German Historical
Institute London, “Chronopolitics: Time of Politics, Politics of Time, Politicized Time,” says
we define chronopolitics as research into ‘how politics is about time’ as well as what kind of
time is ‘presupposed by politics’ ([Christopher] Clarck), how the perception of time and change affect
decision-making and how concepts of time and history give meaning and legitimacy to political actors,
groups and ideas,

while emphasizing that “instead of taking time as a given, we set out to analyse how it is
socially and culturally constructed through political and scholarly practices.”” (299)

“chronopolitics has to do with the multiple different ways in which power relations between
groups—whether formally acknowledged in recognized systems of governance or not—
affect both the representations of the relations between these groups and the world, in their
specifically temporal aspect, and the material relation of these groups to the world, in their
specifically temporal dimension. So the presumption is that in these competing
representations (which will involve issues of causality, normative evaluation, narrative
claims, patterns of meaning and affect, and the like) and in these divergent relations, we will
generally find a struggle to advance one group interests—sometimes morally defensible,
sometimes not—and a corresponding perpetuation or undermining of hegemonic structures
of group domination. As so sketched, chronopolitics can obviously manifest itself across a
broad range of relations, whether demarcated by gender, ethnicity, class, nation, religion, or
race. Indeed, animal rights sympathizers could make a case that human animal/nonhuman
animal relations need to be included also, even if it is generally going to be difficult (at least on
this planet) to discern the latter’s competing oppositional discourses, though perhaps the
growing body of work on animal cognition can come up with some plausible candidates.” (299)

“Zerubavel argues for a “sociology of memory” that grounds a “phenomenology of history”

since the way particular communities choose to remember the past is “part of the process of
acquiring [their] social identity” (pp.2-3). These “mnemonic communities” as Zerubavel calls
them, may range in size from families to ethnic groups and nations, but they share claims to a
“collective memory” of a “common past,” one that is the product of a “mnemonic
socialization,” regulated by “social norms of remembrance that tell us what we should
remember and what should we forget. (pp. 4-5) The past is “packaged” through “schemata”
that can be linked to “mental relief maps” designed to accommodate particular “historical
narratives,” these relief maps being characterized by a “variable density of historical intervals,”
eventful “hills” and uneventful “valleys,” “full” and “empty” times, and periodizations as
“social punctuations” that purport to establish “defining moments” (pp. 4, 7, 25-34, 82-85). So,
in general, Zerubavel points out, “There are many alternative ways to cut up the past, none of
which are more natural and hence more valid than others. Any system of periodization is thus
inevitably social…”” (300)
“Time maps are therefore intimately and necessarily tied up with anmnesias, ecisions,
forgetting that are not arbitrary but politically required—producing pasts that are “usable,”
utilitarian, functional for the group’s identity and trajectory in time…” (300)

Periodization as a political act, as, also, an ontological expression constitutive of itself,

inasmuch the agency of remembrance articulates the framework of freedom: decsision
making in accordance with a history, as the maintenance of certain relationships that
structure vectors of time, or narratives.

“time maps are going to be foundational for chronopolitics, though it is clear that we need to
extend their scope to mappings of the present and the projected future also: not just where
the social group in question has been in its memory, but where it is now, and where it is
going.” (300)

“our navigation of the world, and our ways of making sense of what we are doing in the world,
will rely in part on these maps and how they enable us to locate ourselves in the
intersubjective time of our group.” (300)

Space as a metaphor of time: Maps encompass dense and scarce time, eventful or
static. Towards the past and towards the future.

Christian identity as temporal matrix.

Hegemony over space goes hand in hand with hegemony over time: a determinate
temporality gives meaning and legitimacy over materiality to certain group.

The French republical calendar offered another temporal matrix. Marxism too, with
bourgeois revolutions that thought of themselves as universal, thus as a certain social
punctuation of history’s narrative.

“Marxism’s alternative temporality periodized (Western) human history into primitive

communism, ancient slave society, feudalism, and capitalism.” (301-302)

“where in these accounts of Christianism vs. Jewish vs. Islamic mappings in religious time, or
liberal bourgeois vs. Marxist socialist mappings in class time, would “race” and “racial time”
fit?” (302)

“In classic racist theory […] “race” signified natural sub-sections of the human race,
demarcated by theological or cultural or biological causation (or sometimes combinations
thereof), and located in hierarchies of cognitive ability, characterological propensity, aesthetic
worth, and spiritual proclivity. That is, the superior race was judged to be smarter, more
virtuous, more beautiful, an more spiritually developed than the inferior race or races.” (303)

“racist theory is thus committed to (i) the reality of race and (ii) the existence of a hierarchy
among the races. And it has historically drawn up racial time maps on this basis […] Think, for
example, how different the presumed underlying termporality will be for the theological
theories of polygenic origins (the inferior nonwhite races as the result of separate
supernatural creation, whether divine or diabolical) versus secular theories of monogenetic
origins (the inferior nonwhite races as those more primitive humans closer to humanity’s
simian ancestors on a social Darwinist evolutionary scale).” (303)
“The socio-political importance and reality of race is thus really the key factor in affecting the
“social life of time.” Societies constructed on an axis (even if one among others) of racial
domination will generate “racial times” both at the discursive and the material levels.” (304)

“Saracens, Jews, Ethiopians, Mongols, Gypsies, and “Skraelings” (North American Indians)
were depicted as bizarre question-mark humans with dubious origins […] if this cumulative
case can be convincingly developed and sustained, it would mean that from its inception, the
Western tradition has been structured around ethnic exclusion, which […] either becomes
racial from antiquity, or at least from the Middle Ages onward.” (306)

“From its Athenian origins to its modern incarnations, Western democracy […] would then
have been built on the denial of equal political status to “Others” at least ethnically and
perhaps racially conceived of, so that these categories are integral rather than anomalous to
Western polity. In particular, both Christian and secular times […] would need to be
reconceived of as racial times, predicated on time maps that delegitimize the temporal
origins, the timelines of descent, of those disqualified in advance from being true believers
and genuine members of civil society.” (306)

“In Euro-colonial white racism […] the [temporal] cartography was generally more
straightforward, requiring only geo-temporal location on a map of Enlightenment (both
Christian and secular) and darkness. What becomes the overarching metric of Euro-modernity
vis-à-vis the rest of the world is predicated on a stadial scale of savagery, barbarism, and
civilization, different racialized rungs on the time ladder.” (307)

Racism appears as a foundational ideology for the construction of modernity.

“The Euro time map, the chronopolitical discourse of empire, centers Europeans as the most
temporally advanced race on the planet, ready to assume the burden of leading to civilization
those with the capacity to progress, even as assimilated inferiors, or if necessary to
exterminate or at least remove from the path of progress those lacking this capacity.” (307)

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Kant, Mill, Hegel, etc.

“Across a wide range of political and philosophical and national variants, we find the common
theme of a white temporality, a racial Europ-time, demarcating the vanguard of humanity from
its laggards (if they are fully human in the first place). Of course the particular time map
invoked in the discursive realm will depend on the particular temporal regime imposed in
the material realm.” (308)

Fabian, Time and the Other: Western Anthropology denies coevalness to non-western
people, operating with a hierarchical “allochronic” logic.

Social Darwinism-evolutionary fitness or unfitness establishes a “natural time” of

biology which replaces a theological time defined by closeness with divinity,
salvation, eschatology.

“this seeming democratization of the status of fallenness is effectively denied by the re-
inscription of a classic nonwhite representation—howling, dancing, painted savages—as the
terminus point, and thus the beginning point, of the Fall.” (311)

“So the ontological bottom line is that even if, in our hearts of darkness, we are all savages,
nonwhite savagery is paradigmatic—natural and inescapable for them—while at least we
(white, culturally evolved, normatively self-regulating) are capable of knowing and doing
better, located at a different position in humanity’s moral evolutionary timeline, though
vulnerable to lapses.” (311)

In the post-war and post-colonial period “It is no longer a matter of ranking of races from
advanced to primitive, underpinned by biologically determinist assumptions. Rather, we now
have a vocabulary of “developed” and “underdeveloped” nations. But in effect a white time
map is still orienting our understanding, in that the nations and peoples in question
correspond to the groups earlier characterized in racial/racist terms, and the temporal
hierarchy remains, albeit now framed in terms of degrees of development along a stadial
timeline. So in neither case, whether in the colonial or the postcolonial version, is the
alternative time map considered that seeks to establish causal links, the unadmitted temporal
connections, between Global North wealth and Global South poverty that would make them
synchronous developmental/underdevelopmental times (Rodney, 2018; Táíwo, 2010)” (312)

“A time of exploitation, of overt racial oppression (African slavery, colonial conquest and
extraction), is displaced by discrete non-intersecting times whose non-contiguous
boundaries preclude any such subversive accounting. […] White racial time, white
chronopolitics, continues to structure our dominant understandings and normative
judgements about the past and present of the contemporary world order.” (312)

“need for an oppositional racial chronopolitics, guided not by race as racism but race as a
recognition of the racial structuring of the modern world and the concomitant need for
corrective racial justice (Mills, 2019).” (312)

“Chronopolitical contestation by its very nature is likely to encompass past, present, and
future, since as we have seen from the beginning, group time will typically identify itself with
historical narratives that also seek to explain the present and stake particular claims on the
future.” (312)

“The temporality of the Marxist narrative likewise privileges the West, with its stadial
progression of primitive communism, ancient slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and then
socialism. […] fissolving the time-encrusted links of the past, so that all that is solid melts into
air, then the alternative times of, say, Amerindia, Asia, pre-colonial Africa, Native Australia,
become devalued. They are to be colonized, displaced, expropriated, by a bourgeois time that,
in supposedly laying the groundwork, the updated temporality, for the advent of global
socialist time, incorporates them into what is still a Western narrative.” (313)

“Marx demands a more sweeping “human” emancipation that, by ending the alienation of the
bourgeois order and freeing us of the “material” domination of competitive and self-seeking
society, will supposedly bring about a polity committed to general equality.” (313)

For subaltern populations “not even the “political” emancipation promised by

modernity has been achieved. Indeed, it is precisely modernity that has brought about
their subordination.” (314)

“the struggle against Euro-comination ahs always required as a corollary the rejection of its
temporal tendentious time maps, and the chrono- and geopolitics they have rationalized.”
314)

The revisitation of colonialism, slavery and enlightenment liberalism’ narratives

demands a re-sketching of time and space maps. Racism has to be considered as a cornerstone
of modernity.
“Only on this basis can a new temporal order be created for all of us, rendering obsolete the
“racial” time of human groups in relations of domination and subordination and signaling
the advent of a new and united egalitarian time for the human race as a whole.”