Chronic White Supremacy: Toward a Critical Race Theorization of Time Work

This paper builds upon my conceptualization of "racial temporality” (Fleming 2017) by theorizing the temporal politics white supremacist racism (and anti-racism) in Western nations. Extending the insights of critical race theory, I emphasize the chronic (long-term, enduring) nature of systematic racism broadly andwhite supremacy specifically. From this perspective, the epistemology of ignorance (Mills 1997) which sustains systematic racism requires the hegemonic misrepresentation of the racialized present and past. I argue that within societies shaped by white supremacy, a key feature of ‘time-work’ (Flaherty 1999) is the chronic, hegemonic temporal distortion and misrecognition of racialized social and political dynamics of the past and present, which, in turn, facilitate the inter-generational siphoning and transfer of material, psychological, socioeconomic, political, biological and temporal resources from people socially defined as ‘non-white’ to people socially defined as ‘white’. White supremacy thus endures, ironically, through the systematic epistemic erasure of its systematic and chronic nature. Such erasures include forms of denial, misrepresentation and disinformation by those who intentionally seek to secure resources for ‘whites’ as well as the ‘unintentional’ and institutionalized distortions of racial temporality that result from vague, imprecise and/or episodic descriptions of on-going racialized social and historical realities. Implications for the study of racism and anti-racism are explored, with special attention to recent work in the area of cultural sociology.