Jonathan Turley: “White Time”: Dutch Professor Argues that Time Itself is Racist
We have previously discussed how many professors seem to compete in finding new forms of racism in every facet of society and education. Astrophysics, math, runoffs, science, statistics, and meritocracy have all been denounced as racist. In this academic cottage industry, professors secure publications and speaking opportunities by identifying racism in the expressions, images, or entire fields. It was, therefore, only a matter of time before time itself was declared racist.
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.”
Likewise, in “The Chronopolitics of Racial Time,” Jamaican academic Charles W. Mills described the “Euro-chronometer” as a Western-centric, linear timeline.
These works are often heavily laden with jargonistic narratives. In one study from Brazil, academics argue that “thinking of time outside and against the Euro-chronometer requires decolonial epistemologies that have the potential to disrupt racist chronologies.”
Professor Essanhaji continues this scholarship by “drawing on critical race theory and decolonial scholarship on chronopolitics and white time.” She applies with earlier work “to academic time theft to theorize how universities extract, fragment and defer the time of academics of colour through racialized institutional processes.”
“White time is not simply the time of the privileged, but the power to define temporality and progress itself. It is the colonization of time, known as the system of modernity/coloniality. As Vazquez […] argues, this system is maintained by erasing cyclical or relational understandings of time, ensuring that time is perceived as racing towards unattainable, more modern futures. In that sense, white time is both prescriptive and pre-emptive, foreclosing alternative futures and experiences of the past by delegitimizing other temporalities.”
Academics have long argued that non-white histories and figures are often “erased’ in scholarship. Such arguments have led to a move away from Western works or classics in favor of non-Western sources in higher education. However, the time scholarship suggests that the very construct of time has been shaped and furthers white domination and privilege.
In Professor Essanhaji’s work, this scholarship is used to challenge the demands placed on minority academics in publishing and other measures of academic achievement. Again, the work is heavily layered with jargonistic language. Here are her findings:
“The analysis identifies three mechanisms of academic time theft. First, prolonged uncertainty operates through racialized precariousness that keeps academics of colour in a condition of academic probation through insecure contracts and housing precarity. Second, ongoing disruption emerges through everyday racism that fragments attention, diverts emotional and intellectual labour, and interrupts academic continuity. Third, recursive evaluation operates through the continual resetting of inclusion and promotion criteria, producing perpetual states of “not yet” recognition and deferred academic futures. Together, these mechanisms sustain racialized temporal regimes in which academics of colour are positioned as perpetually “almost there” while white institutional time remains uninterrupted.”
These authors largely cite each other with little attention to countervailing viewpoints. It becomes a closed, self-perpetuating system as academics invite one another to speak at their universities and feed off one another. Few academics are willing to challenge such scholarship. Indeed, as we have discussed, departments have largely purged their ranks of conservative or contrarian voices.
As shown in this latest scholarship, the work in this area jettisons such “colonial” or “white” forms of analysis in favor of storytelling:
“I depart from a critical race perspective, employing counter-storytelling to construct (counter)narratives grounded in the lived experiences of people of colour. This method recognizes the connections between the historical impacts of colonialism and contemporary exclusions within organizations. By highlighting the experiences of people of colour navigating the university’s racism, I seek to provide rich accounts that reflect on how time is racialized and experienced in Dutch universities.”
There is a faux statistical framing based on “data” that is largely the subjective descriptions of minority academics:
“Initial open coding focused on participants’ descriptions of inequality across social, material and affective dimensions, including social, material and affective inequalities. While time was not predefined as an analytical category, it emerged inductively through participants’ recurring temporal framings of inequality.”
When one tries to drill down on the “data,” it appears entirely anecdotal and subjective, often turning on one or a handful of “narratives.” These stories are used to claim that academic measurements of success, driven by “white time,” are unfair to minority faculty: “these mechanisms position academics of colour perpetually as ‘almost there’ while their academic futures remain deferred.”
The thrust is that minority faculty should not be subject to traditional or accepted pathways for tenure or promotion:
“Academic time theft is not an incidental by-product of exclusion but a structural mechanism through which universities sustain white institutional time. It works by continuously delaying, interrupting and recalibrating what counts as academic legitimacy, ensuring that the labour of academics of colour remains productive for the institution while their progression is indefinitely postponed.
…To ensure that people of colour have academic futures, researchers and policymakers must break with the white temporality of academic work within which progress for some is enabled and for others is ongoingly deferred.”
Academia has already embraced narrative-driven scholarship in many departments as an alternative to traditional academic analysis. The Critical Legal Studies movement, for example, has challenged conventional scholarship as too restrictive and exclusionary. Few academics today dare to challenge such scholarship on the merits. To do so is to risk being labeled as reactionary or, even worse, racist.
This latest scholarship further challenges the time and structure for advancement for minority faculty as inherently racist. The question is whether the appointments and promotion process is at risk of losing objective and consistent measurements of scholarship.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Zakia Essanhaji’s 2026 paper, “Academic time theft: stealing time, producing racialized inclusion in Dutch academia,” attempts to frame the structural miseries of the modern university as a targeted racial project. Drawing on 15 interviews across two Dutch universities, the author posits that academics of colour are subjected to “academic time theft” via prolonged uncertainty, everyday disruption, and recursive evaluation.
While the paper highlights the very real pressures facing early-career researchers, its analysis is fatally compromised. It suffers from methodological fragility, conceptual overreach, and a remarkable blindness to the broader political economy of higher education. Ultimately, the paper takes the universal pathologies of the neoliberal university and forces them through a narrow, predetermined ideological filter.
The empirical foundation of this paper is staggeringly thin. Essanhaji relies on a mere 15 interviews to substantiate sweeping claims about systemic “racialised temporal regimes” across an entire national academic system. While qualitative research does not require massive sample sizes, making structural claims about institutional exclusion demands a comparative baseline. The author entirely fails to provide one.
By exclusively utilising “counter-storytelling” and thematic analysis preloaded with critical race theory, the methodology functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The research design is engineered not to test a hypothesis, but to validate the author’s theoretical commitments. When a researcher uses a conceptual framework designed exclusively to find “white institutional time”, they will inevitably find it. This approach sacrifices analytical rigour for ideological alignment.
The core theoretical contribution of the paper is the concept of academic time theft, which suggests institutions deliberately extract and fragment the time of marginalised academics. However, the mechanisms cited to prove this are deeply flawed.
Essanhaji points to insecure contracts, housing precarity, and the continual resetting of promotion criteria as evidence of this theft. These are not unique, racially targeted mechanisms of exclusion. They are the defining, universal characteristics of the modern Dutch university system for junior staff. The Netherlands is notorious for its hyper-competitive academic funding model, its heavy reliance on temporary contracts, and a nationwide housing crisis that affects the entire population.
To frame a junior academic struggling to find housing or secure a permanent contract as the victim of a bespoke, racialised “probation” is analytically lazy. It conflates the general exploitation of early-career academic labour with targeted racial malice.
The paper’s most glaring analytical failure is its core dichotomy. Essanhaji argues that “white institutional time” remains uninterrupted while the time of academics of colour is constantly delayed. This assumption is a gross distortion of academic reality.
The implication that white early-career academics enjoy serene, uninterrupted timelines devoid of precarious contracts, changing evaluation metrics, or administrative overload is absurd. The “recursive evaluation” described in the paper is simply the shifting goalposts of the modern metricised university. By attempting to shoehorn the crisis of academic casualisation into the framework of “chronopolitics”, the paper obscures the true driver of academic misery. It treats class, funding structures, and labour economics as mere background noise to elevate race as the sole explanatory variable.
Essanhaji’s paper is less an empirical investigation than an exercise in theoretical rebranding. While “academic time theft” is a compelling catchphrase, the concept collapses under scrutiny. The paper fundamentally misdiagnoses a systemic labour and funding crisis as a highly specific racial injustice.
The author’s recommendation that universities should treat temporality as an equity issue is practically meaningless without addressing the underlying funding structures that rely on disposable junior labour. By ignoring the broader political economy of higher education, the paper renders itself analytically hollow and practically useless for meaningful institutional reform.
Part of the problem is the publish-or-perish mentality. These ‘Academicians’ (lol) are therefore incentivised to pump out as much crap as possible.
The proper response: refuse to fund your child’s college education if they major in some shit like gender studies. With no students, there will be no tuition revenue to justify the bloviating of those worthless blowhards.
… and so on.
I think I’m beginning to get the hang of this DEI racket.
The science-based, industrial technology that supports a global population of eight billion depends more on precise measurement of time – and the need for punctuality – than on anything else.
If you can’t grasp that, you have no place in modern society.
I’ve only just gotten to the second episode of Lindsay’s podcast, but not without first having a good laugh at his “dialogue” with that Canadian know-it-all Peterson. Here, two complementary “influencers” are ‘influencing’ others with “Luciferian atheism.” What a hilarious bullshit. No, honestly, I didn’t spend more than two minutes on them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYGNTFY4ZIQ
Peterson says, the greatest sin is pride, vanity, arrogance. To emphasize his exceptional status, he wears a ring on his little finger. In body language it indicates how an individual sees himself in contrast to the group (all other fingers). If, for example, it is splayed out—as with British aristocrats holding a teacup—this signals: “I’m superior to all of you!”
Note on Lindsay’s podcast “The Nazi Experiment,” Episode 1:
The symbolic image he deliberately chose for his podcast —the “iconic” gate and train tracks of Auschwitz—sums up his “historical insight” (and only permissible conclusion): Racialism means extermination of Jews, not survival of Europeans.
Pronouncing Weltanschauung as “Weltenschwang” is the (rather funny) running gag of Lindsay’s worldview. For in doing so, he makes his own ignorance of what he is talking about abundantly clear in a way that is downright sensually perceptible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldview#Etymology
Among countless other errors and fallacies, he claims that Blavatsky (“on whose insane worldview National Socialism is based”) brought the swastika to Europe in 1870. Is this guy really that stupid, or does he think he can fool us this cheap way?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika_(Germanic_Iron_Age)
Preliminary note on Episode 2:
He cites the so-called “naturalistic fallacy” as follows: “The fact that animals don’t wear clothes does not imply that we should not wear clothes.” Of course animals wear clothes: their own fur! In other words, our clothes are our substitute fur. But Lindsay is supposedly too stupid to even realize that.
He claims that people of mixed race are not cross-species hybrids, since there is only one human species. Therefore, racial mixing has no health-related consequences (genetic, behavioral, etc.). This argument is untenable. It is well known, for example, that people of mixed race have great difficulty finding compatible organ transplants.
It has also been shown time and again that racially mixed individuals tend to be more aggressive than “pure-bred” ones. It has even been proven that parts of the West African population carry genetic material from an extinct human species, and that the proportion of Neanderthal genes in Europeans is significantly higher than, for example, in sub-Saharan Africa.
The question is how to define “species” and “race.” In the animal kingdom, it can be clearly observed that hybrids actually arise only under artificial (i.e., not natural) circumstances. The “British” Lord Rothschild even crossed zebras with horses, which, as expected, was contrary to nature.
Even if we all (supposedly) belong to the same species, racial differences are clearly visible, recognizable, and noticeable. Even the body odors of different races differ in a clearly perceptible way and play a genetic role in mate selection. The question is whether we belong to the same subspecies, or genus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liger
All parents think their own child is the most beautiful in the world. But only the European race exhibits such diversity in its mental and physical characteristics. The beauty of European diversity is a feast for the eyes. Yet we are becoming increasingly monotonous; light eyes, skin, and hair are on the verge of extinction.
https://nationalvanguard.org/2021/09/racial-purity/
Always some whites from the faculty lounge arguing over the New Man workers utopia that is never going to happen.
Academia is jewish.
Administration, faculty and … students.
Those stats saying there’s still xx% White, in reality have only a fraction ethnic European bc jews are counted as White.
Again, the jew is pitting everyone against the ethnic European, while he runs the board.
Don’t be a dumb Goyim, know the enemy
I haven’t listened to the rest of Lindsay’s podcast episode 2 yet; I only got as far as the point where he brought up a book by a Jewish author (as expected, he cites Jewish “key sources” far too often) that compared America to Weimar as early as 1982.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ominous_Parallels
https://pdfhost.io/v/2y2W47qp53_Ominous_Parallels
In the introduction to Peikoff’s book—which, as before, is clearly intended to demonize Germany as “absolute evil”—Ayn Rand notes the following:
“As an example of why the cause of Nazism should be understood (but is not), I would like to mention a recent television interview with Helmut Schmidt, Chancellor of West Germany. Asked to name his favorite philosopher, he answered —in a changed tone of voice, a stiff, solemn, deaf-and-blind, heel-clicking tone—“Marcus Aurelius. He taught that we must do our duty above all.” If he is typical of his country (and I believe he is), Germany has learned nothing.”
Helmut Schmidt was one-quarter Jewish. Ms. Rand probably didn’t know this. But it gets even crazier: Did Ms. Rand help herself to Hitler’s belongings? https://www.renegadetribune.com/ayn-rand-plagiarized-adolf-hitler/
A British sport shooter visits a German company.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUSTD6sL9b4
I’ve finally managed to gather five or more moving boxes full of (mostly electronic) music that I downloaded from the internet for years in the 2010s like a manic addict (through German platforms like Rapidshare or Megaupload, not to mention Karlheinz Brandenburg’s invention, the “MP3”).
Some CDs/DVDs got broken. Which is annoying, because I don’t know what was on them. Now I have to check each disc individually to see if there’s anything on it that might interest my American audience. After that, I have to check if the tracks are available on Judentube or upload them myself.
It is clearly stated here that this is not just a bunch of junk, but rather artists who were generally born between 1945 and about 1953—that’s the rule, though there were exceptions (Vangelis was born in 1943, but his work is widely available). I quickly sensed the inventiveness of this generation.
Film operates on a different generational level. I realized that the generation of brilliant musicians in the electronic music scene is not the same as the one in film world. There, too, are plenty of surprises in store, though it’s hard to say to what extent something like that can be translated into English.
Our world is still (far too) “Eurocentric”; it’s high ti-
me to turn it completely upside down. It would only
cost a few billion to reprint all the books and maps.
https://x.com/professorkao/status/1663565269644750850
But is time itself racist? As we know, it is becau-
se no one can escape our linear Protestant capita-
lism! Especially not when it’s controlled by Jews!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS6wHAEVdHE
People with strong connection to Saturn (like me
and Kevin MacDonald) have strong presence in
here & now. They are more aware of transience.
American with German surname Fricke made a film.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhybkLmFhAs
Replacement for the defective Judentube version. This film makes a powerful statement without words. What is its main message? “That what is valuable survives.” He must have influenced Nietzsche when the latter wrote: “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger!” He means: “Build immunity or die! Base your existence on substance and sustainability!”
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1s54y1B7w4/?uid=425631733534793142377734
The test of the merciless Chronos, who is another name for Saturn. The magnificent Saturn has those striking rings that seem to hold him captive and confine him, but which in truth make him a power that transcends generations. Saturn tolerates no lies, no cowardice, no laziness, and will crush anything that fails to measure up to this standard.