A Dutch professor has declared that time is racist. In a paper that sounds like a parody but is depressingly real, the academic argues that Western concepts of linear time, punctuality, schedules and deadlines embody "whiteness" and colonial oppression. "White time" supposedly marginalises non-Western, more "relational" or cyclical understandings of temporality. The piece, covered by Jonathan Turley, is the latest entry in the radical Left's seemingly endless project: everything must be deconstructed as racist, oppressive, or colonial; except, of course, the deconstructors themselves.
This is not fringe crankery. It flows directly from the postmodern and critical race theory playbook that has captured large parts of academia. If mathematics, logic, grammar, punctuality, the nuclear family, merit, objectivity, and now the very flow of time itself can be racialised as "white," then the entire edifice of Western civilisation stands condemned. The goal is never serious analysis. It is the delegitimisation of the West's achievements so that radical political transformation appears not just desirable, but morally mandatory.
The Absurdity of Racialising Time
Time is not a cultural invention of Europeans. It is a fundamental feature of reality. The sun rises and sets, seasons change, organisms age and die, cause precedes effect. Every human society that survived developed ways to track it: calendars, seasons, astronomical observations. Ancient Egyptians, Chinese, Mayans, Indians and Africans all had sophisticated timekeeping. The Gregorian calendar and mechanical clocks that enabled modern industrial society were refinements built on earlier foundations, driven by the scientific revolution and the practical demands of commerce, navigation and science.
Labelling efficient time management "white" is both factually wrong and deeply condescending. It implies that non-Western peoples are somehow less capable of punctuality, foresight or linear planning, a soft bigotry of low expectations dressed up as anti-racism. In reality, successful East Asian societies (Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China) are famously rigorous about time, schedules and deadlines. African and Middle Eastern business cultures vary, but no serious observer attributes differences primarily to "whiteness" rather than culture, institutions, education and incentives. Blaming "white time" for disparities is a category error that substitutes racial essentialism for analysis of human capital, governance and values.
The claim collapses under its own logic. If time is racist, then so is every technological and scientific advance that depends on precise measurement: physics, engineering, medicine, logistics. Modern life, from air travel to cancer treatment to global supply chains, relies on it. Are these also "white supremacist"? The position reduces to civilisational self-sabotage: reject the tools that built prosperity because dead white men helped perfect them.
The Selective Outrage: Everything is Racist Except the Left!
For the radical Left, almost everything associated with Western success is now tainted. Classic literature is colonial. Mathematics is oppressive. Standards of evidence and debate are Eurocentric. Even the expectation that students show up on time or master core material can be problematised as "white." Yet the same activists rarely apply this lens consistently to non-Western cultures. Tribal practices, religious fundamentalism, arranged marriages, or historical atrocities in Africa, Asia and the Americas are contextualised, relativised or ignored. The asymmetry is glaring: only the West must be pathologised and dissolved.
This is not principled anti-racism. It is a political weapon. Critical race and postcolonial theory treat "whiteness" as original sin and power as a zero-sum game. The aim is not to improve standards for everyone but to tear down the ones that produced unprecedented wealth, freedom and scientific progress. The professors and activists pushing these ideas operate on comfortable Western salaries, enjoy reliable transport, electricity, antibiotics and academic freedom, all made possible by the very linear, future-oriented, evidence-based culture they denounce as racist. The hypocrisy is total.
Marx Himself was a Racist!
The irony deepens when we remember the intellectual godfather of much of this thinking. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were hardly paragons of anti-racism. Marx referred to some non-European peoples in crude racial terms, dismissed "Oriental despotism," and viewed certain groups as historically backward or destined for absorption by more "advanced" civilisations. Engels celebrated the conquest of "barbarian" peoples. The Marxist tradition has its own long record of ethnocentrism, hierarchy and justification of violence against "reactionary" classes or nations. Modern critical theorists selectively inherit the revolutionary zeal while airbrushing the inconvenient prejudices.
The lesson is simple: all human groups and civilisations have flaws. Obsessing over the sins of the West while excusing or ignoring others is not moral clarity; it is selective historical blindness that serves a political project of Western self-abnegation.
Time is not racist. It is neutral, inexorable, and universal. Societies that master it through discipline, planning, innovation and cultural norms that value punctuality and foresight, thrive. Those that do not face predictable disadvantages. Pretending otherwise does not liberate anyone; it traps people in excuses and lowers expectations.
The "white time" thesis is the predictable endpoint of a rotten epistemology: if everything successful about the West can be racialised as oppressive, then failure elsewhere is never the fault of culture, governance or values, it is always colonialism's fault, even decades after independence. This is not scholarship. It is ideological copium.
Universities and public discourse must reject this nonsense. Civilisation depends on reason, evidence and competence, not guilt-driven deconstruction. Time waits for no one, least of all those busy proving that the clock itself is the enemy.