Anti-blackness finds it foundations not in legal solutions or politics, but in white temporality that constructs whiteness as civilized and blackness as temporally displaced. This racialized temporal displacement is not a one-off event, but a system that that applies itself into white spaces, marking black modes of being as “wastes of time” and “unproductive.”

I’m reclaiming my time… reclaiming my time…reclaiming my time

—Congresswoman Maxine Waters, July 2017

In July 2017 during a congressional hearing, Congresswoman Maxine Waters famously declared, “I’m reclaiming my time… reclaiming my time ::: reclaiming my time.” These words, she repeated with a cutting calmness whilst Secretary of the Treasury, Steve Mnuchin, evaded her questions with excessive cajolery (Emba, 2017). In drowning his appeal to the backdrop, the congresswoman disrupted white spatiality and white time expectations, and at once, claimed her institutional power as the U.S. Representative for California’s 43rd congressional district. To be more precise, in claiming ownership over time, a valued commodity in white space, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, a Black woman, declared control and authority to dictate within white space.

Indeed, her declaration was a declaration like no other. Assertive. Powerful. Bold. And even more, it bore with it historical and intersectional significance; looming in the midst of such a declaration as hers is a system and structure so wide and vast, so deep and racist—and gendered—that it had afforded (and will continue to afford) Mnuchin’s audacity to undermine her. Insomuch as these exchanges between a Black congresswoman and a white male Secretary may be deemed as interpersonal and interrelational, they also implicate the multiple layers of systemic, structural, and institutional anti-Blackness in which Congresswoman Waters has had, and continues to navigate in order to claim her place within the U.S. legislature and the wider space that is our country. In fact, similar to whiteness, these layers of anti-Blackness are so pervasive and common that they are easily rendered invisible and normal, inhibiting, for instance, the right to time and space and thus the right to one’s full humanity—for Black women (as in the case of Congresswoman Waters) and on a broader scope, for Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color. Within the context of counseling psychology, scholars and practitioners must gain a deeper intersectional understanding of systemic racism and its foundational underpinnings within white space and time. In our conceptualization of systemic racism, we specify that white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism are integral to the creation and recreation of white space and white time. Our racial–spatial framework of systemic racism allows us to connect the intrapsychic and interpersonal with the economic, territorial, and temporal aspects of racism that are not always comprehensively addressed in counseling psychology research. We contend that this clearer awareness of systemic racism could help counseling psychologists in their research and counseling practices to better support Black and non-Black people of Color to challenge and disrupt anti-Blackness.

In this article, we note that whereas anti-Blackness positions “the Black person as socially dead—that is denied humanity and thus ineligible for full citizenship” (Dumas, 2016, p. 12), anti-Black racism is the structural and systemic authorization of that dehumanization. Relatedly, individual acts of racism are enabled, perpetuated, protected, and normalized by racist systems that work in concert with and constitute systemic racism. Thus, when we reference racism, we are viewing it through the lenses of structural and systemic racism (Helms, 2017). We use Black to reference individuals, people, and communities who are Black. As Dumas (2016) notes, “Black is a synonym (however imperfect) of African American” and it is “recognition of Black people as an actual political group within civil society” (p. 13). We use white in lower case because whiteness is an unstable social construct (Dumas, 2016) that continuously mutates in order to maintain white supremacy. We use Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color and/or Black and non-Black people of Color to acknowledge the ontology of anti-Blackness and how white supremacy and racism affect our lived realities as non-white racialized groups and individuals—albeit from varying histories of racialization and with varying outcomes. As noted, the dismantlement of racism in U.S. contexts must begin with rupturing anti-Black racism if we are to further facilitate liberatory possibilities for Black and non-Black communities of Color. At the same time, we caution against any conflation of our various experiences, recognizing that our examination of anti-Black racism cannot and must not derail Black liberatory efforts for Black communities and Black people (Vargas, 2018).

Furthermore, our use of “onto-epistemology” describes the interconnections between the “ontological position on the question of reality, such as whether or not racism is structural in nature or defined as expressions of individual prejudice” and the “epistemological assumptions about what constitutes knowledge and ::: ” how we understand the “…relationship between the known and the knower as well who counts as a subject, as opposed to an object, of knowledge” (Leonardo, 2013, p. 599). In our definition, a racial– spatial onto-epistemology refers to the philosophical and ideological assumptions about race and racism in the U.S. Specifically, it refers to how we conceive of racism as systemic, institutional, and structural and how we interpret and make sense of race and racism within the constructs of white space and white time from the knowledge and experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black peoples of Color. White spaces refer to the “geographic areas perceived by White people to have boundaries and protections for White privilege; White people; and their behaviors, culture, and norms” (Liu et al., 2019, p. 147). Accordingly, our racial–spatial onto-epistemology of systemic racism assumes that white spaces are configured to privilege whiteness and white culture, and that these spaces are materially rewarding to people who subscribe to it. Through our onto-epistemological conceptualization of systemic racism, we address anti-Blackness specifically and emphasize the connections between global and U.S.-based anti-Blackness and its continued significance in racialized capitalism and white supremacy. We recognize and acknowledge that global and U.S.-based anti-indigeneity were and are critical aspects in the founding and perpetuation of systemic racism. Certainly, we cannot stress enough the multilayers of oppression and racial violence that were and continue to be inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in the U.S. That we even speak of “property,” at all, in relation to white space must be anchored in settler colonialism (i.e., land theft, displacement of Indigenous peoples), “genocidal carcerality [or] the multiplicity and entanglement of spatial strategies at work within any genocidal context” (Woolford & Gacek, 2016, p. 401), and its interconnections to the annihilation of Indigenous peoples and erasure of their cultures (i.e., genocide, environmental racism, Indian residential, boarding, and mission schools) that come with it. Anti-indigeneity thus deserves and demands a much more thorough, complex explication than what we can offer in this article.

Our focus on anti-Blackness as part of our theoretical synthesis of systemic racism is an acknowledgment that “through perpetual and multifaceted enactments of violence, anti-Blackness makes possible the accumulation necessary for capitalist reproduction” (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019, p. 11). That is, for the perpetuation of racial capitalism and white supremacy, anti-Blackness “remains a necessary precondition” (p. 8), and anti-Blackness and anti-Black racism figure heavily in the coherence, configuration, and continuation of systemic racism. For example, an intersectional critique of gender roles must focus on how Black women, who often performed agricultural and farm labor, were critical in defining rigid racialized gendered roles that also differentiated Black people, especially Black women apart from white men and women (Morgan, 2004). More specifically, anti-Blackness insists on Black nonhumanness (Wilderson, 2020) by denying Black people any connection to power and privilege associated with whiteness, and denying their capacity to legitimately occupy a place. And thus “the geographic locations in which Black populations reside are treated as open to the varied agendas espoused by dominant spatial actors” (i.e., white people; p. 12). As Bledsoe and Wright (2019) suggests, there is a particular kind of invisibility attached to Blackness or a Black “aspatiality” (p. 13). Through a historical perspective, Archer (2020) aptly describes how this Black a-spatiality justified the construction of roadways and highways that were purposely built through Black neighborhoods, businesses, and homes as a means to ease white travel time while creating concrete barriers that restricted Black people and Black families movements, and decimated vibrant cultural and economic Black communities.

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Racial capitalism, as Robinson (2000) defines, is the accumulation and production of wealth for white people through exploitation, dispossession, and displacement of Black and non-Black people of Color, and makes racism material and rewarding for white people. Hence, white racial spaces are configured through the cooperative functioning of power governors (Liu, 2017), or institutions whose own racial capitalist interests are further advanced by the establishment and elevation of whiteness (Robinson, 2000). In these racial spaces, there exists a racial economy where white epistemologies are valued (Bryant-Davis & Moore-Lobban, 2020), and where white time is used for profit (Parham, 1993a) and to create racial trauma. Thus, in this article, we declare the right to claim such space, and the right to claim such time for and by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color. As Asian American, non-Black educators and researchers of Color whose works interrogate racism and asymmetrical power relations, we acknowledge that within systemic racism, people of Color experience differential racialization in the U.S. (Delgado & Stefancic, 2012). Furthermore, we know that we must dismantle anti-Blackness (Vargas, 2018) and that simply, there is no racial justice without Black racial justice. Conceptualizing Systemic Racism Must Move Beyond the Individual and Intrapsychic In counseling psychology, our understanding and use of systemic racism remain fragmented, wherein anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and racial capitalism are discussed through individualistic, intrapsychic, and nonintersectional perspectives (i.e., they are often conceptualized separately and independently of one another). Counseling psychology must explicitly examine the interconnectedness of racial capitalism, anti-Blackness, and white supremacy, and interrogate white power institutions and systems in connection to anti-Black racism. As Pieterse et al. (2011) state, promoting psychological health among Black clients requires a more complete comprehension of the “psychological antecedents of oppression as experienced by individuals of African descent” (p. 93). Because counseling psychology research has focused mostly on the interpersonal and intrapsychic attitudes and beliefs about racism (e.g., racial trauma, micro-aggressions, and other forms of psychological tension and conflict), terminology like systems, structures, and institutions may be articulated but do not necessarily critically question and/or expose the power systems underlying racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. Terms like institutional and structural racism in counseling psychology thus have become tropes much like colonizing and decolonizing (Táíwò, 2020) or antiracism, where asymmetric power relations are flattened and obfuscated. Our conceptualization of systemic racism calls for the central interrogation of power and racism and underscores the deep interconnections between anti-Blackness, white supremacy, and racial capitalism. In other words, anti-Blackness (i.e., the denial of humanity to Black people; Wilderson, 2020) in the U.S., must be examined at a structural and systemic level (i.e., as anti-Black racism) if researchers and practitioners are to confront and dismantle white supremacist ideologies in counseling psychology (Helms, 2017). In studying racism, counseling psychology’s focus on people’s interpersonal behaviors and psychological dispositions, suggests that the eradication of anti-Black racism—or any racism for that matter—hinges primarily on individuals being aware and making the right, reasonable, and equitable choices. Similarly, the assumptions in counseling psychological scholarship predominantly placate to whiteness as standard and default (Grzanka et al., 2019). In other words, the language and terminology of racism-related constructs often converge around white epistemologies, sensibilities, and experiences about the function and nature of racism, rather than around the lived experiences of Black and other non-Black people of Color. Even research focused on Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color tend to look at how individuals and their communities have been acculturated to navigate within white physical, cultural, and racial paradigms, spaces, and time (Liu et al., 2019), rather than imagine other possibilities. But what if we were to imagine just that? What if we were to imagine possibilities wherein the eradication of racism was not about fitting into the default of whiteness, or acculturating to white values and practice, or surviving in white spaces, or existing in white time (Bryant-Davis & Moore-Lobban, 2020)? What if we were to imagine possibilities wherein the eradication of racism and the creation of psychological health were about the making and claiming of space, and thus, the making and claiming of time for and by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color—untouched by whiteness? We begin our theoretical synthesis by examining extant scholarship on systemic racism, anti-Blackness, racial capitalism, and white supremacy in counseling psychology. Specifically, we discuss the problems arising from using the term, “systemic racism,” without explicitly connecting it to racial capitalism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness (Liu, 2017). In this critique, we identify the potential limitations of using a systems theoretical approach that does not center on exposing the structures (i.e., the physical geographies related to racism) and institutions (i.e., the policies and practices, such as white time within organizations) of racism or explicate how systemic racism functions, for whom, and for what purpose. Second, we describe racial capitalism, white space, and white time and how they function within systemic racism to create material and psychological rewards and advantages for white people while spatially and temporally exploiting, displacing, and dispossessing Black and non-Black people of Color. It is within this framework of systemic racism that white privileges and advantages are recreated through the continued inequities levied against Black and non-Black people of Color. Finally, we call on the profession to challenge current assumptions about research and practice, and we provide recommendations on how the reclaiming of space and time may be actions toward liberation for Black and non-Black people of Color.

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A Racial–Spatial Framework on Systemic Racism

Anti-Blackness and white supremacist ideologies are deeply ingrained and embedded in American culture, education, and economics, so much so that their deleterious impact on the lives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color is described by psychologists as weathering and racial battle fatigue (Geronimus et al., 2006). This constant effect of systemic racism needs to be theorized as an encompassing institutionalized aggression against Black and non-Black people of Color rather than just a psychological stressor within systems. For instance, in the Multicultural Guidelines (American Psychological Association, 2017), systemic racism is examined through an existing psychological framework: The application of an ecological approach to help contextualize psychology practice and research. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (EST; Bronfenbrenner, 1979) was adapted and used in the guidelines to help the reader envision the ecological cascade and devastating impact of racism on the individual. And while the EST is a well-researched and applied theory of child development, it remains a child development theory, and largely indifferent about the genesis or persistence of racism. Racism, within the EST, is just one of many potential harms or stressors that may happen within multiple systems. Thus, racism as a system or set of systems is severely undertheorized within EST. And while EST is a theory of an ecology of systems in which racism may be a part, EST is not a theory of systemic racism and its impact on the trajectory of human development. Consequently, one limitation in EST is that it assumes normal functioning layers of society for the child and individual, and racism creates dysfunctions that are anomalies rather than system wide and deliberate.

Our racial-realistic (Bell, 1993) conceptualization of systemic racism framed by Critical Race Theory (CRT; Delgado & Stefancic, 2012) posits that racism is purposeful, normal, and permanent, and not spontaneous, disjointed, or disorganized (see Figure 1). Systemic racism is ideologically driven and materially rewarding. It also differentiates between the privileged and the oppressed. It is selfcontained and it continues to reproduce itself, in part, through adapting and evolving the mechanisms by which its aims are met (e.g., adapting laws around enslavement toward incarceration). In our definition, systemic racism comprises networks of institutions and structures that are rooted in white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and racial capitalism with the goal of creating, protecting, and sustaining white spaces and property. These structures and institutions help reproduce white epistemologies, whiteness, and the belief of white superiority; the result of systemic racism is continued asymmetrical power dynamics that legitimize and rationalize varied forms of racism against Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other non-Black people of Color. Through the CRT perspective, systemic racism connects structural and procedural injustices embedded within sciences, law, economics, education, and culture and where inequity, death, and annihilation are expected outcomes for Black people in American society. In short, systemic racism legitimizes asymmetric power as normal and practically banal.

As mentioned, extant counseling psychological research may invoke the term, systemic racism, but in general it does not clearly or consistently name white power institutions, racial capitalism, and/ or anti-Blackness. Without this explicit naming and interrogation, the research is also limited from fully exposing ways that these institutions form the ideologies and structures through which individual white people can participate in racism regardless of malintentionality and/or awareness (Jones & Carter, 1996). Whereas some white people may commit racism daily and deny accountability and/or that racism exists at all, for instance, systemic racism directs us to see that racist environments can be sufficiently stressful for creating psychological and metabolic problems for Black people and non-Black people of Color (Paradies et al., 2015). In other words, because racist attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and practices are systemic (i.e., they are everywhere across institutions and communities), and because they are embedded within, and are supported by the structure, most Black and non-Black people of Color do not have to experience explicit forms of racism every day in order to suffer from the harm reaped as a consequence.

But if systemic racism is so detrimental to communities of Color, why has it continued to persist? We argue that systemic racism stabilizes institutions in the United States and helps to make institutional and organizational practices predictable. Historically, for instance, racism racialized the accounting of Black people and their labor (Fleischman & Tyson, 2004) stable so that white wealth creation and capitalism could be predicted and appropriately accounted for. Racism, and more specifically, anti-Black racism was monetized (Fleischman et al., 2004; i.e., via chattel slavery) and helped legitimize and stabilize the development and operation of white global capitalism and exploitation. As capitalism evolved from European feudalism, the accounting of Black people who were enslaved (i.e., their productivity, their insured replacement cost, and their projected lifespan) allowed white investors to better forecast markets, prices, and profits (Robinson, 2000). Imperiality and colonial beliefs and practices reified the binary of human and nonhuman and between person and nature (Jenkins & Leroy, 2021). Relatedly, anti-Blackness flourished during European colonial conquests on the African continent, and anti-Blackness synthesized with anti-indigenous beliefs and practices (i.e., land theft, genocide, and indoctrination) in the Americas so that white settler colonials could cultivate riches for their imperial investors (Jenkins & Leroy, 2021).

Settler colonials were primarily white people who were practiced in stealing and occupying land, abolishing those who lived on them, and transforming land into wealth-generating properties (Verancini, 2011). These white settler colonials were not only invested in their properties and institutional longevity but also in reproducing and embedding their ideologies and worldviews (e.g., white supremacy and anti-Blackness). Today, anti-Blackness persists within these institutions and societal structures like banking, education, and law because most white people still benefit—materially and psychologically—from its continued operations (Patel, 2015). In similar ways that most white people were (and are) likely to forge solidarity in their whiteness, many white people can, and have found common purpose in anti-Blackness (e.g., National Football League fans and owners protesting a kneeling football player; Liu et al., 2019). Given the explicit functions of anti-Blackness in sustaining white privilege and power, we can thus appreciate Warren’s (2018) assertion in Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation wherein he writes: “Black freedom, then, would constitute a form of world destruction...” (2018, p. 6). In other words, antiBlackness (and its inextricable entanglement with systemic racism) is so vital to the survival of society as we know it under white supremacy, that dismantling it would be dismantling society itself.

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A fuller incorporation of racial capitalism with settler colonialism helps illuminate how systemic racism is meant to reap material benefits for white people. Systemic racism becomes real and tangible through the process of creating and maintaining properties, or white spaces and white ecologies. In this racial ecology, Black and nonBlack people of Color may be granted proxy privileges (Liu, 2017), particularly for those who internalize a colonial mentality (Pieterse et al., 2011). These rewards of proxy-privileges work to help perpetuate systemic racism by tokenizing the perceived imprimatur of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color in these spaces (Settles et al., 2019). Our conceptualization of systemic racism extends Liu’s (2017) suggestion that one of the purposes of racism in the United States was to acquire land and property, to control geography, and to maintain economic inequity, and that these processes converge to limit the lives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian and other non-Black people of Color. Systemic racism creates seamless white spaces for the material and psychological and emotional benefit of white people (Anicich et al., 2021; Liu et al., 2019). To this end, systemic racism in the U.S. context is white racism and must be named explicitly as such; and while Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color can subscribe to white supremacist ideologies and participate in racist bias and discrimination, they only receive proxy privileges (Liu, 2017) and contingent institutional positionalities as a result, and not the full protection of white privilege (Helms, 2017; Liu, 2017). To be clear, although white people can experience various forms of discrimination, white people do not experience systemic racism because the full material benefit of systemic racism is exclusively reserved for them. But to understand these material benefits for white people—how racism connects to materiality—we must understand the functions of racial capitalism within systemic racism. Racial Capitalism Racial capitalism helps expose how racism becomes material (Robinson, 2000). To clarify, capitalism is premised on acquisition and accumulation of private ownership of property (Jenkins & This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. 248 LIU, LIU, AND SHIN Leroy, 2021). Within capitalism, it is irrelevant how that property is initially created or what that resource and property are, as long as it can be used to generate wealth (Robinson, 2000). Since one of the most permanent forms of property is land, we can deduce that white geographic spaces serve as the foundation for racial capitalism in the United States. Upon this stolen land, exploitable labor is necessary to create wealth. Robinson (2000) described racial capitalism as the ideology and practices to control and exploit Black people for white wealth. Toward this goal, race became biological and bound-toblood so that counting and categorizing Black people was easier (Feder, 2007). Race was also tied to specific geographies (i.e., Africa) and nations whereby territorial conquest and exploitation from European colonialism was attributed and conflated with whole populations (Hawthorne, 2019). Further entrenching it into U.S. society, academic sciences like medicine and psychology sought scientific legitimacy and eagerly joined into the geneticizing of race and racial differences and helped to further reify racial differences, deficits, and white superiority (Helms, 2012). Similarly, legal professionals also created the language of private property for real estate and the enslaved, and tied land and humans to white capitalists, thus authorizing the intergenerational inheritance of those assets (Jones-Rogers, 2019). For counseling psychologists, racial capitalism and systemic racism are reproduced through these white settler-colonial worldviews, or what Katz (1985) refers to as white cultural values. Yet, because she does not name white supremacist ideologies that cohere these values (Liu et al., 2019), Katz missed the opportunity to explicate how these values become behaviors and attitudes that continue systemic racism. By using a racial–spatial ontoepistemological conceptualization of systemic racism, we could see that Katz (1985) basically described the relationship of racial capitalism and white settler-colonial epistemology (Verancini, 2011) when she provided the constellation of white cultural values such as mastering and controlling nature; owning goods, space, and property; and viewing time as a commodity (Liu et al., 2019). Therefore, within this conceptualization of white cultural values, exploiting property to generate wealth through the application of asymmetric power is a core aspect of whiteness and its operations within systemic racism. Not surprisingly, whiteness has a powerful and elevated position in our society because of its capacity and connection to racial capitalism. Thus, whiteness is a privileged and protected identity—a type of highly valued property (Harris, 1995) and one that draws white people to continually protect it and invest in it. In short, a racial capitalism framework helps us see ways in which this investment in whiteness is not a passive process but constitutes a form of legitimized white racial greed where the practices of hoarding, reducing racial economic competition, and vigilance against constant threats to one’s position and status are normalized (Adjei, 2018). Furthermore, while some white people may compete against other white people for resources (e.g., Katz, 1985), when it comes to racial issues and racial equity, many white people perceive it as a zero-sum game where they lose when Black people gain and succeed (Norton & Sommers, 2011). This belief derives from a subscription to a racial hierarchy where many white people believe that they (Mutz, 2018) and their children must be prioritized (Hagerman, 2018), and where vigilance means surveilling and policing the boundaries of these pristine white spaces for other white people (Gruber, 2020). Psychological research has revealed the potential cognitive processes, which may underlie white boundary surveilling and policing. Studies suggest that many white people tend to positively regard other whites as American more easily when compared to people who have varying or ambiguous nonwhite racial features (Devos & Banaji, 2005; Kunst et al., 2018). Indeed, research shows that most white people prefer to be among other white people (Anicich et al., 2021) suggesting that, a presence of Black and other non-Black people of Color, for example, could disrupt their sense of comfort. For these white individuals, white spaces are critical in helping them feel safe and comfortable (Bledsoe & Wright, 2019; Liu et al., 2019). As Du Bois (1920) remarks, many white people believe “that whiteness is the ownership of the Earth forever and ever” (p. 20), and as Franz Fanon (1963) states, “the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land” (p. 9). White Spatiality If the goal for most white people is to own land and space and to replicate that space to reflect their own likeness, then what does it mean for Black and other non-Black people of Color? In her book Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle, McKittrick (2006) examines the interconnections between race and spatiality and writes, “Black matters are spatial matters,” (p. xiii) suggesting that Blackness (and the dehumanization of Blackness i.e., anti-Blackness) is coconstructed with space, and that the ways in which spaces are structurally configured (e.g., segregated neighborhoods, green spaces, supermarkets, roadways) relate to race, racism, and racial identity. That race is connected with space implies that space can be constructed for the comfort of white people, and space can also be made to exclude Black people (and in varying ways, other non-Black people of Color). To this point, a Black person (and/or a non-Black person of Color) can walk into a space and feel that it is racist, even though no person has expressed racism directly at them. And this would make sense, because for Black and non-Black people of Color, racialized spaces have always been a part of their lives (Onwuachi-Willig, 2017). Robinson (2000) describes this knowledge as the “accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle” (p. xxx), which certainly includes a Black onto-epistemology of white spaces (i.e., an internalized Black spatial cartography; Butler, 2018). Most Black and non-Black people of Color understand that white spaces come with white cultural norms and expectations. Living within the white spaces often means knowing that there exists a white racial ordering and expectations of how to behave in ways that keep white people calm (i.e., be racially innocuous; Liu et al., 2019). Stepping off the sidewalk to make way for white people, enduring surveillance when shopping (Schreer et al., 2009), and coping with one’s real anger, fear, and anxiety during police stops (Lloyd et al., 2020) are aspects of living in white spaces, particularly for Black people, and in varying degrees, for other non-Black people of Color, who learned these norms and expectations from hostile acculturative experiences (e.g., racial trauma; Liu et al., 2019). Hence, one of the quintessential experiences of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other non-Black people of Color in the United States is physical displacement, dislocation, and dispossession and the struggle to find one’s place (i.e., racial identity; McKittrick, 2011). In contrast, for many white people, they see the space around them as theirs, which allows for their “ontological expansiveness” (Sullivan, 2004, p. 302) and movement into every physical (i.e., through motion), psychological (i.e., through discourse), and emotional space (i.e., through empathy and humility). Simply, systemic racism allows white people to learn about whiteness and themselves as “white people” (i.e., their white racial identity) through their racially privileged interactions in perceived white spaces. Thus, most white people may feel in-place almost everywhere and can actively avoid nonwhite spaces (e.g., Black and non-Black communities of Color) and/or push out Black and nonBlack people of Color to create new white spaces (i.e., structural advantages; Bledsoe & Wright, 2019) based on their perception of racial encroachment and threat (Anicich et al., 2021). Regardless of context, we understand that these physical ecologies and white spaces both constitute and preserve systemic racism and the white racial order wherein Black people are always relegated to last. Studies show that places that were heavily invested in Black enslavement, for instance, continue to have the highest incarceration and capital punishment rates of Black people (Alexander, 2012; Vandiver et al., 2007). Geographically, these places also represent the highest rates of racial economic inequity (Mihm, 2014) where Black community members have the poorest health rates (Neblett, 2019; Park et al., 2021; Price et al., 2021). Racist social media participation in these geographic locations is also related to Black and non-Black people of Color having higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, stroke, myocardial infarction, coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease, and mortality (Huang et al., 2020). Systemic racism implies multiple institutions, or power governors (Liu, 2017) that derive material benefits through mutual collaboration or benign neglect (i.e., waiting out racism). These power governors are situated through real “brick-and-mortar” structures where their geographic positions are purposefully organized for institutional economic viability and help create and legitimize white racial spaces (Archer, 2020; Gruber, 2020). Racial segregation, for example, in neighborhoods and schools is among the most visible and enduring representations of structured racism and inequity (Rothstein, 2017). Black communities are often separated off by walls, highways, and toxic landfills, all of which amplify negative physical and psychological health effects (Jones-Rounds et al., 2014). For instance, access to healthcare facilities in white communities is much easier and more convenient than in predominantly Black communities (Shin et al., 2016). Additionally, white communities benefit from “bluelining” (Gruber, 2020, p. 867) where police are likely to respond quickly to protect these white spaces for white people.

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White Time

White spaces become meaningful, universal, and profitable through the operation of white time. White time (Mills, 2014, 2020) also tells us how white people and Black and non-Black people of Color are supposed to exist in these spaces. For many Black and non-Black people of Color, systemic racism has a persistent temporal effect because many of the traumas are consistently recapitulated and have a longevity and pervasiveness through constructs like historical traumas, colorism and internalized racism, decolonization, and racist stereotypes. Racism and time also disrupt Black health through shortening lifespans and gestational terms. In contrast, white people may have the racial privilege of seeing time linearly or as a source of profit (Parham, 1993a) because white time is often synchronous with white cultural norms, systemic racism, and institutional processes. Being in-synchronicity with systemic racism may mean that, given the same period of time, white people may be more productive because their race is not a factor in their work (Parham, 1993b).

Where white time was used against Black people who were enslaved through purposefully calculating lifespans and labor output of men, women, children, and future generations, white people never suffered this kind of trauma because of their race (Morgan, 2004). Instead, white people’s time is not to be wasted (Mills, 2014, 2020), and they should always be “first in line” (Liu, 2017, p. 354) because their time is more valuable. Conversely, for Black people, systemic racism constantly wastes, steals, and disrupts their time through police harassment and violence (i.e., persisting anger and fear), receiving slower service at a restaurant, waiting longer at the doctor’s office, inappropriate health diagnoses, or being denied a purchase because their form of payment is deemed as illegitimate. Thus, being a Black person and/or a non-Black person of Color in white space means having the constant aggressive experience of time-theft. In mental health, for instance, Black people have difficulty finding and starting effective treatment (Shin et al., 2016); and thus, their time is stolen through racist nonresponding and delays.

Another way to understand white time in white space is through allochronism (Rosa, 2019). Allochronism and systemic racism are forms of dehumanization, where white people may perceive, conceptualize, and experience the racialized other as not existing within the same time as they are—the white perceivers (Kowal, 2015; Rosa, 2019). Historically, allochronism functioned within settlercolonial worldviews to justify stealing Indigenous land and enslaving Black people because Indigenous and Black people were deemed less developed and civilized (Rosa, 2019). In effect, allochronism represents a form of racist temporal displacement of the other. Accordingly, allochronism positions the white person as the legitimate holder of real time while the subject-other is operating from and within a different time that requires different ways of interacting with them (Kowal, 2015; Rosa, 2019). These racialized differences may also give rise to white paternalistic racist attitudes and behaviors against Black and Indigenous peoples such as treating them like children or reprimanding them for not being timely.