![]() Renewed interest in communities as spaces for criminal opportunity has generated numerous studies of neighborhood social dynamics and crime. It signifies an emergent multiracial, “nonwhite” identity that challenges conventional notions of race and class in American suburbs. ![]() This “moral geography” is both continuous with earlier histories of multiracial communities in the greater Los Angeles region, and distinctively new. However, even while their initial movements were shaped to a large degree by housing market discrimination, Asian American and Latina/o residents of the area ultimately participated in producing what George Lipsitz has called “a moral geography of differentiated space,” in which their motivations and long-term actions differed significantly from those of white residents, who fled the area en masse during the same time period. As largely middle-income homebuyers, however, they had a degree of choice distinct from their poorer, nonwhite counterparts that was also informed by differentiated positions in American racial hierarchies vis-à-vis property-in particular, the “model minority” status of Asian Americans, and the ambiguously white standing of Mexican Americans. They approached the task with a full awareness of the realities of structural racial discrimination and the limitations it imposed on where they could and could not live. Īsian Americans and Mexican Americans began to purchase homes in Los Angeles’s San Gabriel Valley in large numbers beginning in the 1950s and 1960s. In their descriptions of themselves as black achievers, these students resist hegemonic notions that academic success is white property and cannot be attained by them. It also means viewing achievement as a human, raceless trait that can be acquired by anyone. For these students, being a black or African American achiever in a predominantly white high school means embodying racial group pride as well as having a critical understanding of how race and racism operate to potentially constrain one's success. I suggest that these students do not maintain school success by simply having a strong racial self-concept or a strong achievement self-concept rather, they discuss achieving in the context of being black or African American. By listening to these students talk about the importance of race and achievement to their lives, I came to understand how racialized the task of achieving was for them even though they often deracialized the characteristics of an achiever. In this article, I examine how black students construct their racial and achievement self-concepts in a predominantly white high school to enact a black achiever identity. Despite the temporal inequalities between them and their white counterparts, youth at Run-a-Way discovered ways to invert the terms of temporality to ensure that their culture was always most relevant and “up to date.” Although whiteness is linked to modernity and that which is future oriented, racialized youth viewed their white counterparts as behind time, lame, or just plain “wack” (uncool). The author shows how racialized youth lose time through physical, psychic, and emotional labor required to process racialization and racism and illustrates the various structural mechanisms that steal their time. Forced to work twice as hard to be half as good, youth saw their time horizons as compressed. As a result of the perceived temporal advantage held by their white counterparts, racialized youth expressed feelings of temporal inequality and disparate life chances. ![]() Results show that racialized youth view white youth as having more time to take advantage of educational and employment opportunities. The data for this research are based on more than one year of fieldwork at Run-a-Way, a multiservice center for youth. Drawing on data from 30 in-person interviews and ethnographic methods, the author explores how racialized youth interpret time in relation to whiteness and the experiences of white youth. A solid foundation for any empirical investigation of the relationship between whiteness and the racialized temporalities of racialized youth, however, has yet to be set. Independently, the study of whiteness and the study of time are important interventions in sociology.
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