This TED Talk features cultural theorist Brittany Cooper, recorded live at TED Women 2016.

What if I told you that time has a race, a race in the contemporary way that we understand race in

the United States. Typically, we talk about race in terms of black and white issues.

In the African American communities from which I come, we have a long-standing, multi-generational

joke about what we call CP time or colored people's time.

Now, we no longer refer to African Americans as colored, but this long-standing joke about our perpetual

lateness to church, to cookouts, to family events, and even to our own funerals, remains.

I personally am a stickler for time. It's

almost as if my mother when I was growing up said, we will not be those black people. So we

typically arrive to events 30 minutes early. But today, I want to talk to you more about the

political nature of time. For if time had a race, it would

be white. White people own time. I know, I know. Making such, quote-unquote, incendiary statements

makes us uncomfortable. Haven't we move past the point where race really matters? Isn't race a heavy-handed concept?

Shouldn't we go ahead with our enlightened progressive selves

and relegate useless concepts like race to the dustbins of history?

How will we ever get over racism if we keep on talking about race?

Perhaps we should lock up our concepts of race and a time capsule if we keep on talking about race.

Perhaps we should lock up our concepts of race in a time capsule, bury them, and dig them up in a thousand years, peer at them with the clearly more enlightened, raceless versions of

ourselves that belong to the future.

But you see there, that desire to mitigate the impact of race and racism shows up

and how we attempt to manage time, in the ways we narrate history,

and the ways we attempt to shove the negative truths of the president into the past,

...