We tend to think of time as something we all share equally. The clock ticks at the same rate for everyone. The past recedes, the present arrives, the future opens. 

But this apparent neutrality conceals something important: not everyone stands in the same relationship to time. 

Time is not neutral. It is organised.

European existentialism, from Heidegger to Sartre built powerful ideas on this very point.

Temporality, these thinkers argued, is not clock-time but lived structure of existence itself: the way we carry our past, inhabit our present, and project ourselves toward future possibilities. 

For Heidegger, the capacity to be "ahead of oneself," oriented toward possibility, is the very ground of human freedom. 

For Sartre, to deny that freedom is bad faith: a refusal of one's responsibility to become. 

These are powerful ideas. But they rest on an assumption that is rarely examined: that the subject has a continuous, coherent relation to time. That the future is open. That becoming is available.

But history suggest otherwise. Openness to the future has never been equally distributed. 

Du Bois understood this when he wrote about double consciousness: the experience of always seeing oneself through the eyes of a world that looks on in contempt. 

Fanon pressed further, showing how the colonial encounter shatters the body's normal relationship with the world, fixing the colonised subject as a timeless object while dispossessing them of their own historical continuity. 

History amputated. Future foreclosed. The result is not merely political domination but temporal alienation. 

Lewis Gordon and João Costa Vargas extend this insight further.

​Where Sartre saw bad faith as individual, they show that entire societies operate in bad faith, continuously denying anti-Blackness as foundational while reproducing Black suffering across time. 

The claim that "we have moved on" is itself a form of collective self-deception. 

My Africana Critical Race Framework™️ (ACRF) names what is actually happening through four interconnected concepts: 

- Colonised temporality: time structured through colonial power.

- Temporal captivity: being held within recursive patterns where the past repeats and the future narrows.

- Racialised time-consciousness: internalising the sense of being perpetually "behind," "not yet," and "late."

- Stolen time: the ontological condition of those whose futures have been denied and whose history have been interrupted. 

Each layer deepens the one before it: from structural, to experiential, to internalised, to ontological. 

This matters practically. 

Therapeutic frameworks, even those adopting the language of social justice and EDI, frequently continue to centre Eurocentric assumptions about selfhood, healing, and temporality while remaining hesitant to name anti-Blackness as foundational rather than incidental. 

The subject may then seek healing within the very structures that produced their alienation, mistaking adaptation to colonial conditions for healing itself. 

Decolonisation, then, cannot only be political or economic. It must also be temporal: a recovery of interrupted histories, a reorientation beyond the imperatives of survival, and a reopening of foreclosed futures. 

This is not merely a political project, but a Black Africana existential, ontological, and epistemic one. 

To reclaim time is to reclaim the capacity to narrate oneself otherwise—to exist beyond the temporal, epistemic, and ontological frameworks imposed through coloniality. 

Decolonisation is the refusal of stolen time, and the insistence upon a time that's our own.


This reflection is inspired by Black Africana thinkers including George G. M. James, Cheikh Anta Diop, Molefi Kete Asante, Frantz Fanon, Tommy Curry, Lewis Gordon, and others who have challenged the colonial organisation of time, history, and being. 

​References

Du Bois, W. E. B. (2007). The souls of Black folk (B. H. Edwards, Ed.). Oxford University Press. 
Fanon, F. (2008). Black skin, white masks (C. L. Markmann, Trans.). Pluto Press.
Gordon, L. R. (1995). Bad faith and antiblack racism. Humanity Books.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Blackwell.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H. E. Barnes, Trans.). Philosophical Library.
Vargas, J. H. C. (2018). The denial of antiblackness: Multiracial redemption and Black suffering. University of Minnesota Press.