Gender Studies Professor Who Said Time Is Racist Shares ‘Oddly Threatening’ Email: ‘Tick Tock’

“White people own time.”

A gender studies professor who previously declared that “if time had a race, it would be white” shared Wednesday what she claimed to be a threatening email that contained only two words:

“Tick tock.”

Brittney Cooper, associated professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers, claimed that the message came following a week in which she was confronted by an “angry white man” and subjected to trolling. Apparently, Cooper associated the temporal language with a bomb threat.

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“After a week of trolling emails and a confrontation after a talk with an angry white man, this email feels oddly threatening so just posting here for documentation purposes,” Cooper, who is also known as Professor Crunk, wrote in a caption accompanying the screenshot of the allegedly threatening message.

https://twitter.com/ProfessorCrunk/status/1116079873662038016

Several of Cooper’s followers were concerned, with one commenter tweeting: “How awful! What started the flood of threats?”

Last week, the feminist professor garnered attention for discussing the racial implications of time during an NPR interview and claiming that “White people own time.”

Speaking to host Guy Raz for the TED Radio Hour episode “Confronting Racism,” she expounded on her theory regarding the racial politics of time. Cooper’s conversation with Raz centered largely around a 2017 TED talk she gave on the topic.

During her TED talk, Cooper said that “White people own time,” citing as evidence the black community’s use of the phrase “colored-people time,” a long-standing joke about black people’s purported “perpetual lateness.” She even suggested that her own penchant for punctuality stemmed from her mother’s reaction to racism.

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“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,” Cooper said, before declaring, “if time had a race, it would be white.”

Raz asked the university academic to explain.

“So when I say time has a race, I’m saying that the way that we position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought,” she explained. “And a lot of the way that we talk about time really finds its roots in the Industrial Revolution. So prior to that, we would talk about time as merely passing the time.”

Cooper also shared her thoughts on race while appearing this week on a panel for the 2019 Women in the World Summit, “a convening of mighty women leaders, blazing activists and courageous movers.”

“You can’t get in bed with white supremacy without also getting in bed with patriarchy. This is a lesson from the Kavaniagh hearings. If white women’s tears can’t compel moral compunction from white men, what does that mean for the rest of us?” ~@ProfessorCrunk #WITW pic.twitter.com/iEZquYJBA1

— April is in DC (@ReignOfApril) April 11, 2019

“You can’t get in bed with white supremacy without also getting in bed with patriarchy. This is a lesson from the Kavanaugh hearings,” Cooper said. “If white women’s tears can’t compel moral compunction from white men, what does that mean for the rest of us?”

The contentious racial climate has led some critics to argue an identity politics-mindset is negatively affecting conversations about race in America.

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