Equal time? Why time is a social justice issue

Time has always been complicated for JJJJJerome Ellis. (Mr. Ellis uses this spelling of his first name because it’s the word he stutters on most.) As a composer, poet, and performer who stutters, he comes up against time limits that most people take for granted. 

“A time limit assumes that all people have relatively equal access to time through their speech. Which is not true,” says Mr. Ellis. “I can rehearse something as many times as I want,” he says, “but I don’t actually know how long it will take to say anything until I have to say it.”

Mr. Ellis used to think his stutter was his fault. But he’s done blaming himself. 

In Episode 5 of the Monitor’s six-part podcast series, “It’s About Time,” hosts Rebecca Asoulin and Eoin O’Carroll explore how disability, gender, and race can affect our access to time.

They talk to Mr. Ellis about his journey to reclaim his time. They also hear from linguistics professor Deborah Tannen about how culture and gender can lead us to different – and sometimes inequitable – expectations of each other’s time. 

“Women monitor ourselves because we don’t want to be seen as taking up too much space,” says Dr. Tannen. “If they talk at a meeting, they may try to be as succinct as possible.”

For Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University, time is a privilege. She points to many ways that Black people are robbed of hours, days, and even years of their lives. Dr. Cooper says, “To be Black in this country is to always be in a fight for more time.”

This is Episode 5 of a six-part series that’s part of the Monitor’s “Rethinking the News” podcast. To listen to the other episodes on our site or on your favorite podcast player, please visit the “It’s About Time” series page.

This audio story was designed to be heard. We strongly encourage you to experience it with your ears, but we understand that is not an option for everybody. You can find the audio player above. For those who are unable to listen, we have provided a transcript of the story below.

Audio Transcript

Jessica Mendoza: Welcome to “Rethinking the News” by The Christian Science Monitor. I’m Jessica Mendoza, a producer on this podcast. Today, we’ve got Episode 5 of our science series, “It’s About Time,” hosted by Rebecca Asoulin and Eoin O’Carroll. If you haven’t listened to the rest of the series so far, go back and check them out! Enjoy today’s episode. 

[Music]

JJJJJerome Ellis [Note: He uses this spelling because the word he stutters on most frequently is his name.]: I got up to the microphone and, you know, I knew my, my whole voice would be heard in the school. And I, I got up there and I, I couldn’t, I couldn’t say the, I couldn’t say the first word.

Rebecca Asoulin: This is JJJJJerome Ellis. He’s a composer, performer, and writer. And he stutters. He’s talking about a time in seventh grade when he had to read something over the morning announcements.

JJJJJerome Ellis: I remember the feeling, which is a feeling I feel so often of, like, ‘Oh, I’m, I’m wasting everyone’s time,’ or like, ‘I’m not saying this in the, in the amount of time I should.’ I don’t know how long I stayed up there, but I eventually just like, walked away from the microphone, and was like crying and I just left. 

[Music]

Eoin O’Carroll: This is, “It’s About Time.” A series all about...

Rebecca: Time. I’m Rebecca Asoulin. 

And I’m

JJJJJerome Ellis: That’s an example of sort of like an internal time limit. They’re, they’re sort of an interruption in the day, so you want to sort of make them as efficient as possible.JJJJJerome Ellis: I’ve had, you know, thousands of experiences where I’m speaking with someone on the phone and they hang up on me because I’m stuttering and they assume, assume, assume that the – that the line has dropped.JJJJJerome Ellis: In my life, I have, have pretended not to know the answer to something because I, because I couldn’t say it, or because the labor involved in saying it was too intense for me. JJJJJerome Ellis: The way I thought of myself and my stutter is that this is something that is wrong with me, and it is, it is my responsibility. And that all the pain and struggle that comes from it is, is, is, is ultimately mine. And so it’s my fault, essentially, that they’re hanging up. I’ve long felt that there’s something not right about that. Announcer: JJJJerome Ellis. [Applause] JJJJJerome Ellis [Poetry Project]: And I understood intuitively that the purpose of this time limit was to create as nonhierarchical a space as possible. JJJJJerome Ellis [Poetry Project]: But in removing one hierarchy, the time limit introduces another. A time limit assumes that all people have relatively equal access to time through their speech. Which is not true. Stuttering is very unpredictable. I can rehearse something as many times as I want, but I don’t actually know how long it will take to say anything until I have to say it.JJJJJerome Ellis: When I was rehearsing it in the streets, the average would be about, would be about, about two and a half minutes.JJJJJerome Ellis: My goal going into it was really to, like, reach the end.  I just want to say every word I’ve, I’ve, I’ve written out in advance. I want to not do what I’ve, what I’ve done in the past where like, like, like, like, I was saying to you earlier, like, like saying the announcements in middle school, I – you know, I didn’t even, I didn’t even, like, let myself stay and and say it. I just, I gave up. You know, I’ve I’ve given up many other times and I didn’t want to do that.  JJJJJerome Ellis: When I, when I started reading, I started reading St. Pierre’s work, it just really helped me just take an enormous amount of, of weight off of myself. And pressure. And to not see like my stutter as solely my responsibility. JJJJJerome Ellis: Those are also responsible for the pain and struggle that, that I feel sometimes in relationship with my stutter. And at the same time it helped me focus more on the aspects of my stutter that I find very valuable, and have a great deal of beauty and music to it, you know. JJJJJerome Ellis: The author of the book was, in fact, mocking that law as something that is silly or unnecessary. They didn’t see, they didn’t see the ways in which that was trying to address an issue of accessibility.The author, you know, has probably never had the experience of being hung up on the phone, or running up their cellphone bill because what should be a five minute call is taking much longer. JJJJJerome Ellis: If you are privileged by a certain structure or environment, or that structure, environment works for you, then it can be hard for you to see ways in which that won’t work for someone else. Deborah Tannen: So who talks more? That's a very interesting question.Deborah Tannen: – a linguistics professor at Georgetown University. And I study how people talk. Deborah Tannen: And they were noticeable because they were sitting very close. They were holding hands.Deborah Tannen: Often at the end of the day, when women and men come together – it doesn’t matter who’s been home and who’s been at work – the woman might tell the guy what happened during the day, who she met, what she thought, what they said. And then she would ask him, “How was your day?” And he’ll say something like, “Oh, same old rat race.”Deborah Tannen: “That’s so true. She’s the talker in our family.” And everybody burst out laughing.  Deborah Tannen: Women monitor ourselves because we don’t want to be seen as taking up too much space. So if they talk at a meeting, they may try to be as succinct as possible. You don’t want to be putting yourself forward. You don’t want to be the center of attention. You don’t want people to think that you want to be the center of attention.Deborah Tannen: – and suddenly it’s a great idea, but it’s his idea. Partly, it’s the expectation about who you’re going to hear a great idea from. Sometimes it is the phenomenon that you’re hearing it for the second time. And so you’re paying more attention. Sometimes it’s how tentatively versus how declaratively the point was made, how much space was taken up by explaining this idea. So it could be a whole bunch of things. And I trace it to the way boys and girls learn to use language as children. Little girls are more likely to talk in small groups or even in pairs. The center of their social life is often a best friend. It’s very common to see two little girls, one is whispering in the other’s ear. And the sense of closeness in the relationship is often created by talk.Boys tend to play in larger groups. And it’s the activity that’s central. Your best friends are the ones you do everything with. The boys tend to use talk to negotiate their status in the group, saying how good they are at something, telling jokes, telling stories, somehow keeping that center stage position. Deborah Tannen: I’m always very clear that one style isn’t better than another. Any style is good if it’s shared and understood, and any style is problematic if it’s not shared and not understood. But sometimes there are things that can get people’s way in terms of getting jobs, being successful in the workplace.Deborah Tannen: We have very – I say “we” because I grew up in Brooklyn – we have a rather fast pace that to us is normal. So the amount of time you leave, to be sure nobody else wants the floor is very short. If you’re not used to that pace of conversation, you really think you haven’t been given a chance to get the floor.Deborah Tannen: He complained that she talked too much when they had guests over for dinner and didn’t give him a chance to talk. She said to me, “He’s a big boy. He can get the floor same way I can.” And he said in the background, “You need a crowbar to get into those conversations.”So it isn’t just gender, it’s culture as well. But these things are so automatic. We do tend to think of it in terms of intentions and abilities, and not just different ways of speaking that we’ve learned over time.Eoin: It’s funny because it seems like a lot of the miscommunication between men and women and maybe between regions is really people trying to follow the golden rule. Deborah Tannen: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. ‘Do unto others as you would have others do unto you,’ does not work if the person it’s going to be done unto has a different conversational style.Eoin: Rebecca, you’ve been quiet.  Rebecca: No, I haven’t. It’s just because I’ve talked just as much as you, and so you think I’ve been quiet. Yeah, it’s interesting, Eoin and I hosting this podcast, because I’m definitely more of an extrovert. And how I’ve been gendered in my speaking style is not very feminine. I’ve definitely been the person who’s been told they’ve been bossy more than they’ve been too quiet. And Eoin’s kind of the opposite.Deborah Tannen: You’re reminding me of a colleague of mine who was on the faculty somewhere in Los Angeles, and she once said that a student in her class said, “I’m sick of being told that I talk like a man. What I talk like is a New Yorker.”JJJJJerome Ellis: Someone who speaks like me is seen to be stupid or to not know, or to not, not know what they’re talking about. JJJJJerome Ellis: I feel that both as someone who is Black and someone who has a stutter, they are, are deeply interwoven. Time and access to time is racially inflected and there are so many spheres in which this happens. Brittney Cooper: To be Black in this country is to always be in a fight for more time.I’m Brittney Cooper, associate professor of women’s gender and sexuality studies and Africana studies at Rutgers University, and author of “Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower.” Brittney Cooper: That literally means that our life expectancy is being dramatically affected, that the amount of time that we get on the earth is being curtailed. We’re trying to be here as long as we can, while living in conditions that are designed for us to die. And part of the way that we get here is people don’t actually think that the time that Black people have to spend on the earth is valuable.Brittney Cooper [Ted Talk]: Ta-Nehisi Coates argues that “the defining feature of being drafted into the Black race is the inescapable robbery of time.” We experience time discrimination, he tells us, not just as structural, but as personal: in lost moments of joy, lost moments of connection, lost quality of time with loved ones and lost years of healthy quality of life. JJJJJerome Ellis: Masters often would not let their slaves have watches or clocks as a way of exerting control over time. JJJJJerome Ellis: One aspect of your existence as a slave is that you don’t have control over how you spend your time, and you also – it’s also going to be hard for you to know what time it is. Many, many slaves, of course, knew how to, how to tell time using the, the sun and stars, and there are, are modes of resistance they enacted through that.Brittney Cooper: In my first book, “Beyond Respectability,” I talk about the way that Black folks literally have to make the argument coming out of slavery that they are capable of being people of the future. That they are not like this weak race, that is just going to die out because they’re not sort of being paternalistically controlled by the institution of slavery. Brittney Cooper: As he put it, “Africa was no historical part of the world.” So we should move on from her, never to speak of her again. The African continent was seen as a place that was not impactful in terms of the flow and thrust of history. And so there was this kind of white male narcissism that says that Europe is the place through which we understand the move and march of time. Brittney Cooper: The place from which white people come is the place that is historically significant, and the place from which Black folks come is in fact not historically significant. Brittney Cooper: “Why can’t you all move on? Why do you keep bringing up this thing that happened?” Right? Or, “My ancestors didn’t own slaves, or I didn’t enslave anybody. You’re sort of imposing the past on me.” And part of the argument that I make is Black folks say, Look, the past and the things that happened to our ancestors have so fundamentally shaped what was possible for us. How you treated Black people in the past in terms of their possibility, in terms of their educational access, in terms of their access to building generational wealth, fundamentally still shapes the life chances of people in the 21st century. Brittney Cooper: My people have been in the Americas for at least two centuries and most likely longer. And yet I’m the first person in my family to graduate from college, and I graduated from college in the 21st century, in 2002.Brittney Cooper: People who are demanding inclusion into democracy, particularly around questions of racial justice, are often saying things like, “Freedom now.” “Defund the police now.” “We’re tired of negotiating. We don’t want to hear about how this is a gradual process. End slavery now. We don’t want gradual abolition.”Brittney Cooper: – they typically respond by slowing time down. So they say things like, “We can’t just change everything tomorrow. We can’t upend everything. We have to take it step by step. There’s a process to this. We need to be convinced. We have to convince other people.”Brittney Cooper: We don’t have to see time as one more privilege to be bandied about, something that those with more power and money and access get and the rest of us are just out of luck. We can begin to think about time as a value worth protecting, worth legislating around, worth organizing around. Brittney Cooper [TED Talk]: I believe the future is what we make it. But we can’t get there on colored people’s time or white time or your time or even my time. It’s our time. Ours. Thank you. [Applause] JJJJJerome Ellis: What really helps me think about time is, is thinking about it through music. In music, you know, you, you are shaping time constantly but that it’s always moving. Rebecca: So the last question is one that we’ve asked everybody. What’s your definition of time? JJJJJerome Ellis: Ooh. I love that. I would say that time is, time is, is the possibility of change.