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Are you thinking about time right now? For ‘Black Futures’ contributor Rasheedah Phillips, it’s a lifelong pursuit.

Cassie Owens, Philadelphia Inquirer, Jan 1, 2021

Rasheedah Phillips has learned a lot of ways of looking at time.

“Time is very subjective,” explained Phillips, a Philadelphia-based Afrofuturist artist and researcher whose survey questions about time and memory are included in the new anthology Black Futures, featuring the work of more than 100 esteemed Black creatives in the U.S. and abroad.

“Time is very cultural,” said Phillips, who is also a housing attorney at Community Legal Services, the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair community and the cofounder, with her partner Camae Ayewa, also known as the artist Moor Mother, of the collective Black Quantum Futurism.

“Time is dependent on a person,” Phillips said. “It depends on a community. It depends on your location.”

In the African Diaspora alone, she explained, there are thousands of cultures, if not more, “each of them having their own cultural traditions and observations of time.” The sense of time that we have in the U.S. is Western, she continued, which is cultural, too.

Phillips, of North Philadelphia, is currently researching the impacts of time zones on marginalized people as a fellow at The New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Her survey questionnaire about time in Black Futures is an ethnographic research tool she’s been using since 2012. It appears among essays, fine art, interviews, social media posts, memes, lyrics, and other forms of expression in the acclaimed 544-page book, edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham.