Restorative Times: An Entangled Exploration of White Time, Hospitality, and Restorative Justice in Schools

This paper explores the entanglement of the coloniality of time, justice, and emancipatory horizons through the lens of restorative justice in public schools. The author utilizes Jacques Derrida’s theory of hospitality in order to demonstrate how restorative justice, as an open spacetime of impossible choices, creates liberatory possibilities. The author utilizes Charles Mills’ “white time” to deconstruct racial capitalism’s notions of time as they manifest in schools and to reflect upon how restorative justice’s orientation towards relational, fluid temporalities offers a means through which the ethico-ontoepistemological assumptions that underlie oppressive systems in schooling can be questioned and transformed. A restorative justice approach grounded in hospitality, this theoretical paper argues, offers a way through the oppressive temporality of White Time.