The TIME Project was an effort to improve the access to and use of higher level vocational education and training among the black communities of Nottingham (England). The emphasis was on the city's community of African Caribbeans. This paper discusses the development of the TIME Project from the perspectives of a white academic community from the University of Nottingham, the university associated with the project, and a black community development worker. Their different perspectives reflect both an outsider's view of the situation of the African Caribbean community and the view of an insider. The paper's central argument is that the development of the TIME Project revealed new forms of racist practices that required project workers to rethink the scope of access programs in the African Caribbean community. These practices were new forms of racism in that they arose within contexts of policy and practice that did not exist until relatively recently and they were not primarily constructed around a racist ideology, either individual or collective. The processes and structures that have limited the lifelong learning opportunities of these African Caribbeans owe their existence to the dominant political discourses. The discourse of urban regeneration in Nottingham has shaped a context in which powerful local organizations are pursuing a strategic aim of dominance within a local training and education market. The absence of a black middle class with sufficient economic and political power to exert influence on its own community and on the mainstream providers of education is a key gap within the power matrices of social exclusion. It is important to recognize that access programs themselves are structured by discourses that can maintain exclusionary practices. (Contains 13 references.) (SLD)