How Does Octavia Butler Use Racial Injustice In Kindred

In Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, she illustrates the power white people designed to suppress black people in America. She uses characters, setting, and time to help the reader establish a better understanding of the racial injustice. Butlers makes it clear in her novel that by the establishment of a racial hierarchy and the even further marginalization of black women, which not only affected slaves but is still affecting African Americans into the modern era.
The novel begins with the main character Dana having her arm crushed inside the wall of her house, but she cannot explain to anyone how it happened. As the novel progresses the reader is informed that Dana has the ability to time travel, but with one catch, she is unable to choose the place she travels. Dana currently lives in 1970 California where she is married to a white man named Kevin. …show more content…
When going back in time, Dana is much smarter and far more educated than anyone living; however, this does not cause Dana to be respected within society because she is black. Rufus and his father Tom are both less educated than Dana, yet they feel entitled to be in control of her because they are white and she is black. Nigel a slave on the Weylin plantation once asked Dana “Why you try to talk like white folks” (Butler 1979, 74). For Nigel to think tat because Dana talks with proper grammar and with a large vocabulary, she is talking “like white people” shows the separation that white people created. Instead of saying Dana talked as if she was highly educated, Nigel believed that “white” was synonymous with “smart.” Dana did not “talk like white people,” Dana talked more intellectually than white people, especially the ones she encountered in 20th century Maryland. The idea that white people were so far above black people in society made it where positive qualities were only seen if the person was