Travels and Races Racial slurs have been common for centuries. Some are less offensive than others, but they still exist. As the only Hispanic in a primarily white school, I was often called “Mexican” and asked where my green card was. Ironically, Puerto Rico is a US territory and my mother is white, so I am actually just as much of a US citizen as my harassers. Nonetheless, the racism stung. After reading Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, I realize that my experience with racism is minuet at best. Dana, the main character in Kindred, is a black woman from the late 1900s forced back in time to the early 1800s. This time period was one of extreme racism and slavery, and Octavia Butler conveys the horrors of it in an extremely realistic setting.
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It is thought to have come about as a mispronunciation of the word “negro” by southerners in the 19th century, but has progressed into an extremely derogatory racial slur. In the 1800s, it was primarily used to demean black slaves, with the underlying implication that they were worth little to nothing, dead or alive, being far inferior to the whites. Rufus, a young white male being raised by an abusive slaveholding father and selfishly extravagant mother in the early 1800s, ignorantly uses this term to describe Dana. During his early years, Dana, in her short moments spent with Rufus due to her unexpected time traveling, does her best to explain the wrongs of such derogatory terms to him. She is somewhat successful with him as a child, but once he reached young adulthood, his father begins to have a larger influence on him. Rufus grows into an ignorant young man with a heart full of resentment, hatred, confusion, and loneliness. He is Rufus Weylin, the man who will force himself on a slave woman that he loves. He will be the father of her children, one of whom is Dana’s ancestor, and eventually cause his love to kill herself in desperation to escape from his …show more content…
Knowing that she is from the future does not deter him, but heightens his interest in her. After Alice’s death, Rufus tries to force himself upon Dana, and she is left with no choice but to kill him in order to escape. After returning to the future and being left with a permanent injury, Dana visits the site of Rufus’s old plantation house. It was burnt down and many of his slaves, people who had befriended Dana in her travels, had been sold. Dana, knowing the depth of her own pain and struggles with the short amounts of time that she spent in the 19th century, realizes that no matter how bad her own experiences were, they would never hold a candle to those had by all the slaves that were left behind- those who had no chance of
It is thought to have come about as a mispronunciation of the word “negro” by southerners in the 19th century, but has progressed into an extremely derogatory racial slur. In the 1800s, it was primarily used to demean black slaves, with the underlying implication that they were worth little to nothing, dead or alive, being far inferior to the whites. Rufus, a young white male being raised by an abusive slaveholding father and selfishly extravagant mother in the early 1800s, ignorantly uses this term to describe Dana. During his early years, Dana, in her short moments spent with Rufus due to her unexpected time traveling, does her best to explain the wrongs of such derogatory terms to him. She is somewhat successful with him as a child, but once he reached young adulthood, his father begins to have a larger influence on him. Rufus grows into an ignorant young man with a heart full of resentment, hatred, confusion, and loneliness. He is Rufus Weylin, the man who will force himself on a slave woman that he loves. He will be the father of her children, one of whom is Dana’s ancestor, and eventually cause his love to kill herself in desperation to escape from his …show more content…
Knowing that she is from the future does not deter him, but heightens his interest in her. After Alice’s death, Rufus tries to force himself upon Dana, and she is left with no choice but to kill him in order to escape. After returning to the future and being left with a permanent injury, Dana visits the site of Rufus’s old plantation house. It was burnt down and many of his slaves, people who had befriended Dana in her travels, had been sold. Dana, knowing the depth of her own pain and struggles with the short amounts of time that she spent in the 19th century, realizes that no matter how bad her own experiences were, they would never hold a candle to those had by all the slaves that were left behind- those who had no chance of