Maddie O’Connor In Kindred, Dana is pulled from her home in a “modern” time and sent back to the times of slavery, and in doing so again and again, she changes. If you were put in a similar situation and sent back to the same time with her same disadvantage of being of a darker skin color, do you think you would also change as she had? Oppression is a force that works in a lot of ways, both outright and direct, and even when a person is actively knowledgeable about it and/or purposefully trying to resist it, it can end up completely changing who they were and in the times of slavery, it worked as the driving force of keeping slavery alive in all kinds of ways. Of all punishments for slaves, quite possible the most common was whippings. Throughout …show more content…
Not only did this dehumanize by treating them like property, but the threat of being sold away from family and friends was an effective tool for stopping rebellious slaves. In Kindred, Rufus sells Sam (a field hand) away who had just been talking to Dana out of jealousy (PAGE NUMBER). It’s a major shift in Rufus’s and Dana’s relationship, and it’s a clear example of how just the thought of being sold or having another be sold because of a person’s actions removes all their human rights and reinforced the idea of inferiority. After Sam is sold away, and Rufus hits her, Dana is forced to see the truth of her situation and makes the choice to risk death at her own hands to escape it (PAGE NUMBER). When Rufus threatens to sell Alice’s children, it’s a thought that forces her to obey him (PAGE NUMBER). All Sarah’s children got sold by Tom, besides Carrie and it makes her willing to be a “good” slave in order to keep her one remaining child (PAGE NUMBER). The threat of being sold at any time, to not have the right to stay with those slaves loved was a driving force of oppression and one of the most constant ideas that was sown into the very concept of …show more content…
Slaves were commonly referred to by the n-word as if that was their definition of who they were, when Rufus speaks to Dana as a child after she has saved his life he says “WORDS” (PAGE NUMBER). It’s a category and a word that means lower than white people and it is a strict enforcer of the idea that the races were not only separate, but that all of them can be defined as a single lower entity. Furthermore, Dana is referred to by other slaves as a “white nigger” (PAGE NUMBER) throughout her stay due to her education and ability to talk back to Rufus as if she were equal to him. When (NAMES) call her that,(PAGE NUMBERS) they mean it in a derogatory way and thus were enforcing the ideas of oppression, that only whites were smart and can read or write and that to be black is to be inferior. They don’t see Dana as someone to look up to, but as someone to despise for her abilities and that helped enforce oppression. The slurs and ideas had become embedded in the slaves themselves and even Dana in the end of Kindred continues these ideas when she tries to convince Alice that things aren’t that bad for her without meaning too (PAGE
In those Days being black was like being an animal, people would treat you different and you had no opportunities of becoming successful. As soon as we start reading the book Rebecca let us know that this was the time when black people had to go to different bathrooms, had different treatments, in less words they could not do what white people did. As stated on the book “This was the era of Jim Crow-when black people showed up at white-only hospitals, the staff was likely to send them away, even if it meant they might die in the parking lot. Even Hopkins, which did treat black patients, segregated them in colored wards and had colored-only fountains.”(p.15). People use to think, that black people were inferior to the white race. Another good examples of the society problem, is when we get to know Carrell, the mad racist scientist, who wrote a book named “Man, the
them” and “friend and enemies”, there are other texts in which correspond to the same ideas and can be utilized to further support the relevance oppression has to these particular concepts. To elaborate, another text also written by Octavia Butler entitled Wild Seed thoroughly supports the concept that “control” is regarded as the underlying issue to oppression. A clear reference to be made involves characters of both Kindred and Wild Seed. Within Wild Seed Doro abuses his control and utilizes his powers for selfish purposes as do the white men in Kindred. In both instances innocent people are harmed and abused without proper cause. Another inference to be made details that in each situation both Doro and the white men are referenced as the
The history of slavery in America is one that has reminders of the institution and its oppressive state of African Americans in modern times. The slaveholders and the slaves were intertwined in a cruel system of oppression that did not yield to either side. The white slaveholders along with their black slaves became codependent amongst each other due to societal pressures and the consequences that would follow if slaves were emancipated with race relations at a high level of danger. This codependency between the oppressed and the oppressor has survived throughout time and is prevalent in many racial relationships. The relationship between the oppressed and the oppressor can clearly be seen in Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred. In this novel, the protagonist Dana Franklin, a black woman, time travels between her present day 1977 and the antebellum era of 19th century Maryland. Throughout her journeys back to the past, Dana comes in contact with her white ancestor, Rufus Weylin, a white slave owner and Dana ultimately saves his life and intermingles with the people of the time. Butler’s story of Dana and her relationship with Rufus and other whites as she travels between the past and the present reveals how slaveholders and slaves depended on and influenced one other throughout the slaves bondage. Ultimately, the institution of slavery reveals how the oppressed and the oppressor are co-dependent; they need each other in order to survive.
These slaves were not treated as a person but as an impersonal asset although they did have their rights. These were dismal rights but they were important for the slaves well-being. The rights were as follows: the slave was allowed his personal items (like money etc.), he could not be killed without a good reason.
The slave Traders genuinely did not care about the treatment of slaves, and they treated them how ranchers would treat their cattle. This is proven by Zinn, “They are brought down to a large plain, where the ships surgeon examines every part of them, to the smallest member, men and women being stark naked… Such are allowed good and sound are set on one side… Marked on the breast with a red hot iron, imprinting the mark of the French, English, or Dutch companies” (28). The Traders did not care about the treatment of the slaves only that the slaves got to their future Owners marked and ready for servitude. If a few slaves were lost along the way it did not bother the Traders much, they still got their profit and moved on. While the slave Owners had to treat them a little better because they were their property now. The treatment of slaves in America became known as, “It was a harsh servitude, but they had rights which slaves brought to America did not have, and they were altogether different from the human cattle of the slave ships and the American plantations” (27). The slave Traders treated the slaves like products while the slave Owners simply thought of them as farming equipment. The Owners knew in order to prosper they needed to take care of their equipment, but the slave Traders had the mentality that “there’s more where that came from”. It is in this way the slave Owners and Traders are
Slaves were treated like animals and in some cases worse than animals. Slaves were bought and sold at auctions and considered "property". They were examined along with the horses and pigs "holding the same rank in the scale of being" (Douglass 2002, 373). Many were not even given the luxury of a bed. A coarse bla...
Slave owners not only broke slave families up, but they also tried to keep all the slaves illiterate. In the book slave owners thought, "A nigger should know nothing but to obey his master-to do as he is told to do. Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. If you teach a slave how to read, they would become unmangeable and have no value to his master." Masters thought that if a slave became literate then they would rebel and get other slaves to follow them. Also masters lied to slaves saying learning would do them no good, only harm them. They tried using that reverse psychology to make it seem like what they were doing was right.
As far as how it works in the actual story of the novel, firstly, and most importantly, it puts a strong, independent, black, 20th century black woman in the antebellum south. This provides a strong contrast in living conditions, as well as psychological patterns with those of the 19th century Dana sees and conveys the world of slavery around her with the background of the 20th century, "our world." This allows the reader to find a real connection with the protagonist, Dana. Dana describes in its gory detail the whippings she took:
One form of punishment, a master would use often would be to threaten to sale a slave to get them submissive. When he could not break them or to make an example for the other slaves, he would sale them. Enslaved people knew if the master died as well as if the master was under financial stress, they could be sold. Profit was another reason slaves were auctioned. $1000 to $2000 could be attained for a health male slave before the start of the Civil War. Female slaves that were health usually went for a couple hundred dollars less than the male slaves did.
Through the use of time travel, Octavia Butler creates a profound new view of racism in her novel, Kindred by having Dana see and understand what it was really like to be a person of color on a plantation from an outsider's perspective. Though Dana’s life in the present is filled with issue, it is drastically different from the problems of the past. When traveling to the past, every negative thought associated with Dana due to her race is amplified and violently acted upon, reducing Dana down to the color of her skin rather than an actual person. Fundamentally, having Dana time travel to a real plantation gives her a first hand experience of racism at the time, effectively showing the evolution of racism through time.
Enslaved people always faced uncertainty and danger like in the early 1800's American Law did not protect enslaved families. The American Law wouldn't do nothing that a wife or husband could be sold to slave owner at any time. At some point people who would want to get married had to use the phrase “until death or separation do us part”
“No one is born hating another person because their skin color, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate…” In this quote, Mr. Nelson Mandela is saying that no one was born to hate someone just because of their skin color, background, or their religious beliefs. Children are like sponges, they model everything they see and incorporate it into their own life; they have to be taught by another person to hate these thing. Otherwise, it can be detrimental to a child’s development. In Kindred, the author Octavia Butler exhibits these beliefs throughout the novel. Kindred is a remarkable science fiction novel where the main character Edana Franklin, who is black, often times travels back into time to a Pre-Civil War Maryland plantation
Landowners went to incredible lengths to dehumanize the slaves and make them feel as if they were lesser of a human than they were. With lashing and the terrible conditions that these people were put through it caused them to become more and more separated from them and the owners. The biggest piece of slavery and dehumanization would be not allowing the slaves to have proper literacy and education. These things caused the slaves to leave the owners and run away to a better
You know how people kick and hit machines if they don’t work right because they say its there property imagine that happening to slaves because that is what they did to slaves. Slaves were treated like property in the southern states of America around the time of the Civil War in the 1860s. Back in the 1860s slaves were being taken from their home countries in Africa to be brought to the United States to be treated like property to do the work we should have divided amongst are selves.
“There is no perfect relationship. The idea that there is gets us into so much trouble.”-Maggie Reyes. Kate Chopin reacts to this certain idea that relationships in a marriage during the late 1800’s were a prison for women. Through the main protagonist of her story, Mrs. Mallard, the audience clearly exemplifies with what feelings she had during the process of her husbands assumed death. Chopin demonstrates in “The Story of an Hour” the oppression that women faced in marriage through the understandings of: forbidden joy of independence, the inherent burdens of marriage between men and women and how these two points help the audience to further understand the norms of this time.