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'Slavery Exposed In Octavia Butler's Kindred'

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In the story “Kindred” by Octavia Butler the slaves hardly fought back. The book showed that the slave owners as a whole weren't the entire problem, society was. No matter how much the slaves fought against it in their personal lives it was still widely accepted and enforced. The slaves had virtually no rights and were seen as sub human even when they were freed. Every part of society was against them and fighting back did much more harm than good. Slavery was a long, slow process of dulling. Slaves had the constant fear of physical violence, the threat of losing the ones they love, and endured a life of always being treated as subhuman. One way that slavery dulled those in its grip was the constant fear of physical violence. Their masters could hurt or kill them at any moment and there’s nothing they could do. Dana explains how whippings were …show more content…

Not only does this erode their self worth but it also takes away some of their humanity. In one chapter Rufus the slave owner and Dana are talking about Alice's lack of rights. Dana says, “[Alice] has the right to say no” and Rufus replies with, “We will see about her rights… she'll get what's coming to her. She'll get it whether I give it to her or not.” This shows his obvious disregard to see her as a human being. To him, she's hardly even human and doesn’t even deserve a second thought. Another example of a slave being treated inhumanely would be in the part of the story describing a slave, “Weylin called her a good breeder, and he never whipped her. He was selling off her children, though, one by one.”(192) This shows how slaves were not treated like humans at all and rather as animals. Not only that but the slave owner plays it off nonchalantly, because to them it's just an everyday occurrence. Actions like this cause an environment that dulls slaves to the adversity that they

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