Butler Doesn't Want You to be a Kevin

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Throughout, Kindred, I couldn’t help but criticize Kevin’s worldview and thoughts, although I certainly subscribe to the idea he is an all-around well-intentioned guy. I feel one of the main points of the time-travel experience of Kindred was to try to personalize the horrors of slavery and give contemporary people a feeling for how horrible slavery was and just the scope of the people in affected. Specifically, Butler aims to show how horrid slavery was as a day-to-day way to live. Not just the brutal work, not just the violence, not just being stripped away from their families, but having to wake up in bondage every morning. And I’ll admit, its something I hadn’t thought about extensively before… I knew I wouldn’t like to do manual labor, to be whipped, raped, killed, torn away from my mother, but I just didn’t give so much thought to the idea of never feeling like you are truly your own individual. Just feeling trapped in a box every day, unable to control my own destiny.

Kevin doesn’t seem to understand this, even as it is being shoved in his face throughout the entire book. By all accounts, Kev is a pretty good and progressive guy. He defies his family in marrying a black woman, and he is obviously disgusted by the rape and beatings, but he doesn’t seem to really how much of an effect just being a slave has on someone, which is an experience Dana gets to know all too well after she is left in the 1800s without Kevin. While he is clearly a damn good guy willing to do the right thing--risking his life to teach slaves how to read--he sometimes exhibits a bit of a surprising apathy at the daily situation slaves are in.

And that is why I feel someone Kevin is the target audience for Kindred. One of the main points of Kindred is to force us to experience the daily reality of being a slave. People spent their whole life in this condition, which is hard for us to ponder while we sit in our comfortable chairs in our houses reading this. Butler’s point is that slavery isn’t just the extreme horrors that jump into our minds (that we think are reasonably rare) or some big picture issues, it affected so many people day to day. And Butler doesn’t want liberal white people to be like Kevin, she wants them to be a couple of steps ahead of him after they finish reading her novel. She wants people to be able to empathize with Dana’s experiences in a way Kevin surprisingly cannot.

Comments

  1. Grace JuhnApril 18, 2020 at 10:49 PM

    This is a really interesting point of view. I feel like Kevin accurately depicts the perspective some hold in today's world. A lot of people casually mention slavery and the horrible times people went through which is not necessarily bad, its just that I think some have lost the ability to truly feel the pain of slaves back then. I admit its hard to feel empathy for people who existed years ago and how easy it is to forget moments of the past. But I think you bring up a really interesting point about how butler wishes us to still remember what horrible experiences slaves went through. She definitely gave us a very eye opening and personal way to experience the lives of slaves. I think following Dana's perspective was more impactful because we are both outsiders to the life of slavery.

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  2. NikaApril 19, 2020 at 11:56 AM

    I would like to add that Kevin doesn't experience the day-to-day life of being a slave, though. When he's on the plantation, he's basically shielded from the worst of it. He's not called to witness the beatings, he doesn't observe what happens in the fields, and in front of him, the slaves probably hid every negative emotion or thought about their experience because he was white and they thought he was a slave owner (I'm reminded of the reading from US history, where an ex-slave gave a white and black person interviewing them a totally different perspective about slavery). As far as he's experienced it, it's not as bad as he had heard from history books. Dana of course knows better because she's working alongside them and experiencing the horrors first-hand. However, once Dana leaves him behind for five years, he seems to see a lot more and be a lot more impacted, and he has become a lot more aware of how terrible it is and does a lot of good by helping slaves escape, which I think does him credit. I do think Butler is warning white readers not to become an earlier Kevin and not to dismiss the horrors easily because it "doesn't seem as bad". I also think she's making the point that white people (like Kevin) really can't understand what it's like to be black because they AREN'T black and won't ever experience being black.

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  3. Ethan AshbrookApril 19, 2020 at 3:58 PM

    Even if Kevin is a well-intentioned person, it's still really interesting that Butler compares him to Weylin and how similar their eyes are at multiple points throughout the book. Even if Kevin is the type of person who risks his life to educate slaves, that doesn't change the fact that living in that time period that long changes someone for the worse. To me at least, it kind of feels like Kevin will never totally become the good guy that readers might hope he'd be, or even that Butler is talking about the inefficacy of trying to have someone change. Although I also could be reading into it way too much, since that's super defeatist. Even if that is the case, Butler might just be trying to make white readers understand the problems with Kevin's viewpoint and, like you say, figure out for themselves whether or not they trivialize slavery.

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    Replies
    1. Elizabeth RienstraApril 19, 2020 at 4:59 PM

      Yeah, Kevin just seems much more removed from it all than Dana does. He can never really understand Dana's viewpoint, and when we see the story from Dana's point of view, Kevin frustrates us. Kevin thinks he's doing alright as a white person because he condemns slavery and isn't racist, but when it comes down to it he's still got a somewhat problematic viewpoint. He can't entirely understand slavery since he's not black, but he can shift his view a bit and empathize more with Dana.

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  4. Elizabeth TApril 29, 2020 at 1:08 PM

    I like your analogy between Kevin and "the white reader," particularly as Butler is explicitly drawing a postmodernist connection between Kevin the observer of history, and the reader, who observes history through the lens of Dana. Kevin is in a lot of ways in the position *of* a reader, albeit one with a much more personal stake in how the story plays out. So I think it's very reasonable to think that Butler's "real" readers are meant to parallel Kevin's journey in a lot of ways.

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