Kindred has taken the top spot for the best book I’ve read this semester. It made me think of when people say they want to go back to the past, whether that be the 80s or the 60s or the 50s. There’s a power in nostalgia and what we think are “better days”, but we should realize that every era has its struggles and hardships. No age was a utopia. I know I’ve seen many posts online where people wish they could go back to the past, and then people of color comment and say that they wouldn’t dare go back. Sometimes those people who were in positions of power back in the day and even today only see as far as their own sphere, and don’t think about other groups of people.

And as far as 1850 goes, there’s really only one group that benefits.

There was one line that particularly stuck out to me in the novel. Dana says that she didn’t realize how easy it would be to accept slavery. There’s a lot of things that we accept as fact in our society, or just ignore. Sometimes it slowly creeps up on us, and sometimes it comes all at once and the bombardment changes the fabric of society too quickly for us to react. I think of that now with Trump’s presidency. During his candidacy, he was inflated on the Internet as everyone reported on controversial comments he made. And when our country inaugurated him as president, the comments persisted. The comments became a daily part of our lives until less and less people reacted to them. We make them into jokes, we shove them off, and yes, we rally and we fight, but there’s a disproportionate amount of people who do nothing. It’s easy for me to see how Dana  can become accustomed to slavery as easily as we become desensitized to Trump’s comments or other things like police brutality. It’s hard to swallow that the darkest parts of our world have become commonplace for us, but just as for Dana it’s a survival instinct, so it is for us.

As a note, I read the novel before I read the graphic novel. The novel took me about 4.5 hours to read, and the graphic novel took me about 2 hours.