Kindred - Kevin
Kindred - Kevin
In many novels and movies, there is often the white character that acts as the “white saviour”. In Kindred, I shockingly don’t see that character presented. At first I thought it was Kevin, but then his character's plot line took a huge turn.
In Kindred, Kevin seemingly acts as a performative white saviour. He almost pretends to care about Dana's issues and then dismisses them once they no longer concern him. He doesn’t take the time to fully understand where Dana is coming from, or try to understand why she struggles so much as a Black woman. Yes, it is very much impossible for him to grasp the struggles of being a Black woman, though, there are very few times where he clearly tried to comfort Dana in a beneficial way.
In the beginning of The Storm, Kevin began throwing a fit because he couldn't understand the current technology, and just the overall frustration with his situation. While Kevin is throwing a fit, Dana is the one doing the comforting. This is where my personal issue with Kevin comes in. Yes, Kevin went through all of this, being at the plantation, experiencing slavery, though he was never actually a slave. He has always been free, and would be in every lifetime because he is a white man. Dana was the one who was unwillingly being pulled back into time, being forced to be a slave, being beaten, called slurs, and the list could go on. Kevin was pretending to be her owner because it made the most sense logically, and he needed to stay close to Dana. Dana was performing as a slave because she quite literally had to. She had no papers, and no way out. She would have been killed. Yet, Dana was the one comforting Kevin. The one who could willingly stay home and go back to his life living as a white free man.
Overall, I believe Kevin's role in Kindred was purposeful, as a white man can clearly never really understand what it’s like to be a Black woman. Though, I do still believe that you cannot marry a Black woman and have such a sense of selfishness when put into uncomfortable situations. Separating Dana from her traveling back to the past, she is still a Black woman in America. She will always have to deal with uncomfortable situations, and if Kevin is not able to fully grasp that idea, then I'm not understanding what exactly their relationship holds for future situations.
Hi Brianna! I agree with your uneasy opinions on Kevin. I think being both white and older gives him the power dynamic over Dana that he might not be consciously aware of. He's too used to helping her (seen in how his financial stability allowed him to take her out to eat and buy an apartment for them to move in); therefore, he doesn't register to understand Dana's struggles. I like the example you gave. Maybe another example you could use is the scene where they talk about the kids enacting slave selling, and he accuses Dana of reading too deeply into it.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with this. While Kevin was never racist or purposefully sexist, a lot of the caretaking after the time travel fell on Dana, despite her being the one who went through more. I think the scene where Dana is very affected by the slave children's game and Kevin isn't is especially telling because it gives us a representation of their beliefs about their perspectives: Dana is feeling very real feelings because of her closeness to the situation and Kevin is pretending he understands more because he believes his own suffering rivals Dana's.
ReplyDeleteHi Brianna! I also was very intrigued by Dana and Kevins relationship. Nobody quite really likes him, and he has all of these slip ups, yet at the end of the novel they are still together and Kindred doesn't really read like it is a relationship destined to break up. I do think a big part of Kevins role is to highlight the legacy of slavery, lasting into modern times, especially with all of the parallels Octivia E. Butler runs with him and Rufus. Great post!
ReplyDeleteHi Brianna, I absolutely agree with your points. Kevin, maybe partially as a person from 1976 with his own influences, can be unsympathetic to Dana's perspective and is unable to view any world through her eyes and experiences, which is exposed especially in the scene where they're watching the slave children. While he could never experience slavery himself, he is unwilling to listen and see her point of view as valid. Your point about Kevin being unable to handle future situations is also really fair, especially because there will still be things in the modern day that affect Dana and do not affect Kevin. Great post!
ReplyDeleteHi Brianna, I think you bring up a really interesting point with Kevin's discomfort surrounding some of the stuff that Dana experiences and witnesses while on the plantation. It initially could come off as a good thing that he's so disgusted by this system that he doesn't feel comfortable seeing or hearing about it, but that idea falls apart quickly when we realize that the ideas that make Kevin so uncomfortable is the reality that Dana and so many others are living. In the end, Kevin's discomfort is nothing compared to what everyone else is going through, and it makes the reader a lot less likely to feel bad for him. Great post!
ReplyDeleteYou're definitely right that Kevin in no way plays the role of "white savior" in this narrative, and if anything, he exists in the plot largely to represent his own inability to fully grasp what Dana is going through, however sympathetic he might be. He remains morally and ethically on the "right side" throughout the story, including his five years stuck in the past--he apparently takes great risks to support the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement, at one point fleeing for his life after angering local whites. But these actions, while "right," are never presented as grandiose or "saving" anyone. He does "pass the test" and remain on the right side of history, but as you note, he continues to be shockingly tone-deaf about Dana's experiences, and this likely does reflect a larger theme about how racial identity compels Dana to have a vastly different experience in the past than he does--as he puts it, in one of his foot-in-mouth moments, "maybe that's something I can't understand." Kevin, I'd cut the "maybe" from that sentence!
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