In Kindred by Octavia Butler, she writes, “Then, somehow, I got caught up in one of Kevin’s World War 11 books– a book of excerpts from the recollections of concentration camp survivors. Stories of beatings, starvation, filth, disease, torture, every possible degradation. As though the Germans had been trying to do in only a few years what the Americans had worked at for nearly two hundred.” (Pg. 116)

Octavia makes a good point here. That ante bellum whites tortured people for over two hundred years, long before the Nazi’s. It’s hard for me to look so far back to the past. It’s important that while we look at the Germans, we take into account the entirety of our long and brutal pasts. Many people have been hurt in our long and complicated past. This story, along with the stories of those tortured by the Germans, allowed me to take a look into Japanese Internment camps and the many people that suffered. African Americans, Jewish, Dutch, are only a few of the people that have suffered in our history. As a woman of Caucasian/Indonesian decent, I have two different pasts that are associated with my heritage. The possibility that my Caucasian ancestors owned slaves contrasted by my Indonesian ancestors who spent part of their life in prison camps during WW11.

Octavia had a personal connection with her story because of her African American heritage. Our heritage is incredibly important to understand our place in the world now. Looking at the past can help us make life decisions and influence what our purpose is in the world. For myself, studying my grandma’s life has opened up a whole new side of my life. I’m not purely defined by my ancestors pasts but it helps me understand what they went through- and what I can take away from their lives that will help me form who I am as a person. I haven’t experienced racial discrimination or oppression but I have been bullied, seen loved one’s die, and doubted myself along the way.