In Kindred, the person who has the most difficulty accepting her role in the past is Dana. Although she understands that she must, at the very least, help Rufus stay alive, she finds it morally repugnant to support a white racist and rapist. She feels that she can change him for the better, not wanting to admit the anachronism of that perspective. The intellectual part of her knows that sexual abuse of black women was widespread and that is therefore very likely that her own heritage depends on an incident of rape. Her emotional and moral perspective finds it nearly impossible to accept, and ultimately she must resort to violence to free herself.

Alice, in contrast, is entirely a person of the past, so such an escape is impossible for her. Unable to accept that Rufus is willing to sell their children, she cannot face the prospect of living without them and takes her own life.

Dana’s modern-day husband, Kevin, is perplexed at being dropped into a bygone time when slavery was legal. Despite being a white man married to a black woman, Kevin had not fully confronted his own white privilege. In the past, his role was slave owner. This forced him to admit the benefits of whiteness and to experience the difficult decisions that owners made every day. He cannot become comfortable with the daily realities of his position. Even to speak with Dana, he has to pretend that he endorses a white man’s assumption of having rights of sexual access to black women.