R6 Response

Rebecca Meekins

“The relationship that exist within In the Heart of the Valley of Love are extremely relevant as they provide refuge for the characters from this authoritarian state within which they now exist. Their lives are exactly the lives we fear: massive water shortages, extreme poverty, and an eroding culture. Yet somehow, In the Heart of the Valley of Love proves that even in those situations, anybody can find light.”

Anna Malefatto

“One of the major reflections of reality is the isolation of the wealthy and the white people form the rest of the poorer, racially diverse population. In this future, white is the minority, and that is not a difficult demographic to imagine, especially fro LA…Francie mentions the lack of white faces in crowds, or the diverse ethnic makeup of the people she sees on the street. However, this is not a point she ever dwells on too deeply.

Andrew Anderson

“From small details like Francie’s passing mention of a time “before nonwhites became the majority in the country” (Kadohata 76), we learn that the balance of race in America has shifted. Contrary to the emergence of an increased acceptance of nonwhites that we might naturally assume would take place in this situation, we instead see a world in which a decreasing minority is exercising an increasing amount of control over the majority of the population.

Sarah Feldberg

“Supposedly lung cancer is expected to afflict a startlingly high percentage of children born and raised in LA post-1990. Additionally, cancer is a political disease – I believe that ethnic minorities and impoverished populations have higher incidences of cancer due to environmental racism, jobs in manufacturing or industrial sectors, access to poorer-quality food and personal products, etc. Additionally cancer is often ruinously expensive to treat-as narratives in various magazines note – people often go into massive debt trying to obtain cutting edge treatments, and minorities and the poor also have higher death rates from cancer due to lack of access to quality health-care options.”

Veronica Bruscini

“Her everyday experiences – a mere forty three years distant from today’s realities – present a bleak future for the United States. “Just about everybody broke laws all the time.” Francie reports, matter-of-fact about this necessary mode of daily survival. “Occasionally.” She adds just as candidly, “the police arrested a randomly chosen person, and if you went searching for him or her, they might arrest you too” (Valley 13) Kadohata never names the extraordinary event which precipitates such dynamic changes to everyday life – economic and social upheaval, drastic shortages of natural resources

“The bus was full of poor people, old people, women, kids, and pickpockets. There was not a white face on the bus” (Kadohata, 88).

After reading the preceding responses and through my prior understanding of race and ethnic relations, I can see the reality in Kadohata’s novel set in the future. As Veronica mentions, the dynamic changes illustrated in the novel include social upheaval. Minorities become the majority and the majority becomes the minority and yet, the white race still obtains the wealth and power. In Kadohata’s novel, she shows that there is still a racial disconnect between the two groups. In today’s society, there is a growing number of immigrants and mixing among the races. There are a growing number of people of color in America. Anna mentions that the racially diverse population in the future is not hard to imagine. As I learned in my Cities and Suburbs class, almost half of today’s population is made up of racially diverse people. This percentage will only continue to grow in the future. In LA, there are more non-whites than whites by a small by growing percentage. Andrew writes that with the diminished white population comes a increase amount of control over the non-whites. This aspect in Valley is interesting because in today’s society, with the growing non-white population comes a growing number non-whites represented in local and national government.

There is a lot of economic turmoil in 2052 including disease shortages on food and water. It is not hard to understand the depravity and economic turmoil in LA at this time since it also reflects how LA is in today’s society. As Sarah mentions in her writing, there is a high percentage of children born and raised in LA post 1990s that will have lung cancer. There are parts of LA that are racially diverse are extremely poor and that reflects in the health of the residents. Since LA is growing in non-white population, does that mean that levels of poverty will increase as well? Kadohata presents a very plausible outlook on what the future might look like if we continue down our path of growth and consumption. Many futuristic novels and films focus on how man’s creation of technology will bring down mankind but Kadohata’s Valley focuses on how consumption will affect everyday lives and how race relations will always be a problem in society.