Aboard the Reconnaissance, the vessel where Natives of My Person takes place, a member of the crew, a young and boastful carpenter, banters with a more experienced crewmember who tells the carpenter that he has much to learn. “You are too young to have much history,” he warns the carpenter. The carpenter’s pride is hurt, so he boasts of the skills and achievement of his ancestors, of the lineage of craftsmen to which he was born and he says, “I have a lot history in my hands.” 

The cultural critic Imran Siddiquee, writing for The Atlantic, once commented, “If the United States were to truly transform into a totalitarian state, or suffer an environmental catastrophe, it's safe to say society’s deepest divisions wouldn't magically disappear overnight.” For the US, race would certainly be among those "deepest divisions." And yet YA dystopian fiction, even of the American variety, often appears to exist in a racial vacuum.