Sitrep 5

In Childress' Wine in the Wilderness,  I was struck by how much focus was rooted around intersections. How ultimately the way we argue for certain avenues of being untimely gets entangled with others argument. 

We  see in the play how much class distinctions is intentional made early on. According to Colbert (2009), "In teaching this play, I direct my students’ attention to how the characters’ language suggests their class positioning. I question how Bill’s class-inflected speech differs and aligns with Tommy’s categorization of her neighbors. I alert students to the fact that Tommy’s use of the pejorative separates her from the rioters and establishes her behavior as one of the several demarcations of class differences within the play. While most readings of Wine in the Wilderness, including La Vinia Delois Jennings’s account in Alice Childress, consider the ways Tommy forces Bill, Sonny-Man, and Cynthia to acknowledge their class privilege, critics do not consider Tommy’s assertions of superiority, which reveal a third class at play—the rioters. Moreover, since Riot Sale and The Bronx Is Next depict characters participating in or planning a riot, these plays do not establish the layers of divisions presented in Childress’s."

This line of thinking marks similar will Kimberlee Crenshaws paper, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color", we see how in pushing one side of a left leaning argument, it fails towards liberation for all and more aligns closely with liberation for all with caveats. Liberation is impeded not only by those how those traditionally in power resists and demand the status quo preserved, but it is also impeded at times by those trying to do revolutionary work. This is colonial though process makes it difficult for for consolidation. The play, as Colbert demonstrates, shows divisions among seemingly similar groups of people because of colonial Eurocentric views about mobility, and even notions of freedom and liberation.

Plays like this help demonstrate better the widening gap in groups that are labeled as "monolithic", because the classist nature of some in the group positions themselves as being the ones to pull up the rest of their ethnic group, while the the other gets the arm dragged and forced to be something they don't want to be. The play demonstrates this well in this and any community that seems divided amongst themselves, mainly because class is always obfuscated. Made hard to see. That way when a person like Tommy comes into a scene, we can blame their life being the way it is as "her fault", or show some kind of self-aggrandizing pity without actively changing anything about our own lives to make hers marginally better.