At the beginning of Pearl Cleage’s 2022 work entitled Angry, Raucous, and Shamelessly Gorgeous, she acknowledges that her play is meant to be seen as in dialogue with the work of August Wilson in general, the “1990 protest piece by Anna Campbell entitled Naked Wilson, and the concept of “intersectionality,” the notion that one can be simultaneously oppressed in different ways, by different groups, for different reasons. One can, for example, be a Black woman and be oppressed differently, and also for both. Kimberle Crenshaw, the UCLA and Columbia law professor is the person who not only coins this term, but who is also a leading figure in the Critical Race Theory movement, a movement that looks at how racism is embedded in so much of US law. See, for example, her essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color” in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. Ed Kimberle Crenshaw et al. New York: The New Press, 1995. 357-383, where she notes, “Because of their intersectional identity as both women and of color within discourses shaped to respond to one or the other, women of color are marginalized within both” (358).

     August Wilson is perhaps the most celebrated American playwright of the late Twentieth Century, author of The Century Cycle, a series of ten plays, one for each decade, all depicting the struggle of African Americans to find some sense of self and belonging in the post- Civil War era. An in-depth look at one of his most celebrated plays, Fences (1987), can help us begin to see the issue…