In the following essay on Wine in the Wilderness, the author discusses the idea of the play's protagonist as the "true Africentrist" in the midst of the intersections of class, race, and gender.

In Wine in the Wilderness, Childress makes the point that the intersections of "sexism, racism, and classism are immutably connected to black women's oppression while making it crystal clear that black women triumph because of a strong spirit of survival inextricably linked to an African heritage." Enlisting the background of a Harlem riot as a controlling metaphor for communal and intraracial fragmentation, Childress foregrounds the underclass, undereducated heroine of Wine in the Wilderness as the true Africentrist, proud of blacks and her blackness. She stands in stark relief to bourgeois, intellectual blacks whose white assimilationist and classist values expose their racial disingenuousness. Espousing the in-vogue black power rhetoric of brotherhood, liberation, and nationalism, the...