Recurring themes in Confederates revolve around a historical photo of a Black woman breastfeeding a white baby—it’s one of the first things you see in the play, and the image and the trauma behind it factor in at several points throughout the story. In their essay “Mother’s Milk,” Emily West and R. J. Knight write, “Wet-nursing is a uniquely gendered kind of exploitation, and under slavery it represented the point at which the exploitation of enslaved women as workers and as reproducers literally intersected … constituting a distinct aspect of enslaved women’s commodification.” For more information, please visit production dramaturg Angela M. Farr Schiller’s research page on the subject.
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Author Ta-Nehisi Coates
“Rupturing the narrative”
One of Dominique Morisseau’s inspirations for writing Confederates was a landmark 2011 article by Ta-Nehisi Coates published in The Atlantic, titled “Why Do So Few Blacks Study the Civil War?” An excerpt: “In our present time, to express the view of the enslaved—to say that the Civil War was a significant battle in the long war against bondage and for government by the people—is to compromise the comfortable narrative. It is to remind us that some of our own forefathers once explicitly rejected the republic to which they’d pledged themselves, and dreamed up another country, with slavery not merely as a bug, but as its very premise. It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery—chief among them, its flag—still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of ‘freedom.’ It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.”
In a subsequent interview with NPR, Coates goes on to say, “There's a kind of avoidance, where we haven’t yet learned to confront the fact that [the Civil War] was a war for the establishment of a republic based in white supremacy. And it failed. And it’s a very, very good thing that it failed.”
A Legacy of Healing
Dr. Joy DeGruy’s seminal book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury & Healing explores how African Americans developed attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to survive the trauma of enslavement, Jim Crow, and current-day racial terrorism—and proposes strategies for building upon the strengths African Americans have gained from the past to heal from injuries both past and present. Dr. DeGruy’s website has a wealth of information on the topic—in particular, explore the pull-down Resources tab for further reading and exploration.
“The trauma that has been passed down through each generation”
Author Janice Gassam Asare examines the long legacy of American slavery that African Americans still deal with—from learned helplessness to health outcomes, colorism, and “respectability politics”—in her Forbes article “3 Ways Intergenerational Trauma Still Impacts the Black Community Today.”
Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out
Racial Battle Fatigue
This syndrome, described by social psychologist William Smith as a “public health and mental health illness,” has very real physical consequences. “People of Color,” Smith says, “experience daily battles of attempting to deflect racism, stereotypes, and discrimination in predominately white spaces and must always be on guard or wary of the next attack they may face.” Read about the causes and symptoms in this article in Medium.
“The intersectionality wars”
The conflicts in Confederates are rooted in the concept of intersectionality, a phrase coined in 1989 by scholar Kimberlé W. Crenshaw to describe how a person’s race, gender, class, and other characteristics intersect and overlap, affecting how that person sees, and is seen by, those around them. An in-depth 2019 article in Vox traces how this concept “has, in a sense, gone viral over the past half-decade, resulting in a backlash from the right…. But Crenshaw isn’t seeking to build a racial hierarchy with black women at the top. Through her work, she’s attempting to demolish racial hierarchies altogether.”