“Sicker than a rabid dog”

African American women counterpoint the nation's declared international conflicts with its undeclared racial war at home: the war that black women living in a predominantly white racist culture know intimately. After all, African American women playwrights are almost triply othered when the subject is war has often been viewed as the venue of whites and a masculine subject. The five women playwrights Drinking Gourd, A Raisin in the Sun, A Rat's Mass, Crisis and Birth of a Nation manage, nevertheless to employ their artistic voices to speak out against the woe that is war. Their compelling voices insist that we concur with their judgments, and they illustrate that African American women can cross the battle lines of race and gender to stake out new claims for their voices. Their plays that explore the cost and pain of war become sophisticated weapons aimed at senseless loss of African American life as a result of America's materialist and racist national culture.