Like many of his other works, Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play shows the devastating effect racism has both psychologically and physically on its victims and perpetrators. Fuller’s goal is to expose both overt racist behaviors and beliefs, and those that are so ingrained in the culture that they are taken for granted.

In an interview with George Goodman of The New York Times, Fuller describes how the themes in his work (and the work of other African American writers in the early 1980’s) were shifting from “focusing on our problems with whites, to matters involving blacks as human beings.” Instead of depicting simple confrontations between blacks and whites, Fuller was “concerned about how racism affects blacks in their dealing with each other rather than as victims of a larger plot by whites. I want to explore the internal psychological effects of racism.”