From the erasure of Native knowledge to the internal hierarchies among the oppressed, from religion’s double edge to the seduction of assimilation, Coogler’s film maps the mechanisms of survival within a rigged system. It’s not a film about one form of oppression: it’s about how they conspire, and my goal isn’t to resolve these tensions neatly. It’s to name them.
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As a Black woman with a degree in film criticism, it is not lost on me that, to enjoy film, to take pleasure in it, I must forget racism. My gaze is largely forgotten, and it is why I sought out my degree in the first place: there weren’t enough Black critics critiquing Black films. More specifically, there aren’t enough Black female critics. As bell hooks writes, “There is power in looking” (hooks, 115), but unless we learn how to look critically, we are powerless. So, it feels like a gift when I get to experience a film on my own terms, without being pushed to the margins. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners offers that rare space. Centered within the gothic horror of Jim Crow-era Mississippi, the film follows Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (played by Miles Caton), seduced by the Blues, as he pursues collective freedom alongside his twin cousins, Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan). Their freedom is imagined through economic and cultural empowerment, by way of their new business venture, Club Juke, a social space “For Us and By Us.” But the very space that promises liberation and more specifically Black autonomy also becomes the site of betrayal. Hate adapts. It waits. And it enters through the cracks in even the safest rooms.
What Sinners captures so clearly is a pattern that repeats across history: how systems offer freedom selectively, not to uplift but to preserve themselves. Instead of shutting people out entirely, they let just enough in. They offer access in exchange for assimilation, usefulness, or proximity to whiteness. I hope to show you the layered ways Sinners dramatizes that exchange. From the erasure of Native knowledge to the internal hierarchies among the oppressed, from religion’s double edge to the seduction of assimilation, Coogler’s film maps the mechanisms of survival within a rigged system. It’s not a film about one form of oppression: it’s about how they conspire, and my goal isn’t to resolve these tensions neatly. It’s to name them.
Warnings Ignored: Information for True Liberation
I begin here, at the site of erasure, because access to information is the first step toward understanding how selective liberation is maintained in America. Before the system could offer partial freedom to some, it had to make invisible the knowledge of those who understood the land first. Long before slavery codified racial hierarchies, colonization depended on silencing Indigenous knowledge systems that could have threatened its logic (Wolfe 388). Sinners makes this absence felt through the exclusion and dismissal of Native characters. Much like reality, their eventual erasure from the film is not just a historical loss; it is the foundational wound of the whole film, their departure shapes everything that follows.
Early in Sinners, there is a scene where a group of Native Americans approach the home of a white couple we know as Klan members. We know this as moments earlier, a white man (who we later find out is a vampire named Remmick), burned beyond recognition, had fallen from the sky, begging the couple for protection and bribing them for shelter. When Remmick (played by Jack O’Connell) approaches, the couple answer the door together, presenting a united front. However, when the Native Americans arrive, only the wife appears at the door, a shotgun in hand. Her lone figure, framed tightly in the doorway, visually amplifies her vulnerability and fear. In contrast, the Native Americans are framed together at a distance, their body language urgent but nonthreatening. The blocking and composition emphasize the racialized dynamics at play: Remmick is granted entry, he even sweetens the deal with money in the form of two gold coins, despite the visual suspicion of his arrival. The Native Americans, on the other hand, are denied, not just entry but understanding. Not wanting to come in but for something to come out, they are treated as intruders. The wife’s fear, directed at the very people most attuned to the land’s dangers, highlights an early pattern in the film where racial perception shapes whose knowledge is recognized and whose warnings are disregarded.
The encounter between the Native Americans and the white couple is not merely an isolated moment of prejudice but a reflection of a deeper historical pattern. As Patrick Wolfe argues, “settler colonialism destroys to replace,” a logic that requires the elimination, not merely the subjugation, of Indigenous presence to secure settler claims to land and authority (Wolfe 388). It’s paramount to the scene that the Native Americans are more aware of the dangers lurking in the land than are the white settlers who now claim dominion over it. Their knowledge, rooted in generations of survival and resistance, is rendered invisible by the couple’s biases. The irony is clear: these white settlers defend land they once stole, rejecting the warnings of those to whom the land rightfully belongs. The Natives watch the setting sun for signs, a gesture of intimacy with the land that the white settlers cannot understand, but their authority is dismissed.
The Native Americans’ warning, crucial as it is, also falls on deaf ears and is delivered to the wrong people. Though they attempt to offer protection, they are dismissed and soon disappear from the narrative entirely. Their erasure mirrors the historical treatment of Native peoples in America, who have often been rewritten as part of a distant “history” rather than acknowledged as a living, present force. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues, silences in historical narratives are not accidental; they are produced at every stage of power’s control over knowledge, from “the moment of fact creation” to “the moment of retrospective significance” (Trouillot 26). In Sinners, this structural silencing is dramatized: the warning is not given to those who need it for survival but to those invested in maintaining systems of racial dominance. It is not merely the physical absence of the Native Americans that haunts the rest of the film; it is the absence of their knowledge where it was most needed. Liberation requires access to information, the ability to recognize danger and prepare against it. As Tiya Miles notes, Indigenous existence itself has historically been framed as an existential threat to settler power, reinforcing the systematic exclusion of Native voices from dominant narratives (Miles 12). By misdirecting critical knowledge to those least likely to dismantle oppression, the film reveals how selective liberation begins long before open conflict: it begins in deciding who is permitted to know, resist, and survive.
Faith, Control, and Who Gets to Be Saved: Religion as a Tool
Readings of religion have long been a matter of debate. Interpretation often rests in a person’s proximity to belief: how much one believes tends to dictate one’s view of religion and its collective impact. I fall somewhere on the spectrum between believing in a higher power and rejecting the mechanisms humans have created to worship that power, such as church institutions, tithes, and religious iconography. Yet, if I were to suspend myself in two opposing frameworks, one devout and one atheistic, two conclusions emerge from what Sinners presents about religion. On the one hand, religion is a safe haven: it powerfully connects communities and is called on in times of need. On the other hand, it is a tool of oppression, capable of suppressing individuality and indoctrinating people into a singular, collective understanding. I believe the film attempts to view religion mostly from an atheistic lens.
Exploring this view, we are introduced to Sammie’s father, Jedidiah Moore (played by Saul Williams), a man who seemingly spends his days preaching on the very plantation where his congregation picks cotton. The small church, housed in a structure resembling a former slave quarter, serves both as a meeting place for the sharecroppers and a site of emotional refuge. Jedidiah is never seen picking cotton himself; he appears only within the church, often filmed from a low angle that emphasizes his authority. The lighting on him is consistently dark, subtly calling attention to the sinister ways he weaponizes religion to limit Sammie’s aspirations. In one telling scene, Sammie, hoping to convince his father to let him perform at Club Juke, wakes early to meet his cotton quota for the day. But Jedidiah offers no praise or reward, as if such labor is merely expected — as if picking cotton, historically a symbol of Black subjugation, has been reclaimed as a virtue. The film later shows just how hollow that virtue is. Sharecropping offered no real economic power, with the labor often paid in wood nickels and plantation dollars that could only be spent within closed systems of oppression. No real currency of freedom is exchanged, yet Jedidiah preaches as if, by “casting their buckets down,” Black folk can find true liberation in submission (Washington 219). But as W. E. B. Du Bois observed in The Souls of Black Folk, the Black church has historically been a “double-edged sword,” offering both sanctuary and subtle forms of social control (Du Bois, ch. 10). In Sinners, Jedidiah’s church replicates this tension: it shelters the community while reinforcing submission as the path to salvation.
Furthermore, religion’s power in Sinners is not confined to the devout or even to the Black community itself; it is wielded just as violently by figures like Remmick, who weaponize faith as a tool of domination and conversion. In one of the film’s most chilling sequences, Remmick recites the Lord’s Prayer with Sammie after he corners Sammie in a lake behind Club Juke. Remmick dunks Sammie’s head under the water multiple times like it’s a baptism, while trying to forcibly convert him into a vampire not just by biting him but also by way of ideology. What complicates this moment further is Remmick’s confession that he, too, finds comfort in these words, that faith once meant survival for him as well. In the context of the film, the prayer becomes hollowed out: not a call for collective salvation but a tool for control. The Lord’s Prayer reads:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.
If we were to examine this prayer through Remmick’s perspective, each line, recited almost reverently, becomes a call for Sammie’s surrender, not to God but to the oppressive system Remmick represents. And in his hands, Sinners suggests that even the most sacred texts can be emptied of their collective meaning, turned inward, and weaponized. Sammie’s liberation through religion is offered only through sacrifice: sever his connection to his artistry to find acceptance with his father or sever his Blackness to find acceptance among the vampires.
Sinners complicates the idea of faith even further through Annie (played by Wunmi Mosaku), whose spiritual knowledge, rooted in hoodoo and folk traditions, offers the only real mechanisms of resistance against the vampires. Positioned as a caretaker and healer within the community, Annie’s understanding of hoodoo and folk traditions is not ornamental; it is functional and based on their survival. In the penultimate scene leading up to the film’s climax, she arms notably Sammie, Smoke, Pearline (played by Jayme Lawson), Grace (played by Li Jun Li), and Delta Slim (played by Delroy Lindo) with silver, garlic, holy water, and wooden stakes — the only tools capable of killing the vampires. Her knowledge, passed down through generations, becomes the literal difference between life and death. Yet, throughout the film, Annie’s practices are dismissed and derided by those around her: Stack calls her a “witch,” others mock her rituals as “Louisiana bayou bullshit,” and even question whether her methods are real. As Sylvia Wynter notes, “what was to be legitimated as true knowledge was to be that of the conquerors,” their skepticism underscores a deep colonial logic: that spiritual systems outside Christianity are irrational, mythical, and unserious (Wynter 9). Annie’s knowledge is dismissed until it becomes the last line of defense, when Grace, in a moment of emotional collapse, invites the vampires inside the club, it is Annie’s tools that allow the survivors to fight back. For the first time, we see a direct effect: the vampires are wounded and killed not by prayers or institutions but by the marginalized knowledge long relegated to superstition. Sinners thus lays bare another form of selective liberation: Christianity is upheld as a pathway to liberation while entire belief systems rooted in Black spirituality are “othered” or erased. The result is a vision of liberation that demands severance.
What Survival Costs the Oppressed: Hierarchies Within the Marginalized
While Sinners reveals how dominant systems police belief and survival through religion, it also shows how oppression fractures marginalized communities from within. Selective liberation does not merely pit the oppressed against external forces; it forces them to negotiate their survival through proximity to power, often at the cost of solidarity. Through visual and narrative choices, the film demonstrates how non-Black people of color, as well as Black individuals navigating colorism and passing, are pressured to align closer to whiteness to survive, even when that survival is conditional.
One of the clearest examples of negotiated survival comes through Grace and Bo Chow (played by Yao). As Asian American business owners in a Jim Crow town, they occupy a unique social position: while Black characters are restricted to segregated spaces and constant surveillance, the Chows can move freely between Black and white spaces. Their ownership of two separate stores, one serving Black customers, one white, literalizes their ability to straddle the racial divide for economic gain. Their freedom of movement, emphasized through a tracking shot that follows their daughter as she crosses from the Black storefront to the white one, stands in stark contrast to the limited environments surrounding Black characters like Sammie and Smoke. Grace and Bo’s ability to navigate between Black and white spaces, operating separate stores for each community, is not evidence of their full liberation. It is evidence of survival structured by systemic racial hierarchies. As Lisa Lowe argues in Immigrant Acts, “The granting of citizenship or cultural recognition to the Asian immigrant has been conditional upon his or her acceptance of cultural and racial hierarchies that situate him or her as ‘other’ to white subjects and superior to Black subjects” (Lowe 8). Grace and Bo’s economic success is possible precisely because they operate within these racial divisions, not because they’ve overcome them.
Furthermore, this proximity is also visually reinforced during a fleeting but telling moment in the film’s early montage. As Grace and Bo load supplies for Club Juke, Grace appears briefly in a denim jumpsuit and red bandana, clear visual markers of Rosie the Riveter, an icon of white-centered women’s suffrage movements. Though the costume disappears quickly, replaced by a more traditional floral dress once inside the club, Grace’s brief costuming as Rosie the Riveter visually aligns her with a liberation narrative historically reserved for white women. As bell hooks argues in Ain’t I a Woman, “White women were not willing to relinquish their support of white supremacy to support the interests of all women” (hooks, Ain’t I a Woman 136). Grace’s ability to temporarily “wear” the aesthetics of white liberation, even as she remains marginalized, mirrors her broader negotiation with selective liberation: survival through alignment with dominant narratives that never fully intend to liberate her.
While Grace and Bo’s access to selective liberation stems from their non-Black status, Mary’s (played by Hailee Steinfield) struggle emerges from within Blackness itself. Watching her character, I could not help but see how her racial ambiguity, phenotypically white but genetically mixed, positions her differently within the town’s rigid racial hierarchy. Mary’s appearance affords her selective privileges that other Black characters cannot access, highlighting how proximity to whiteness fractures even communities struggling against a common enemy. Her longing to belong to Stack and the Black community that raised her is genuine, but it exists in tension with the possibilities that passing and assimilation offer her. Unlike Stack or Smoke, who must fight openly against the structures that oppress them, Mary has the option to survive by aligning herself with whiteness and despite what she tells Stack during an emotionally charged love confession — ultimately, does. I also found it significant that her name is Mary. In Christian iconography, Mary represents purity, grace, and divine selection. In Sinners, this resonance lingers: Mary is “chosen” not because of her virtue but because of how she looks. Her proximity to whiteness gives her the chance to survive, but only by severing her solidarity with those she claims to love.
Furthermore, Mary’s character backstory really draws me in here. The vampires at this point are made up of Remmick and the white couple who had given him protection from the Native Americans earlier in the film. These core three had attempted to enter the Club but were ultimately denied. Smoke, Stack, Annie, Cornbread, and even Delta Slim’s drunk ass all turned them away with deep suspicion. In our dramatic irony as spectators, we think them right to do so, but they turn them away even knowing they could use their real money (not plantation money) to help keep the Club alive. But it’s Mary who steps outside Club Juke to meet the three white strangers, and it is not an act of naïve hopefulness. It is something heavier. Watching her, it did not feel brave to me. It felt performative. Her willingness to cross that line, even when every other Black character refused, reveals how proximity to whiteness conditions other marginalized individuals to pursue survival strategies that endanger the collective.
And underneath it all, I keep thinking about her mother. Mary clings to the idea that her family had deep ties to the Black community, but when she speaks about her own ancestry, there is a telling distance. She says, almost offhandedly, “My mother’s daddy was half Black,” never even referring to him as her grandfather. It made me wonder if she ever really knew him, or if Blackness for her had always been more of an abstract inheritance than a living connection. Even further, when Stack and Smoke speak of Mary’s mother, their memories suggest that her proximity to them did not make her safe. Mary comes across as an unreliable narrator here. Watching her, I realized it was not just her proximity to white or Blackness that made her vulnerable; it was her confusion about what proximity meant. Like I said, her longing is genuine, but belonging requires more than shared history, it requires shared risk. And when the vampires show up at Club Juke, we see the limits of Mary’s understanding. She volunteers to approach them, because she knows they’ll likely reveal more to her than they would to Smoke or Stack. And what’s worse: Mary had resources of her own. Stack mentions she was set up with a wealthy man in Arkansas, meaning she had access to money and safety that the others did not. But instead of offering her own support, she volunteers to approach the very white patrons the rest of the club had already refused. In doing so, she doesn’t challenge the system that gave her access, she enacts it. She uses her privilege not to protect the community directly but to negotiate from within whiteness (Fanon 13). Her help ends up centering her and liberating only herself.
Grace, Bo, and Mary reveal that true liberation demands solidarity across marginalized communities, not selective access to systems of power. Each character is conditioned to seek safety through individual access, not collective risk. Sinners show how easily liberation is mistaken for survival, and how survival strategies (when shaped by systemic power) often reinforce the very structures they appear to navigate. In this world, liberation is not shared; it is granted selectively, to those willing to compromise everything but the system itself.
Invited to Be Devoured: Assimilation, Gentrification, and the Price of White Allyship
The vampires in Sinners are brutal in ways that are immediately recognizable: they bite, they maim, they consume. But as I watched, it became clear that the horror Coogler crafts is not solely in their violence, it is in their seduction. Remmick and the Klan-affiliated couple are not interested in storming Club Juke by force. At least, not at first. They try to be invited in. They understand that total domination, for it to be sustainable, must appear consensual. Assimilation, too, often masquerades as invitation: to safety, to opportunity, to belonging. But it demands the surrender of one’s cultural autonomy. This is the same sleight of hand at the heart of selective liberation: a promise extended, but only if one agrees to give up part of oneself. In one of the film’s arguably more comedic scenes, the vampires attempt to serenade the Black patrons of Club Juke from outside, singing “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” The vampires’ performance is not an homage; it is a heist. Watching it unfold, I was struck by how familiar it felt. How often American culture invites in what it will later consume, repurpose, and sell back to us. And the song’s meaning lays the ruse bare. “Pick Poor Robin Clean” is a warning, a story of being stripped of everything you have. The vampires are not honoring Black culture; they are signaling their intention to strip it down to the bones. And they do so under the same rhetoric that assimilation always promises: equality. Coogler makes it clear: the “equality” on offer is the right to be devoured last. Very Orwellian.
I’d also be remiss not to point out Remmick’s obsession with Sammie as another layer to this strategy. He does not just want Sammie’s body; he wants his stories. In their most intimate conversation I mentioned earlier, Remmick speaks almost reverently about Sammie’s gift. But this reverence is predatory. He wants Sammie to join the vampires not to preserve his voice but to hollow it out and use it for recruitment; a vampiric gentrification. As George Lipsitz argues, “cultural practices have often played crucial roles in prefiguring, presenting, and preserving political coalitions based on identification with the fiction of ‘whiteness’” (Lipsitz 371). The vampires’ attempt to appropriate Sammie’s music is not incidental, it is strategic, aimed at softening their control by making it look like a partnership. The vampires’ attempts to claim Sammie’s stories is an extension of this logic. As if it is not already enough to consume Black vitality, it must be repackaged, sold, and wielded in service of the very structures it once resisted.
Even those who attempt to assimilate more consciously are not spared. Smoke and Stack’s costuming by adorning Irish and Italian suits respectively (two ethnic groups once considered outsiders but later absorbed into the machinery of American whiteness) is a painful example. In their pinstripe suits and fedora hats, they mimic a model of upward mobility historically denied to them. But mimicry is not immunity. Despite adopting the visual markers of ethnic whiteness, Smoke and Stack are still fundamentally Black men in Mississippi. Their performance of whiteness does not protect them. Smoke dies at the hands of the Klan during the final siege on Club Juke, and Stack is ultimately consumed by the vampires, physically transformed into the very system they fought against. Stuart Hall reminds us that identity isn’t something that can be restored just by offering inclusion; instead, it keeps shifting under the weight of history, culture, and power (Hall 226). Their tragedy reaffirms one of my central points: that liberation is never fully granted and is violently revoked when its conditions are no longer met.
Ultimately, Sinners refuses the fantasy that allyship, when divorced from genuine risk and relinquishment of power, can be a path to liberation. The vampires’ “alliance” is nothing more than assimilation by another name, and the price is the soul of the community itself. What’s even worse is the vampire’s hive mind is indiscriminate. The white couple Remmick indoctrinates are full-on Klan members, and yet by the end of the film Remmick expects us (the spectator) and the Black patrons of Club Juke to accept a future in which their oppression stands side by side with their oppressor. And as Sara Ahmed writes in On Being Included, “the work of diversity is the work of preserving the institution” rather than transforming it (Ahmed 33). In Sinners, the vampires’ offer of inclusion mirrors exactly that: not a break from the system but a restructuring that protects its core by dressing domination up as diversity. In this way, Coogler indicates not just white supremacy in its most visible forms but the softer, more insidious bargains that marginalized people are asked to make in exchange for survival – bargains that promise protection but demand erasure. Selective liberation is shown clearly; this “pathway” out of oppression is a series of carefully engineered traps designed to fracture solidarity, empty out identity, and ensure that true freedom remains permanently deferred.
The System Owns the Exit: The Cycle of Violence
There’s a moment in Sinners that I could watch on loop forever: smoke gunning down the Klan in a blaze of bullets, Rambo-style, as they attempt to enact their own genocide on Club Juke and its Black patrons. It’s sickly sweet and perversely satisfying, the kind of reversal you dream about if you’re Black in America but rarely get to see. I don’t want that kind of violence today, not really. But if it had happened generations ago, and if it had actually disrupted the legacy of terror and impunity, I can’t pretend I wouldn’t have appreciated it. It’s a fantasy of justice that history denies us. And it’s precisely because it is a fantasy that it stings even as it thrills. But as exhilarating as it is to watch Smoke fight back, the scene carries something. Club Juke itself, the sanctuary Smoke and Stack believed they owned, was sold to them by a man later revealed to be some kind of grand wizard of the Klan. The very ground they are defending was a trap from the beginning. Unknown to the Black patrons, the Klan and the vampires had already planned their fate: by morning, the doors would swing open, and everyone inside would be gone.
Throughout Sinners, overt and subtle racism do not exist as opposites; they exist as collaborators. When Black autonomy could not be undermined through false allyship, it was going to be destroyed through terror. Watching the events unfold, it becomes clear that this was never a battle between two competing visions of America. Sinners doesn’t expose a broken system: it reveals a functioning one, one where the illusion of freedom is offered only to pacify, and where violence waits behind it. Selective liberation is not a failure of the system. It is the system itself.
Smoke’s defense of Club Juke pulls directly from this reality. When he opens his trunk and arms himself, he is not inventing a new strategy for freedom. He is pulling from the weapons he carried as a soldier in World War I: tools of imperial warfare that were never intended to liberate people like him. While his retaliation is powerful, it is built from the debris of a world already shaped by power. This is complicated further when you realize the weapons he uses to kill the master’s men were also meant to protect the master’s house, the Club itself. As Audre Lorde reminds us, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde 110). Coogler presents this not as a moral failure but as the brutal choices survival demands. When the system only allows you the master’s tools, fighting back risks replicating the violence you were trying to escape. Smoke’s role as a soldier also sharpens the historical betrayal the film captures. Black men fought in World War I thinking that proving their loyalty abroad might earn them freedom at home. Instead, they returned to the same systems of exclusion and violence, only now more aware of the hollow promises they had been given (Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers”). Smoke’s victory against the Klan mirrors this reality: brave, but structurally boxed in. Frantz Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth that although the violence of the colonized is necessary for reclaiming dignity, it is not enough on its own to dismantle the structures that produced their subjugation (Fanon, The Wretched 40). Smoke’s fight, however righteous, cannot unravel the system it briefly disrupts. Selective liberation offers resistance only as brief, fleeting flashes of agency, not lasting transformation. Smoke’s Rambo moment is fun, sexy even, but it does not dismantle the system that produced the Klan or the vampires. As the post-credits scene reveals, Vampire Mary and Stack are still alive, still moving through the world, carrying forward the subtler forms of the system.
So, the Klan’s attack on Club Juke is the blunt instrument of oppression. It is a visible, explicit reminder that no matter how much Black culture is celebrated, praised, or invited into the American fabric, Black existence remains negotiable. Meanwhile, the vampires’ earlier performance operates more quietly. It prepares the ground, making betrayal and violence appear as unfortunate accidents rather than deliberate outcomes, capturing what Richard Dyer identifies as whiteness’s greatest maneuver: “White power secures its dominance by seeming not to be anything in particular,” making racism appear invisible even as they dictate the terms of survival (Dyer 9). Sinners shows us clearly that these forms of racism together enact the full performance of selective liberation: offer a seat at the table, then burn the house down.
Conclusion
Finally, The End. Well, not quite. I’ve debated some on how this should end. Whether I make grand claims on how to achieve liberation non-selectively. Neatly tie up all the historical, psychological, cultural posits I make. But this is, simply put, a film criticism. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners maps the conditions of selective liberation with an honesty that refuses easy answers. Across the film, systems of power reveal themselves not only in moments of open violence but also in quieter invitations to assimilate, conform, and surrender. Whether through the vampires or the Klan, Sinners shows that liberation, when it is offered, is always strategic, always partial, and always conditional. It also shows that true belonging is never granted equally; it is negotiated, eroded, and weaponized. Throughout, I have traced how Sinners ultimately leaves us with the uncomfortable truth: that overt racism, erasure, assimilation, religion, and solidarity are not separate forces; they are co-conspirators, each making space for the other to thrive and devalue true liberation. Whether one emerges first, or whether all are always already present, becomes almost beside the point. What matters is that together, they maintain the structures that define who may be free and who must be content with surviving. These are the tensions Sinners refuses to resolve, and they are the tensions I leave open here. Not because there are no answers, but because any answer that comes too quickly risks missing the way systems of power adapt, regenerate, and survive, even when they are momentarily exposed.
Film Rating: 9.8/10. The film is well directed, well acted and well made. There’s a lot to see and unsee and there is a lot to miss. It’s worth seeing multiple times (as I have) and looking out for something different every time.
References
Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press, 2012.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Project Gutenberg, 1997, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/408/408-h/408-h.htm.
Du Bois, W. E. B. “Returning Soldiers.” The Crisis, May 1919, https://www.americanyawp.com/reader/21-world-war-i/w-e-b-dubois-returning-soldiers-may-1919/.
Dyer, Richard. White: Essays on Race and Culture. Routledge, 1997.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove Press, 1986.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963.
Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–237.
hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.
Lipsitz, George. “The Possessive Investment in Whiteness.” American Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 3, 1995, pp. 369–387.
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Crossing Press, 1984, pp. 110–114.
Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Duke University Press, 1996.
Miles, Tiya. Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom. University of California Press, 2005.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, 1995.
Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery. Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901.
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4, 2006, pp. 387–409.
Wynter, Sylvia. 1492: A New World View. Beacon Press, 1995.
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All images are screenshots from Warner Bros. trailers on YouTube.
