As a descendant daughter of the Mississippi Delta, Ryan Coogler’s new film “Sinners” touched an ancestral chord in my spirit in one particularly euphoric dance scene in which Black and Brown bodies of past, present, and future moved in transcendent communion. Long-buried memories from decades past came rushing back in breathtaking clarity.
I was a little girl sweating through my hijab in New Medinah, Mississippi, a small Muslim town in the heart of the Bible Belt — my tender voice joining the chorus of community prayers echoing in the dusk.
I was the anguish of a Black ancestor, who lived relatively free as the son of a White enslaver and enslaved Black woman when he was kidnapped during a Choctaw raid in Kentucky and sold for guns and whiskey to a plantation in the Mississippi Delta.
I was my Mississippi-born grandmother, serenely beautiful and pregnant, majestically appointed in satin and sable, who was forced to urinate behind a White-owned gas station after being denied use of the restroom inside.
I am the rootwork of the everyday admonitions: Don’t let your feet get swept. Keep your purse off the floor. Make sure you burn that hair if you gon’ cut it.
I am the ancestral rhythms born anew in hip-hop, raw and powerful, dancing till sweaty in the Citizens Club, a modern-day juke joint near cotton fields, that yes, even in the 1990s/early 2000s in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was one of the few places where Black college kids could dance free from White gaze — and all of the trouble that comes with it.
“Sinners” is a beautifully wrought ode to community that not only resonated with me but with audiences, in part, because it offers a historically anchored, inclusive view of the American South. The film stands in sharp contrast against the current Trump administration’s racist attempts to whitewash the historic and cultural contributions of Black and Brown people.
Set against the historic backdrop of Missississippi’s bloodsoaked soil, the supernatural thriller is firmly rooted in the Jim Crow-era South. The narrative examines multiracial community coexistence and its inherent tensions, music’s universally transformative power, the insatiable appetite of White culture vultures, and offers an indictment of both economic and faith-based exploitation. The story unfolds through a symphony of symbolism spanning spiritual traditions of West African, Indigenous American, Chinese, and Irish origin and myths from myriad cultures.
The film’s protagonists are the Black people whose African ancestors were hauled from their homeland in chains, whose sweat and toil, grief and joy, rhythm and blues made the South a new home.
They are the Indigenous peoples who knew the land long before it had a Westernized name and whose mother tongue and birthright were stolen.
They are the Chinese people who were brought by ship after the Civil War by White capitalists seeking to exploit them as cheap replacement field labor, who then went on to create a network of stores serving both Whites and Blacks.
The movie posits that there is strength in community, united by purpose, though those bonds are made brittle by the racial politics that dictate their place in society.
Throughout the film, music is a powerfully transcendent community covenant that stretches back through strands of time to unifying ancestral rhythms and spins forward through space to envision an ebullient future. It is when anchored by this ancient form of storytelling — of remembrance and creation passed through a song that is at once delicately intimate and universally all-encompassing that the community is most seamlessly blended — and most powerful.
“Sinners” also warns viewers of the perils of self-serving coalitions.
The Chow family’s proximity to Whiteness enables their navigation of Jim Crow’s codas by operating separate Whites-only and Blacks-only grocery stores. They have deep friendships within the Black community and are figuratively and literally “invited to the cookout” during the juke joint’s sole night of revelry. However, Grace rashly went against the community’s consensus to launch an anger-fueled and desperate battle in a bid to protect her own family.
Mary, whose biblical name is juxtaposed against her overt sensuality, alludes to the “tragic Mulatto” literary trope. Her existence is defined by the “one-drop rule” which long held that anyone with a single drop of African ancestry — usually defined as having at least one multiracial grandparent — was considered Black.
However, as a woman who passes for White, her seemingly oblivious transgressions into Black spaces endanger the very community whose acceptance she so desperately craves. Her self-absorbed allyship coupled with the naive presumption that her proximity to Whiteness extends protection to those she loves, inadvertently invites a corrupting evil that seeks to feast on her community.
“Sinners” also offers a scathing critique of racism as a vicious, many-headed hydra that devours Black and Brown communities. The threat of racialized violence — be it from the Klan, recollections of lynchings, or worries that any small misstep could result in imprisonment or death — looms ever-present.
Equally villainous as physical violence is the inescapable economic oppression. That looming evil is inherent in the sharecropping system, which robbed Black workers of equitable wages and upward mobility. It is the malevolent force that ensures that Smoke and Stack’s business will never break even. The juke joint’s guests were paying in wooden tokens only redeemable on sharecropping “plantations.” And the Klan never intended to let the twins keep the club they paid for come sunrise.
The film condemns cultural appropriation as a parasitic force that saps the souls out of communities. Remmick, as the embodiment of Lucifer (who in some Judeo-Christian interpretations is a fallen angel once in charge of music) wants to use Sammie’s soulful musical gifts to “pierce the veil” and create a multiracial coalition of the undead. However, the song the newly vampiric legion sings is not the cross-cultural melange Sammie evoked with his playing, their movements are a puppet dance of Remmick’s Irish jig.
As Coogler underscored, “Sinners” is about “the deals people in oppressive situations must rationalize.”
Finally, the movie critiques how Christianity has been used as a divisive tool to control and subjugate marginalized people — as in its sometimes violent introduction to pagan Ireland, justifying the enslavement of Africans, or, more subtly, keeping Sammie from his birthright as a griot– a revered musical storyteller.
While Christian prayers were useless against the vampires, ancestral wisdom and traditions provided powerful protection such as the Choctaw firekeepers’ warnings about a malevolent spirit afoot and the ways Annie’s knowledge of rootwork and magic kept loved ones safe.
And it is that safety in and desire for knowing and in being known, in being treasured and loved as a precious part of a beloved community that is at the crux of “Sinners’” resonance. The movie is a homily for all of us as modern-day keepers of memory.
“Sinners” stands in the breach and opens a pathway for all of our ancestors – yours and mine – to beckon across the ages.
They whisper to us in an ancient rhythm: We belong.
This article first appeared on The Emancipator and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.