#5.11.25

sinners is an essay on blackness and music, religious pressure on colonized people, music, and the how the intersections of cultures can manifest. the sinners of the movie are that simply because their sin is being black, being colonized and having the nerve to try to live outside of servicing a master/colonizer.

i absolutely love sinners because it’s phenomenal and reminds me of what i strive to accomplish with my own writing. sinners shines the light on a major area of exigence: the horrific reality that black people became a christian majority only because of colonization. and then to tie this in with the colonizing of a white person who used to be an ‘undesirable’ to america? amazing work.

and of course, the love of blackness is so vivid in this movie to me in the care given. black vampires are unfortunately rare in well-funded projects like this and a special interest of mine. when stack was turned, his grillz were changed to accommodate his new fangs; moreover, his grillz (blackness) changed with him to signify this new facet of his identity (black and—). we get to see annie, a root worker, protect her community with a historically black spirituality that’s often wrongfully demonized. we see blues lovingly mixed with rock, folk, rap & hip hop, and more genres in the beloved ‘i lied to you’ juke scene. sinners loves blackness enough to embrace it and its history, chains and all.

whiteness is actually represented with amazing accuracy. seductive, malleable, and vampiric in how it sucks the culture, meaning, and life out of things because of how it demands to take up the most space, to be thee domineering force over others. whiteness seduced remmick, who is torn in his desire for community, but has no qualms harming black people to acquire it. he quickly steps into the role of klan-sympathizer, equality ally, and source of fear with an ease that comes from practice, from familiarity, with whiteness’ malleability. remmick is vampiric in his vampirism, absorbing the memories of those he turns, abusing that private information to try to seduce humans his cult.