SPOILER ALERT!

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners starring Michael B. Jordan is a cinematic ode to Black folks in the Depression-era Mississippi Delta. The cinematography of this movie conjures up Black classic films such as The Color Purple (1985) and even tragicomedy of Life (2000). Unlike these predecessors, Sinners uses magic realism to tell the stories of African American life that never seemed to escape the horrors of a racial caste system. Coogler’s implementation of vampires provides a window to understanding the role of whiteness in America’s social imaginary. Sinners, I suggest, provides a way to view whiteness as a vampiric imagination born out of a diseased social, cultural, and religious logic that terrorizes Black folks. Through Sinners depiction of Remmick, in the hands of an angry God, the vampiric life is offered as a form of redemption that ultimately damns the white people it supposedly saves.

I want to be clear that I am intentionally separating whiteness from white people. This allows the essay’s title question to be understood more clearly: can ‘white’ people be saved? When the Choctaw band of Native Americans rode up to the Klan couple’s house with vultures circling overhead, they had a choice to seek the salvation offered by vampire hunters or give in to the evil of whiteness signaled by their Klan robes, and the already-turned Remmick who was seeking refuge within. Their self-titled win ultimately cost their own humanity. In this, not only does Sinners situate whiteness as antithetical to the light of the sun, but as a cultural idea that requires white people to buy into it.

I remember reading a 2017 New York Times op-ed by Thomas Chatterton Williams that compared cultural essayist Ta-Nahesi Coates, with white supremacist and ‘alt-right’ founder Richard Spencer. Williams made the assertion that Coates’ understanding of “whiteness [as] a ‘talisman,’ an ‘amulet’ of ‘eldritch energies’ that explains all injustice” is no different than Spencer’s supremacist view of the white race. For Williams, they both “mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural.” Eight year later, after the cancel culture wars, and the rescinding of affirmative action and DEI initiatives under the guise of being anti-woke, I wonder if Williams’ point is worth taking seriously. What is the benefit of assigning supernatural powers to racial identities? The argument Williams makes isn’t a new one: if race is a social construct, something created by humans and not endowed by some supernatural force, then aren’t humans equally as capable of dismantling it?

Williams’ criticism of Coates isn’t a new argument, but it is a minority report. Previously, Victor Anderson in Beyond Ontological Blackness made a much more vigorous claim against ontological blackness—this idea of what it means to be Black—because blackness is always understood in its relationship to whiteness, and secondly its centering of trauma and suffering as unifying to the collective Black experience. Coogler and Coates at first appear to have a reasonable response to Anderson’s problem by recognizing whiteness as an paranormal force. An “eldritch energy” for Coates, vampires for Coogler. However, the creative license of cinema allows Coogler to show that the white characters, just like the Black ones and the Asian ones, are just as easily corrupted by a vampiric whiteness as anyone else. The scene where the turned fieldworkers dance in a circle around Remmick singing “The Rocky Road to Dublin” is less about showing parallels of discrimination faced by African Americans and the Irish, but more about how whiteness has the power to make anyone dance to its haunting beat.

Still, the presence of vampires in the world of the movie still does not adequately account for the unity of suffering in the afterlives of slavery for Black folks who lived under the threat of the stochastic and domestic terrorism by the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs and uniformed police officers. This suggests to me that there is something about being situated in a body with melanated skin that is essential in being Black here in the United States. Strategically applied, an embodied essentialism makes Williams argument simply absurd. There is no comparing of Ta-Nehesi Coates with a white supremacist. Whether Hogwood, the Klansman who sold the sawmill to Smoke and Stack, was in cahoots with the vampires or not is irrelevant because the movie’s closing scene was inevitable from the moment the twins bought the property. Black death, the imposition of Jim Crow’s necropolitics, be it social or embodied, was always the end goal in the minds of white men who held all the keys to social, economic, and political power in the Mississippi Delta. Sadly, no amount of hand-wringing from Williams or calls from Anderson that basically say “Black people are not a monolith” are able to overcome what womanist theologian Emilie Townes aptly names as the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” within the “cultural production of evil.”

As I watched Sinners, it became more and more evident that the true enemy of blackness is a vampiric world order originating in the minds of white folks. The discussion that needs to be had is one that hold the social logic of how white folks willingly choose to see themselves in the world accountable. The evidence of Townes’ fantastic hegemonic imagination is made crystal clear when Remmick, as a vampire, in his mind’s eye sees the juke joint burning down and Sammie’s musical talent as a commodity to be plundered. This theme continues as Remmick articulates that Sammie, and all his abilities, are useful to the vampiric hive-mind—the commodity plundered first, and then finally colonized. And those who agree to the hegemonic and vampiric social imaginary of whiteness accept Remmick’s haunting offer: “I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won’t let you build. Won’t let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.”

It’s not missed on me, nor many others, that Sinners took the road less traveled with African American spirituality, Coogler paints a religious reality understood, even if not uttered, by broad swaths of Black folks who have roots in the American South. Whiteness is not beholden to a God that delivered slaves from an Egyptian pharaoh, nor to a Christ that has come to set the captives free, nor to a Holy Spirit that gives power to witness in public about Jesus’ works in the world. Rather, whiteness is a hellish alliance that sides with Pharaoh, the jailer of the captives, and creates a bloodthirsty apparatus to taint the marketplace of ideas with misinformation, conspiracy theories, and big lies.

As I see it, the vampires of Depression-era Mississippi are a stand-in for whiteness, Coogler gives a peak into the social and cultural way of thinking that many white folks have bought into across the modern era and even presently. This way of thinking is a consumptive logic. It eats, devours, razes and demolishes everything in its path; it’s the trash incinerator at the end of Toy Story 3. Like whiteness, in vampire myth, it must consume the lifeblood of the Other to prevent mortality. This process of discipleship requires taking life, as though it were a sitting duck waiting to be hunted, over and over again in order to maintain the vampire coven.

The seventeenth century Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards asks his listening to community to reject a previous life in his famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” under the threat of hellfire and brimstone. He preached that “the foolish children of men miserably delude themselves in their own schemes, and in confidence in their own strength and wisdom; they trust to nothing but a shadow.” The offer made by Remmick to Sammie, Smoke, Stack, Annie, Grace and Delta Slim standing in the doorway of the juke joint is nothing more than a scheme; one made up to justify his trust in the shadow world of vampires. Smoke and Mary believed in this scheme telling themselves the lie over and over until they found Sammie in a Chicago blues club 60 years later. By this point, Smoke has become an undead entity existing in the shadow of a shadow, a Black vampire. Vampirism, I argue, does not offer salvation to anyone. Not even white people. A resurrection to the undead is not a life. At least not a life recognizable to any living human.

To answer the title’s question, yes, white people can be saved. Whiteness cannot. The vampiric consumptive imagination of Sinners depicts how whiteness functions. It consumes not just Black folks in obvious ways, but it devours Remmick’s Irish heritage and vomits it back as white. Understanding whiteness through the lens of Sinners suggests a social contract of condemned redemption. White folks bitten by whiteness believe that they are saved, yet it’s a salvation destined for damnation. Its disciples experience an unholy resurrection that relegates existence to the nighttime, to the shadows, unto death itself. Whiteness only propagates itself by feeding and devouring the living, a cursed existence that requires a perpetual blood sacrifice to achieve hopes of eternality. Having an existence where the light of the sun results in death’s final blow almost seems like a perfect rebuttal to the centuries of written and decreed colonial history that deemed those found closer to the Earth’s equator with darker skin as the savages.

Rather than stepping into the light of the world and accept their fate, white Americans—and those that think they are white—as individuals, family units, business owners, factory workers, preachers, elected officials, cryptobros, trad wives, tech moguls, teachers, and college students choose daily to participate in a capitalistic system that ingests the blood, sweat, and tears of the vulnerable. And too often, in a caste system based on skin color, the scapegoats sacrificed on their ontological altar are Black folks. The genius of Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners reminds those in the hands of an angry God that the tragic irony in this process of redemption is one that leads to the damnation of not just themselves, but the inevitable death of those still living.