Whiteness as Enemy: Irish Assimilationism and Sinners (2025)
The cultural makeup of the Southern Irishman and what he represents as the antagonist of Sinners (2025)
In May, I sat in three separate theaters to watch Sinners and now that it’s on streaming I’ve continued spreading the Sinners gospel.
But before I get into my tangent, I want to highlight some work done by authors on here because there is a wealth of fantastic writing about this movie!
Caro’s Sensual Terrors has several incredible posts about Sinners. Check them out here:
★ Sinners (2025) drums up rich music history & the spirit of rebellion in the South
★ 7 Black cinephiles on Sinners' impact
From Loudest in the Room, check out this piece dissecting Coogler’s thesis: Sinners (2025): Beneath the Surface
From Film Daze, read Faith is Bigger than God: Sinners, Religion, and Community
Also from Film Daze: Sinners Tries, We Deny: On Desiring the Fat Black Woman
And from the Liberation Education Newsletter, read about The Outlawing of Irish Culture
As a southerner of Irish descent, the fact that the movie’s antagonist is an Irishman far removed from his heritage really stood out to me. The South has always been a miasma of culture, whether due to the violent enslavement of people from various regions of Africa or due to waves of diasporic immigration, you have the flourishing Creole culture in Louisiana to the spiritual Gullah culture of the lowcountry. Sinners does not shy away from representing the layered and complex nature of racial relationships in the Jim Crow era south, featuring an Asian-American family as the local grocers of both the white and black folk, and a white-passing mixed woman and her struggle between sacrificing her identity for safety, or embracing it in a culture based upon the one-drop rule. But I was specifically taken by the choice to feature an Irish man as the antagonist, and I ultimately think that it is the most poignant way of representing the construction of Whiteness in America— a genius cherry on top of what has to be one of the most well framed and creative representations of race in American history.
I’d like to preface this essay by saying that while Remmick is positioned as the antagonist of the movie, building a vampire colony for himself, I don’t necessarily think he is the villain. I argue that the villain in this movie is capital W Whiteness, Whiteness as a cultural body— a monster that lives and breathes, ebbs and flows, and most importantly, consumes. I’d say Remmick is more of a tool of the villain, an arm of the antagonistic body, and in many ways, he, too, is victim. I say this in the way that white folks today can be both victims and perpetuators of white supremacy and violence— just bear this in mind as I explore his character and know that at the end of the day I am not a Remmick apologist.
In the simplest of terms, Remmick’s Irish-American identity is key and positions him in a liminal space, one wherein he has the privileges of whiteness but is subject to forced assimilation and a loss of heritage. The antagonist of this movie had to be Irish, because the Irish identity is perfectly positioned in this era of American history as a camouflaged Other. It is my goal in this essay to not offer just a film analysis, but to examine the history of the Irish in both Ireland and America, and how they morphed into American citizens, ones capable of propagating white supremacy.
To Leave Where I Was Born:
While Rocky Road to Dublin tells of a man from County Galway traveling eastward for opportunities in the city of Dublin, the sense of grief, of forced displacement, abandoned hopes, dreams, homes, and families is echoed in the path Irish immigrants took westward, leaving their homes for America.
Drank a pint of beer, me grief and tears to smother
Then off to reap the corn, leave where I was born
The Irish came to America in waves. Prior to the Famine, most Irish immigrants were Anglo-Irish or Scotch-Irish; that is, protestants of English descent coming from the Ulster region, north of Ireland. The distinction between Protestants and Catholics is of utmost importance in not only contextualizing Remmick’s identity in the movie, but also in contextualizing the struggle of the Irish people against English oppression. Throughout most of the history of the British Isles, the Irish and English were conceptualized as separate races. While we know that the concept of race is a distinctly social construction and would likely not consider the Irish and English different “races” in today’s terms, the medieval and early-modern world stuck with this distinction. Christianity and Catholicism arrived in Ireland from independent missionaries, and eventually morphed with the pagan Celtic practices so that Catholicism became a pillar of the Irish identity. Following the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 the Catholic Irish were subject to violence at the hands of the English, forced to Anglicize. The English tried to rid the Irish of their own language and heritages, perpetuating the notion of Irish “savagery” and “backwardness.” The English established plantations, quite literally the planting of English colonies in Ireland with the goal of suppressing and erasing the Gaelic culture. The Irish were subject to intense oppression at the hands of English, and sometimes Irish landlords. By the 1800s, the Irish were subject to the Penal Acts which positioned Catholics as second class citizens, with little rights, little privileges, and essentially set up an apartheid state wherein Protestants and the English had privileges at the expense of the Irish people. The south of Ireland was liberated (after a long struggle) due to the majority of its inhabitants being Catholic, whereas the north remains a part of the UK due to its protestant majority. The Troubles of the late 20th century were a long drawn out struggle for freedom and I can only hope that Ireland is free and united in my lifetime, but it is important to know the distinction between Protestants and Catholics in the scheme of Irish history; these are identities engrained in the person, the family, and their lived experience, not just religious affiliations that can be shrugged off. In fact, many of those fighting for Irish liberation, like Gerry Adams and Brendan Hughes, professed to a disconnect from the Catholic faith, but their identities were still tied into the inferior positioning of Catholics in British-Occupied Ireland.
So: prior to the Famine, many Irish immigrants who came to America were from Ulster, and of protestant faith. During and after the Famine, the majority of immigrants were Catholic, escaping the English-manufactured famine, persecution and poverty at the hands of the English, and looking for opportunity. Opportunities they didn’t often find in America.
While Ireland struggled for liberation from the English, a different struggle for liberation was unfolding in America.
The struggle for the abolition of Slavery and the struggle for Irish liberation were vastly different. The struggle of the Irish people does not even begin to compare to the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade and American institution of slavery. However, the two histories are intertwined. Many Irish people opposed slavery, and considered it a distinctly British making. In the early 1800s, Irishman Daniel O’Connell championed two causes: the freedom of Ireland from England, and the freedom of the enslaved African-Americans. Daniel O’Connell lived in Ireland his whole life, and attempted to appeal to his Irish brothers and sisters across the Atlantic: “Irishmen and Irishwomen! Treat the colored people as your equals, as brethren,” he wrote, “By your memories of Ireland, continue to love liberty—hate slavery—CLING BY THE ABOLITIONISTS— and in America you will do honor to the name of Ireland.”
While many Irish-Americans opposed slavery, they also opposed the idea of being spoken for by a man across the seas. Many responded by denying any kind of fellowship between the Irish and African-Americans, and “consider[ed themselves] in every respect as CITIZENS of” America. A denunciation of Ireland and the struggle for freedom in America. It was a selfish and hypocritical proclamation, as many Irish-Americans were outspoken about a desire for a free Ireland, yet couldn’t stand up for freedom at home. Some argued on the basis of principle— they were anti-slavery, but didn’t want it to appear as though an Irish man was speaking on their behalf now that they were American citizens. Many just wanted to blend into the cultural framework of America, and this appeal for Irish action put them in the crosshairs of several struggles. Regardless, it is clear that the Irish-Americans, even first-generation ones, found themselves to be distinct from the Irish, and were attempting to worm their way up the white supremacist hierarchy. Some even sent donations to Ireland to “stop O’Connell’s mouth” (Ignatiev 20) and save face on American soil. This parallel is drawn from the first moment we see Remmick in Sinners, appealing to the white Klan members by making it seem as though he was being hunted by Native Americans. He played into their racism for his own benefit, just as the actual Irish-Americans were learning to do as they settled into America. Many Irish did oppose slavery, outspokenly so, but the desire to fit in and appear American led to their condemnation of O’Connell.
An Irish-American man named Mr. O’Brien “added that, while he was personally opposed to slavery, he regarded it as his duty to uphold American institutions.” It is this failure to call out the sins of one’s own country that is so paramount to American history and our failure to hold our country accountable, and it is an incredibly lukewarm and spineless take that perfectly exemplifies the idea that the Irish had to appeal to American exceptionalism to earn themselves a place in American society. This wasn’t always the case— I did some digging on my own ancestors who I’d known left Ireland due to the famine and settled in Ohio in the mid-1800s, and found that my fourth-great-grandfather on my maternal side left Ireland after the worst year of the famine (“Black 47”) and fought for the North in the Civil War. My Irish-American ancestors went on to work as railroad laborers, a typical fate for an Irish immigrant, because for many Irish in America, the American dream manifest as nothing but exploitation and assimilation.
Irish laborers had few options and took on dangerous, labor-intensive jobs like laying railroads. In the public eye, they were hated, made subject to cruel caricatures playing on figures of Irish faith, as figures like Pat and Bridget joined the Jim Crow minstrel stage. But despite the mirrored treatment of African Americans and Irish Americans, the trajectory of the Irish situation in America morphed from solidarity and like-mindedness to assimilation and abandonment. While the Irish were initially oppressed in America, they had something that other marginalized groups in America didn’t— white skin. Irish-Americans eventually sacrificed their Irishness in favor of whiteness. White supremacy sometimes offers survival in exchange for assimilation; the Irish were quite literally starved and pushed out of their homeland in exchange for a country that perceived them as poor drunkards and refused to employ them. Forgetting one’s heritage was became necessary to blend in, apply for a job, and maintain survival. Some may have not realized they were becoming a tool of white supremacy, while others may have jumped on board to ensure their stability in the American hierarchy, but it happened nonetheless, a slow but sure shedding of one’s cultural skin. A sheep in wolf’s clothing, so to speak.
While Irish-Americans had a foot up on other marginalized groups in America on account of their white skin, they were compelled to prove their whiteness, to embody it. Nativism threatened to oust the Irish from White-Americanness. So in order to maintain their camouflage, they had to push others under the bus. Irishman John Binns “would, along with other radicals, jump on the [Andrew] Jackson bandwagon and it made its first appearance in 1822, and be rewarded by a government post through which he dispensed public works jobs to working-class Irish while upholding the slave system and helping to subjugate the free black people of the North,” (Ignatiev, 43). The Irish in America became deeply political, voting in mass numbers for the Democratic party, out of interests for the white working class and “to protect them from the nativists,” (Ignatiev 51).
It was perhaps Nativism that contributed to the perception that the enemy of the Irish was the black population, rather than the fundamentally white supremacist structuring of American society. The liminality of the Irish identity likely also contributed to this clouding of collective judgement. In 1790, the first Congress ruled that “only ‘white’ persons could be naturalized as citizens,” (Ignatiev 30), with no real definition of whiteness. Surely, when the famine struck and the Irish came over in waves, bringing with them their songs, their stories, their strife and their joy, surely they weren’t the same kind of white folks as those American born and bred— those who naturalization was intended for.
Whiteness was more than skin color— it was assimilation, normalcy. Power determines normalcy and acceptability, and those in power were protestant, benefactors of the slavocracy, exploiters of underpaid labor (be it white, black, or otherwise).
So, in arriving to America, faced with nativism and anti-Irish sentiments, pitted against free black people in the workforce and thrust into the country on the cusp of all out civil war, Irish people strove for naturalization. They shed their skin, peel away their Irishness— the saint worship, the ballads and folksongs, the allegiance to the land they’d be everlastingly homesick for— and fit into the role prescribed to them: cheap laborers, mass voters, complacent bodies. In positioning themselves as opposite the black man, they became White.
Laboring Bodies
While the Irish as a whole had an ambiguous relationship to the issue of slavery and abolition in the South, their relationship to black people in the North was one of contingency.
The Irish body and the Black body were defined in America within two different frameworks. The Irish laborer was seen as indispensable; he could carry out heavy manual labor, often in extremely dangerous conditions, for incredibly cheap rates. One Alabaman official was quoted with having said that “if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything,” (Ignatiev 61). The death of an Irish laborer was preferable to that of an enslaved black man. But this does not by any means position the Irish body as lower than the Black body in American society. Rather, it reveals the altogether dehumanization of the black body in America to such an extent that losing an enslaved black man was considered a loss of capital, a lost investment.
The Irish were thus recognized as people, if only the lowest of low. Black Americans were relegated to a lesser, Other space, one wherein they weren’t perceived as humans but machinery.
In the North, where both the Irish and African Americans were “free,” and thus laboring at the lowest rungs of society for wages, they did not labor as one. The Irish “lived on less than the Americans could live on, and worked for less, and the result [was] that nearly all menial employments [were] monopolized by the Irish.” (Ignatiev 62). Nearly all.
The Irish refused to work side by side free African Americans. Though the Irish spearheaded labor movements and contributed to the Working Men’s Party which fought for equity in the workforce, they perpetually refused to engage with the plight of the exploited free black laborer. Their whiteness, if only minimally recognized, kept them just short of the lowest rung of society.
The “free” black American was relegated to the worst jobs for the least pay: chimneysweeps, washerwomen, fish mongers— degrading work that pushed them “down below the waged proletariat," (Ignatiev 64) that is, the Irish manufacturing laborer. In the South, sharecropping kept African Americans on plantation land.
In Sinners, many of the attendees of the juke joint pay in plantation tokens, a form of payment that kept the black bodies tied to the lands they worked, the lands their ancestors were likely enslaved upon just a generation or two before. This form of “payment” kept their movement restricted so their bodies and labor could be persistently exploited. At the very minimum, the Irish had real wages. They could join labor movements to advocate for themselves and move through the world with real money, if only small amounts. But it was nonetheless an existence of far more freedom than the black man, who, in being forced into the most exploitative of jobs, kept the Irish “white” by virtue of not working alongside African Americans.
“The abolition of slavery called into question the existence of the white race as a social formation,” Ignatiev writes, “for if the main underpinning of the distinction between the ‘white’ worker and the black worker were erased, what could remain to motivate poor ‘whites’ to hug to their breasts a class of landowners?”
The distinction of the Irish as White essentially bought their loyalty, made them bootlickers to the same class of people who exploited them in their homelands.
Faith and Word
Faith is hugely important in Sinners. We see Sammy struggle with his relationship to the church and is colloquially referred to as “Preacherboy,” despite his father’s disapproval of Sammy’s interest in the blues. Sammy considers the blues to be his own sort of faith, and even Delta Slim acknowledges this, saying that while religion was forced upon their people, the blues are entirely their own invention, brought across the Atlantic, playing the blues can be so powerful that it can pierce the veil, bringing spirits of both past and future into a space— an act of cultural healing. Community and heritage are intertwined in this film; being together, hearing the blues and occupying a space that defies time brings people together. What doesn’t bring people together is facades of unity, or in Remmick’s words, “fellowship and love.”
While these proclamations of acceptance are great and all, they are the epitome of performativity. We as viewers know that fellowship and love will not follow should the vampires be let into the Juke Joint, and we also know that professions of unity and love only do so much for justice. Kindness and love don’t dismantle centuries of enslavement, trauma, and systemic racism. But white people have the privilege of presenting themselves as progressive through this kind of rhetoric, while coasting on an iron clad system that cannot be punctured with “kindness” alone. In 1804 an Irishman named Thomas Branagan published The Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa, presenting anti-slavery rhetoric and debunking theories of social Darwinism, expressing a desire for radical equality. But just a year later, he published Remonstrances Addressed to the Citizens of the Northern States, and Their Representatives, which “no longer rested on the humanity of the Africans but appealed to the self-interest of white people in the free states.” (36). Branagan was slowly selling his rhetoric to appeal to those who held power in their hands, and by his death in 1843, his ever-shifting approach to slavery was one defined no longer by a desire for equality for all, but for the benefits that eradicating slavery would reap for the white man. Branagan left Dublin for Liverpool in 1774, and from there would sail to Africa on a slave ship. It is likely here that he found solidarity with the forcefully displaced and enslaved Africans who were taken with him to Antigua, but by the time of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s expulsion of whites from Haiti, Branagan had denounced “fellowship and love.”
Between Branagan’s abandonment of his cause of fighting for the enslaved African and Remmick’s flimsy “we all just need to be kind to one another!” (spoken through Cornbread), the performativity of white solidarity is exposed for its spinelessness, for its inability to actually stand up when it matters. In the end, Branagan “opted…for the privileges and burdens of whiteness,” abandoning his rhetoric that “all man, as they come into the world, are equal.” All the same, Remmick scoffs at the notion of being Klan, but feeds off of and hunts down black freedom for his own benefit. He is not running opposite to the Klan, but parallel to it, seeking to consume all that he can of Blackness and expressions of culture, to scavenge the parts that appeal to him, and eliminate the rest. The beast of white supremacy works in such a way, branching out in several directions at once to snuff out that which is not of itself.
Locating Remmick’s Faith:
When Remmick thinks he is victorious, approaching Sammy in the water outside of the Juke Joint, he says, “I want your stories, I want your songs.” I think there is a dual nature to this proclamation: on a personal level, Remmick wants to recover his own heritage through Sammy’s ability to pierce the veil; but within a greater scheme, he represents that hungry monster of whiteness, the all-consuming. White supremacy feeds; it takes, uses what it wants and disposes of the rest. Within this context, Remmick’s words can be read as almost imperialistic. He/ the body of white supremacy wants to take what Sammy has— the blues, the talent and innovation. And we see this in real American history with the idea that Elvis invented rock and roll, or that black people can’t perform country music (i.e. the Cowboy Carter discourse).
When Sammy is faced with death at the hands of Remmick, he begins the Lord’s Prayer and is shocked to have it repeated back to him by Remmick, who tells him that his people too, were forced to swallow those words. This likely refers to the two phases of Christian colonization of Ireland— the first being the initial introduction of Christianity to Ireland, which essentially wiped Celtic/Pagan practices out to be replaced with Catholicism, and the second being the Anglicization of Ireland through forced conversions to Protestantism. Remmick recalls a deep part of Ireland’s past and links it to Sammy’s present struggle between his art and his faith. These words were forced upon both of their peoples. “In the twentieth century African residents of various British colonies in Africa have pointed out that in the beginning, the white man had the Bible and the Africans had the land; and now the Africans have the Bible and the white man has the land,” (30). By the “mid eighteenth century, Catholics held only seven percent of Irish land,” and were subject to the Penal Laws keeping them inferior from Anglo-Protestants. While Catholicism replaced Paganism early on in Irish history, those who practiced Catholicism by the time Protestantism came around would have been more deeply linked to the indigenous Celtic beliefs and Gaelic identity, thus Protestantism being forced upon them is similar (but certainly not the same) as the forced conversion of Africans at the hands of European colonizers, and the forcing of Protestantism upon enslaved populations in America. Sinners features aspects of hoodoo, Gullah, and other Afro-Diasporic practices that make up the tapestry of faith in the South, most prominently embodied through Annie’s character, who practices rootwork, makes mojo bags, and acts as an encyclopedia for identifying Remmick’s villainy. Framed against the staunch Protestantism of the community, Annie is an outlier, but her practices have root in the farthest reaches of history, in a land across the ocean and in a blending of Afro-Indigenous spiritualities amidst displacement and hardship. She, like Sammie, possesses a capability to access the past, but instead of piercing the veil and conjuring spirits, she keeps the past alive in the present by practicing it.
The presence of Protestantism in Sinners would require an entirely different comprehensive analysis, but as an institution it carries itself throughout the film in whispers. It appears physically, in the film’s opening and in the early day of Sammie’s adventure, in the form of the staunch white chapel, sun-bleached and minimalistic, imposing against the rolling fields that stretch into the horizon. By contrast, Annie’s cabin blends in harmony with its surroundings, smoke swirling inside mirroring the twisted Spanish-moss-covered branches of live oaks.
Both of these buildings, these houses of worship, are pillars of the community, but one of them is the white man’s making, and the other is a distinct survival of all that was at risk of being snuffed out by the white man. The two systems of faith are in constant dialogue with one another throughout the film— with some calling Remmick the devil and Annie using folklore to defend herself and the others. But central to the story is the role of protestant Christianity in eradicating blackness, in indoctrinating the black folks in the movie into a world of subjugation. Sammie refuses to sacrifice his practices that link him to his heritage— the blues— and leaves behind the Church, a radical reframing of Southern Christianity as harmful to those who embrace it.
The body of the vampire is the culturally white body. It is a body desperate for community but fated to isolation. It is a body that must consume at the expense of others, and one that cannot see the sun. In Celtic religion, the deity Brigid, later embraced into Catholicism as St. Brigid, was associated with the sun. Sinead O’Connor even said, “see, we used to worship God as a mother,” (Famine). A body that can’t see the sun cannot access life and cannot access past manifestations of faith. Remmick’s giving up of his own cultural makeup to fit into whiteness was a giving up of all that made him Irish, and desperate as he may be, he cannot access his heritage or past because the white supremacist machine erased it from him.
Remmick is not successful in accessing his heritage and he never was going to be, because the masters tools will not dismantle the house. If Remmick was himself a tool of white supremacy, a system that was still inherently positioned against him despite his white skin, he was never going to be able to recover his identity: one cannot dismantle the house they’ve nailed themself into.
But what exactly is Remmick’s heritage?
In an interview, Remmick actor Jack O’Connell notes that “Remmick has, like, 600-700 years worth of heritage, just by virtue of being a vampire.”1 He speaks in a Southern accent, speaking towards his assimilation into American culture, but his Irish accent comes on thick while he sings and utters the Lord’s Prayer. But just how far back does Remmick’s Irishness reach?
In following with O’Connell’s assertion, Remmick would have been initially turned in the 1200s. Other sources, like the Sinners Wiki page, locate him even earlier in Irish history, even as far back as the 4-5th centuries, prior to the arrival of Christianity in Ireland.
While I urge against trying to pinpoint a precise origin for Remmick, I find that the limited lore the movie provides us with alludes to Remmick’s ancient identity. He is left, within the movie, to be ambiguously Irish, with roots nearly impossible to pinpoint because they’ve been erased, stripped from him. But hints of his pagan origins probe the surface of his character.
That being said, locating Remmick’s faith is important. When Sammie begins to recite the Lord’s prayer, he echoes it: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.” In response to Sammie’s shock— how could this white devil know the Lord’s Prayer by heart?— he says, “Long ago, the men who stole my father’s land forced these words upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort…Those men lied to themselves, they lied to us. They told stories of a God above and a devil below, and lies of a dominion of man over beast and Earth…We are Earth and beast and God. We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I, to everything.”
This is a longwinded way of placing Remmick in a pagan Irish past, one that likely does stretch as far back to a pre-Christian Ireland, where a Celtic faith spanned the rolling hills and twisted trees. While defining pillars of the Celtic faith is challenging due to a lack of written material, their art point towards a viewpoint of the world that emphasized oneness with nature, cycles, and man’s place in the natural world2. The motifs of spirals, zoomorphic figures, and knot patterns lends reason to believe that the Celts perceived themselves as part of a cosmos dictated by dynamism, fluidity, and cycles— the rise and fall of the tide, the rising and setting of the sun, the coming and going of seasons.
All this to say, Remmick alludes to a faith long misplaced by time, one that he himself likely can’t recall. He rejects the binaries of Christian doctrine (man over beast, heavens over Earth) and instead emphasizes a faith based in mutuality and symbiosis in nature.
But, as is true in the history of Ireland, Christianity arrived with missionaries who converted the pagan kings, and later Protestantism arrived with the Brits, sweeping across the plains of Ireland with famine and violence in tow.
Remmick recognizes the patterns of Christianity as a colonial tool— identifies it as a means by which his culture and stories were taken from him, and even furthermore, recognizes that the same thing happened to Africans in the process of being violently brought to America.
His only access point towards a pre-Christian Irish past is Sammie, who can conjure up his own ancestral spirits through music. But Remmick cannot access his past because he, in being a part of the demographic of people who shed away their culture to fit into Whiteness, does not belong in Sammie’s space. He is both victim and perpetrator of his own cultural demise, thus he becomes predator to hunt down his past by whatever means available.
Assimilationist Irish Jigging
Remmick’s Irish heritage is hinted at and builds up to his musical number, Rocky Road to Dublin. This scene, along with Sammie’s I Lied to You/ Magic What We Do scene, are defining moments in the film, exploring the language of music and dance within cultures.
Sammie’s solo conjures up spirits of both the past and future, including (but not limited to):
Zaouli Mask Dance: a type of dance located in Ivory Coast, combining the arts of dance and sculpture. The dance features an elaborate costume. The dance itself stems from the 1950s, but the masks may hearken back further.
Peking Opera dancing: connecting the Chow family to the cultural makeup of the Juke Joint, Peking Opera dancers are featured, with sleeves flowing from elaborate costumes while the dancer combines the disciplines of acrobatics, dance, martial arts, mime. This form of dance was distinct to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912)3.
Achouli Dance: The Achouli people of modern Uganda performed multiple types of dance to express ideas such as warfare and masculinity4.
Other dancers and musicians featured include rock n’ rollers, hip hop dancers, a DJ, breakdancers, and a ballerina, attesting to the role of black innovation in the arts of music and dance.
So, being denied access to the Juke Joint, Remmick turns swarms of people and puts together a jig circle. The circular nature of Irish dance may stem back to those elements of Pagan and Druidic worldviews, of cycles and patterns found in nature. The vampires, mostly black folks inducted into the hive that follows Remmick, join in his circle as he sings a haunting rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin, a grief-laden song about belonging and leaving one’s home. His motives are clear in his ecstatic expressions evoked by the sound of his culture, a testament to the makeup of identity, something that masses of Irish gave up in favor of Whiteness.
In Ireland, the British outlawed the speaking and teaching of the Irish language, Irish dance, and Ceilidh gatherings. These gatherings were basic social gatherings structured around dance and music, something keystone to virtually all human cultures, and yet violently ripped from the hands of the Irish in their own homelands.
“On long, dark winter nights it is still the custom in small villages for friends to collect in a house and hold what they call a ‘ceilidh’ (pronounced kay'lee). Young and old are entertained by the reciters of old poems and legendary stories which deal with ancient beliefs, the doings of traditional heroes and heroines, and so on. Some sing old and new songs set to old music or new music composed in the manner of the old.”5
Ceilidhs were taken from the Irish and nonexistent in the States. That this keystone of community was erased can only have created a void amongst a people. The very idea of a ceilidh is embodied in the Juke Joint, but again— its not for him. So his conversion of the party attendees mirrors the forced conversion of his very own peoples, in being a victim he simultaneously becomes the villain, consuming and taking, seeing Sammie’s blues, and to an extent, Sammie’s blackness, as a means through which he himself can access his own heritage, at the expense of others’.
For more about Irish culture and the link between Irish and Black American identities, I would urge everyone to check out this incredibly insightful piece:
Hierarchy of Space and White Encroachment:
In vampire lore, vampires must ask to be let in before they can enter a space. The act of asking ones way in functions twofold in Sinners. When it comes to vampiric media, creators often pick and chose which features of vampiric lore they want to stick to. One of my favorite examples of this is Adventure Time— wherein several variants of vampires are featured, one of which is “old fashioned” and must ask to be let in (thus leading to his demise). Others, like What We Do in the Shadows follow vampiric rules more liberally based on what gets a laugh. Sinners takes a very purist route and the attention paid to the “may I come in?” rule speaks to the intersection of racialized spaces and southern hospitality.
When Mary first enters the Juke Joint, Cornbread doesn’t recognize her and almost turns her away because she passes as white. But she is “like family,” so she can come and go as she pleases. The lightness of her skin and her ability to code-switch allow her to move more fluidly within a segregated society. This is the reason that she is the first to leave the Joint and interact with the white vampires, because she can shapeshift, in a way. She re-enters the Juke Joint after being turned without a problem because she has the privilege of fluidity, code-switching in such a way that her asking to be let in is almost imperceptible as she breezes past Cornbread, successfully shifting her way into the space.
When Remmick tries to get into the juke joint, he is turned away on account of his whiteness. This isn’t something white people are accustomed to— being turned away, not having the privilege to assert themselves in a space, even if it’s not a space for them. Remmick tries to plea his way in, preaching “fellowship and love.” This hivemindedness comes out once more when Cornbread is turned, and says that we all just need to be “kind to one another!"
In industrial Philadelphia, where Irish laborers made up a huge part of the population, mob violence frequently broke out against free African Americans. In 1862, an Irish mob set fire to a tobacco factory because they opposed African Americans’ employment there. Mobs targeted places where “interracial fraternization” occurred, like neighborhoods where Irish and Black families lived side-by-side.
At this point, the Irish had distinguished themselves as White by virtue of not being black. In order to uphold their role, to continue walking the thin line between accepted and marginalized, the Irish had to protect “their” space. Their space was low wage industrial jobs. So when they felt that black Americans were encroaching on this “privileged” space, they retaliated.
In putting together the Juke Joint, it is clear that the Smokestack Twins wanted to create a space for black folks. Not a space to be relegated to, not a marginal spot on the sidelines, an afterthought, but a real space constructed with intentionality, community, and belonging in mind.
And what does the white man do? Try to push his way in.
As a result of these massive expressions of violence in Philadelphia, the city went under martial law and John Binns (mentioned previously) suggested that “black people conduct themselves ‘inoffensively, and with civility at all times…taking care not to be obtrusive,’” (70).
The policing of black behaviors gives excuse for white violence. And the Smokestack twins refuse to let that happen within their space, the space they made for people like them— they deny the white folks entry into the Joint because they know that the minute white people enter the space, everything changes. The white people can preach unity and love all they want, but things can switch up quickly the minute someone looks at a white woman the wrong way, or steps on a white man’s shoe.
At the conclusion of the film, Smoke, who has now lost everything, attempts to roll a cigarette with shaking hands, his mind spiraling through images of all that he lost overnight: catching up with Sammy, recruiting friends to help set up the Joint, reuniting with Annie. All of that was taken from him because a white man wanted to access his past— a past that his people gave up to become White.
Concluding Thoughts:
Time and time again, we see this cycle— the construction of the White race, the erasure of white cultural makeup, the embracement of normativity, and the pitching of marginalized folks against one another. The weak link against white supremacy will always be the folks closest to being sucked into the maw of Whiteness, and in this case, those folks were the Irish. And rather than form a coalition against that which makes them marginal, they let themselves be consumed.
White Supremacy manifests in a myriad of ways. In Sinners, it manifests through the visible segregation of the town along with the exploitation of black laborers, both sharecroppers and prisoners indentured to another form of slavery. It manifests in the Church, which urges Sammie to give up that which connects him to his culture (music). It culminates in the KKK’s plot to kill everyone in the Juke Joint. And it manifests in the body of one Irish vampire.
That White Supremacy is embodied in this movie as a vampire speaks to the all-consuming nature of Whiteness. It destroys all in its path, sucking the blood out of its victims and leaving husks, empty shells of culture.
Sinners reignited my love of cinema, especially southern gothic art that addresses the seedy underbelly of American history and culture. And it featured the most creative ensemble of music and people, itself a testament to the tapestry of people that make up the rich culture of the American south.
White Supremacy is unfortunately alive and well in American culture— it makes up the very roots of our society and government— but Remmick’s death, the survival of Sammie, the perseverance of the blues in carrying the past in its chords, and the vigilante justice against the KKK at the end of the film all stand as testaments against the white supremacist vampire, because at the end of the day, the sun will rise.
https://screenrant.com/sinners-movie-remmick-backstory-not-shown-jack-oconnell-explained/
Doran, Brent R. “Mathematical Sophistication of the Insular Celts: Spirals, Symmetries, and Knots as a Window onto Their World View.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 15 (1995): 258–89. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20557307.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_opera
https://blogs.loc.gov/kluge/2016/11/dance-manhood-and-warfare-amongst-the-acholi-people-of-northern-uganda/
Mackenzie, Donald A., Wonder Tales from Scottish Myth and Legend, 1917, p. 14.
* Ignatiev, N. (2015). How the Irish became white. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.
Really thoughtful read, I appreciate how you’re connecting Irish history to Remmick’s character, especially through the lens of assimilation and whiteness. I did wonder though; what does it mean for Black creativity to not just be something that whiteness consumes?
Like, what’s the alternative to that hunger? I’d love to see more on what refusal or protection of culture looks like, especially since the film is so rooted in Black agency and cosmology.
Either way, thanks for giving me a lot to think about.
i loved this! such an amazing essay!
another thing to take into consideration might be the nature of the ceili dance that's shown in the movie too. i did competitive Irish dance for most if not all of my childhood, and with ceili dances I did we were always connected. we always had a partner and flowed with the music like waves of the water. but in sinners, he's the only one dancing traditionally and he doesn't gain that connection with any of the others during the dance. he's staged way too far from the other 'dancers' for it to get that ceili feel. it's almost as if the vampires are circling him like they're about to sink down the drain.
just something i was thinking about while reading this:) again, such a great read i love this movie so much