On Irish music and Black liberation in Sinners
Some people may know that there are Irish musical roots in the blues genre, which feels pertinent to a movie like Sinners. But the main reason behind this influence was Irish immigrant participation in blackface minstrelsy.
Sure, Irish immigrants were discriminated against, having left their colonized homeland, and were treated as a nonwhite ethnic minority. But part of their shedding this cultural heritage in order to join the white supremacist power structure was performing in minstrel productions, into which they incorporated their own Irish music and songs. From Morrison,
“This free expression […] allowed ethnic whites to mask their own cultural noise and raggedness in blackface, while African American identity in US society continued to be shaped by a hybrid of caricatured blackness within an expression of one’s ethnic whiteness.”
Irish music was seen by the Real Whites as noisy, messy, a signal of their inferiority. And these immigrants chose NOT ONLY to cast off their own culture, but rebrand it as part of Blackness, the inferior Other, in doing so.
When I see people cheering on Remmick and his Irish pride, his free expression of his traditions and music - beyond the points I’ve seen about a white vampire maintaining his monoculture over a bunch of POC that he killed to build his hive mind, I think it’s critical to consider the industry of Irish minstrel performers who chose white supremacist pride over their own heritage in the name of anti-Blackness.
Matthew D. Morrison, “Race, Blacksound, and the (Re)Making of Musicological Discourse”
Sandra Jean Graham, “Spirituals and the Birth of the Black Entertainment Industry”