Can we talk about how, yes, Remmick represented the colonised turned coloniser but also how masterfully Ryan Coogler depicted this throughline of history on screen in about just 2 hours?
How many of the first white settlers to the US (and other settler-states of the British Empire like Canada and Australia) included the Puritans, the Irish, the Scottish etc - communities that had been brutalised at home by the English for generations - and then how those very same people blew their intergenerational trauma through the bodies of the peoples that they enslaved and colonised.*
How while those settlers are described with words such as "pioneering," ""adventurous," "industrious," and "brave" in their colonisation of the "wilds" of the New World, in reality many were actually fleeing political unrest, religious persecution and the barbarism of their places of origin.
How the oppression of the Old World followed them to the New World but how they were offered a seat at the table in exchange for their cultural and religious difference: an invitation into the decontextualised, ahistorical, transient void that is whiteness.
How in Sinners, that white void is represented by Remmick's vampire colony, with everyone doing the same jig and singing the same song as Remmick, their own individual cultures and histories be damned (contrast this to that beautiful sequence in the juke joint where a slew of multicultural ancestors and descendants commune at Sammie's call).
How the concept of whiteness has shifted over time in order to assimilate different people and communities and keep others subjugated.
How in Sinners, this shift is represented by Remmick changing his pitch to recruit others into his fellowship, depending on whose home he was trying to invade.
How legal definitions of whiteness in settler states gave the folks that they applied to more economic and social power than they ever had in the Old World. That power has flowed down for generations but it has come at the cost of connection to culture: the joy of ancestral connection, the grounding self-knowledge and communion of cultural practice (including through language, music, dance and pre-Christian religion).
How in Sinners, that cost is represented by Remmick's vampirism trapping him for eternity amongst the living, away from his people and also by the klan: folks who have embraced the void of whiteness so thoroughly that their cultural tenets are nothing more than hate, violence and destruction. Their whiteness brings them none of the joy, communion and love that we see in Smoke's memories of his community, just before his incendiary final scene.
And this is why Remmick wants Sammie, his songs and his stories. Its why his appetite for the blood and memories of others is insatiable. Remmick - as is the case with all colonisers and cultural appropriators - wants to fill the void.
*See: My Grandmother's Hands by therapist and trauma specialist Dr Resmaa Menakem
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