May 17, 2025

American Sinners

Katie note: Spoilers for Sinners in here

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I spent my Friday night watching 2015-era YouTube commentary videos about Gamergate, partly because I hate myself and partly because, like everyone, I’ve been thinking about How We Got Here.¹ As I watched the videos, the name Perrault released itself from my subconscious and I trust my mind so I read about him too. Peering over a 17th-century lithograph of Charles Perrault’s face, YouTubers discussed various media properties first declared “too woke” (or, as they called it at the time, “infected by SJW thought”).²

Charles Perrault was a member of Louis XIV’s (the one who built Versailles, not the one executed because people finally were like “hey this Versailles thing…”) court. He helped advise on fountain placement at Versailles and invented the concept of the fairy tale in the 1690s, after losing his job. The Brothers Grimm—100 years after Charles—further riffed on the subject.

He also was involved in the central culture war of Louis XIV’s France. At the time, men were arguing if the modern period or… literally everything before Louis XIV was “the best.” Perrault argued Louis XIV, as the coolest guy of all time, had an aura so large it made everything produced in the 17th century the best cultural work. Another faction argued that, in fact, we must RETVRN and everything we remember from ancient Greece is culturally the best. They argued ancient Grecian stuff has to be the best, or else we wouldn’t half-remember it.

Not a class analysis in sight during the reign of a man who greatly expanded France’s colonialism, but what can you do. This cultural battle was all occurring at the tail end of the European Renaissance, where cultures were remixing and attempting to “recover” things from the past, as part of legitimizing the new ways in which they were living and self-consciously adding themselves to history. Feudalism was well and truly dead and the age of colonialism was here.

As a member of the ancient v. modern culture war, Perrault really knew the value of remixing history, writing yourself into it. Perrault, by using folk stories to create his fairy tales, was writing himself (and the values of his time) into history. Fairy tales were new and old. It is strange to think fairy tales (1695) were invented a few years after the Salem Witch trials (1692).

It makes sense, then, that the tip of America’s fascist spear was Gamergate. Gamergate was an attempt to cast modern values, like tolerance, equity, kindness, and human rights, as an incursion on the “ancient” wisdom of 1980s video games.

Fascism, however, unlike European Renaissance thinkers, has no ability to write itself into history. Fascism can only destroy, not create. Fascism lacks the ability to do the myth-making that annoying guys like Jordan Peterson are always discussing, and never creating.

Fascism demands we “recover” the ancient past, but they lack the competent cultural workers who can do such a thing. (This is part of the reason they are delighted about AI. They lack the ability to create the myths they need to maintain fascism, and think the computer might do it for them. It can’t.)

Fascism’s floppy inability to create any kind of culture was on full display this week as standup comedians³ began to respond to Sinners. I cannot bring myself to listen to hours of racist men talk into microphones but Seth Simons’ most recent newsletter gave me the scoop. Their response is, obviously, anger and sour grapes. But they have no game and, therefore, no counterargument.

Sinners, the new Ryan Coogler movie about a juke joint in the sharecropping and segregated South beset by white vampires, is the kind of myth-making we need in the present moment. And its broad popularity speaks to the appeal of its message.

“Whiteness,” which undergirds modern misogyny, racism, transphobia, and homophobia, is the load-bearing myth of colonialism. Any time modern people question hierarchies of gender or sexuality, we stray closer to questioning hierarchies of whiteness and, when hierarchies of whiteness are questioned, we threaten the whole colonial project.

Whiteness is a political category, which fascists, racists, and segregationists try to create into a identity. “What does it mean to be white?” is an impossible-to-answer question in many ways. Whiteness is a state of privilege and power, not a site of identity and solidarity. Whiteness has been gained (and lost) by various people over the years and it can expand and retract at will.

Coogler’s Sinners explains this beautifully. The central vampire, Remmick, is not only a vampire (white) but also a victim of colonialism (Irish). Once on American shores, his new identity as a white person (vampire) overtakes his familial history and cultural position as an Irish, non-vampire person. In his vampirism and whiteness, all he can do is try to absorb other cultures to fill the hole created inside him by embracing whiteness and forgetting his actual history.

He desperately wants to assimilate the folks from the juke joint because their shared culture—and cultural understanding of themselves as having a foot in the past and in the future—may for a brief time fill the hole inside him. His memory of his own culture is vague.

It took me until college to realize I was white. Surrounded by almost entirely other white Irish Catholics in Massachusetts, my whiteness was background noise. I felt I lacked a cultural identity because my whiteness was so all-encompassing. My cultural memory was so vague I could only look outside to see culture, without the understanding to look within to find it.

In 1870, my relative D.C. Finlay crossed from Liverpool to Boston, where my family still lives. On the journey, he wrote a diary, a portion of which was then mailed back to Ireland and carried on the journey once again. The diary tells you what to bring, when you cross to America, and also leaves a potent record of what he left behind.

He writes at one point, “Representatives of Cork, Clare, Limerick, Kerry and my heart rose as I looked on their frank and manly appearances for there is something which I cannot account for which makes the heart of one Irishman cling and warm to that of another.” A few paragraphs later he writes, “We had a good view of Spike Island and we could observe the soldiers on duty and the unfortunate convicts engaged in building a stone wall or dock. As I looked at them I cannot help but feel thankful to Almighty God and His Blessed Mother for preserving me from similar fate, which at one time I was threatened with. However I will leave the past in oblivion and trust for better days in the future.”

And so he did. Although the diary passed from D.C. Finlay to my grandmother and from my grandmother to my mother and from my mother to me, it was discussed as an artifact, rather than as a text. I knew of it, but was afraid to touch it and hold it, lest I destroy our one tangible piece of family history. But, as Trump’s second inauguration dawned, I found myself reading the typed-out version my grandmother made and then the document itself.

During the climax of Sinners, Remmick and Sammie, the blues player at the center of this movie, both recite the Lord’s Prayer and share in its colonialist powers. Remmick and Sammie are both victims of whiteness. But Sammie and the larger Black community respond to that victimization by creating a shared culture which has a foot in the past and a foot in the future. Remmick, on the other hand, responds to that loss by victimizing others.

In his diary, Finlay writes, “As I pass down to my hammock, I come on a lot of Irish at prayer. I join them and find they pray in their own native language, that is a blessing of which I am deprived and a curse almost rises to my lips for the tyrants who made me so, but I suppress and pass on to bed.” My own family’s culture was stolen from them before they ever arrived on American shores, and Catholic prayers were all that were left.

Coogler’s Sinners notes this all-too-common story in American whiteness. It serves as a powerful template for the possibilities of cultural understanding. Remmick, D.C. Finlay, and I can recover a culture, for we have one to recover. And, like Sammie, we could weave that cultural understanding into a future on American shores. We just have to not fall victim to whiteness first.

Fascists, of course, have no counterargument outside of: “hey!” Shane Gillis complained this week on his podcast about it saying (via Seth Simons): “The evil white vampires did kind of piss me off, and the only white people in the movie were evil, nasty fucks.”

This, of course, is not the case. Coogler’s Sinners is deeply empathetic to Remmick’s plight. There is a line drawn between the whiteness of Remmick (adopted, uncomfortable, mildly tragic) and the whiteness of the Klu Klux Klan (embraced, evil). Whiteness is a category which white people can cast off in favor of racial solidarity, as Coogler makes clear. And this possibility, as seen in Sinners, is terrifying to the fascist project.

I’ve been thinking a lot, not only of How We Got Here, but Where We Go. And cultural work is at the heart of Getting Somewhere. We need to create new ways of living, new ways of understanding. Like those before us, we must use the tools we have to write ourselves into history and inscribe on the world new post-colonialist ways of living. Sinners makes the importance and joy (it is very fun to watch! despite all my Big Thought Talk!) of this clear.

Culture is something only non-fascists can hold. It is the tip of our spear, as far as I can see.

Note to myself: Katie, you need to write a newsletter before you write your physical newsletter to get your Big Political Thoughts out of your head so you can write factual stories to share with your neighbors.