This article reviews the immensely popular film Sinners from an African Internationalist perspective.
On April 18, 2025, the musical horror film Sinners released to the public. Sinners is directed, written, and co-produced by Ryan Coogler. Coogler is an Oakland-born filmmaker, the nephew of African labor organizer Clarence Thomas, and the godson of Danny Glover.
Sinners has generated myriad cultural and political analyses. It has been very successful at the box office.
This article takes the film Sinners out of the hands of the white bourgeoisie and the African petty bourgeoisie and places it into the hands of the African working class. Secretary General Luwezi Kinshasa of the African Socialist International (ASI) has described this process as “de-bourgeoisification.”
This article does not attempt to give the most concise review of Sinners. Instead, it offers an African Internationalist guide to explain the film to the masses. African Internationalism allows us to direct the public conversation of this film toward calls for resistance and African independence.
Sinners Chronicles African Culture and Resistance
Sinners tells the story of two twin brothers, Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore, both played by Michael B. Jordan.
Alongside the twins, there are several other important characters in the film. These are Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (the younger cousin of the twins and a blues prodigy), Annie (Smoke’s wife and hoodoo practitioner), Mary (Smoke’s white-passing love interest), Pearline (a blues singer and Sammie’s love interest), Delta Slim (a pianist and harmonicist), and Cornbread (a bouncer and doorman). There are also two Chinese storeowners and friends of the twins, Grace and Bo Chow.
Sinners is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932 and provides a cultural history of Africans in the United States. Clarksdale is recognized as the home of the Delta Blues. A host of African musical legends are from the Clarksdale area or have spent time there. This includes Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, WC Handy, and even Sam Cooke.
The blues is an African working-class musical form derived from the traditions that our ancestors brought from Africa. The blues emerged in the 1860s but is much older. It was created around the same time and under similar conditions as Mento in Jamaica, Calypso in Trinidad, and Samba in Brazil.
In Sinners, Delta Slim states, “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion, we brought this from home.”
The twins had lived in Little Rock, Arkansas and later Chicago. While in Chicago, the twins reparated resources (money and alcohol) from the Italian and Irish mobs and returned to Clarksdale to open up a blues club called Club Juke.
Club Juke represents African self-reliance, self-identity, and self-determination. In the first act of the film, the twins travel throughout Clarksdale to assemble the team for their grand opening later that evening.
The Struggle of Materialism Versus Idealism in Sinners
Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s “The Theory of African Internationalism” chapter in Vanguard: The Advanced Detachment of the African Revolution is a vital guide in understanding and explaining Sinners.
Without African Internationalism, the viewers can draw the wrong conclusions from the film. The film reflects a struggle between philosophical idealism and philosophical materialism.
Chairman notes, “Philosophical idealism assumes that there are things that humans are unable to comprehend.” Comparatively, “Materialism teaches us that the world is tangible, knowable, and can be experienced through the senses… Materialism informs us that the material world is primary.”
The immediate counterpoint to Club Juke is the African church led by Sammie’s father, Jedidiah (played by Saul Williams). Jedidiah urges Sammie to reject the blues and embrace refuge in the church. That contradiction is clear. The wrong conclusion is that hoodoo or the blues brought freedom to Africans.
In Sinners, hoodoo is also embraced as an African form of consciousness, but hoodoo alone does not free Africans. Whether it is Haitian voodoo in the African Workers Revolution of Ayiti, the syncretic gospel of Nat Turner, or blues and hoodoo in Sinners, cultural practices alone do not free us. Culture serves as a medium that unites the people. Chairman Omali Yeshitela notes that African identity is key, but it must be a culture that directs us toward revolution.
Sinners and the Colonial Attacks on African Independence
The evening was cut short when Club Juke was attacked by a trio of vampires: Remmick (an ancient Irish-born vampire and the primary antagonist), Bert (the recently turned nephew of the local Ku Klux Klan grand wizard), and Bert’s wife Joan. Remmick’s Irishness represents the invention of whiteness as a construct of the colonial mode of production.
In other Black horror films and shows, the monsters are the racists. This is not true in Sinners. Remmick makes this clear. African Internationalism teaches that racism is the ideological justification for colonialism. The vampires represent liberal integrationism. The Ku Klux Klan, led by Hogwood, are the racists. Both the vampires and the Klan are colonialists.
Remmick is an ideological imperialist. He told Sammie, “I want your music. I want your stories.” Chairman has noted that the ideological imperialism of the white left has historically been more damaging to our movement than even the white right.
Sammie represents the African future. Understanding that, the only way he is protected is by fighting. Even if they had waited until morning and not fought the vampires, the Klan was always coming back—and the twins mentioned they had forgotten the guns.
Black Horror Films and the Specter of African Internationalism
Sinners joins a host of recent Black horror films and series, including Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) by Jordan Peele; Them (2021) by Lena Waithe; and Swarm by Donald Glover (2023).
Sinners is not perfect, but at this moment, it is a useful tool for outreach and political education. This requires us to become an army of African Internationalist propagandists and win the war of ideas.
The correctness of Sinners on the colonial question reveals the rise of African Internationalism as the dominant worldview. It is the only thing capable of summing up the contradictions of colonial capitalism and the uneasy equilibrium.
A specter is haunting colonial capitalism—that specter is African Internationalism.
As Chairman notes, the prevalence of vampires, zombies, and ghosts in colonial media is “representative of the imperialist sociopolitical purgatory of today. A superstructure resting on the shaky foundation of a terminally ill imperialism is incapable of seeing the future.”
Sinners and other recent Black horror films do not share this dystopian worldview. Chairman notes that the problems of the white world are due to the struggle of the oppressed to take back our future and our resources.
Thanks to African Internationalism, we can see the future.
The road to socialism is painted black.
