Paranoia, Perspicacity, and Afro-Asian Pessimism

Anne Anlin Cheng looks deeper into Ryan Coogler’s new film “Sinners” and its violent exploration of racial oppression.

By Anne Anlin ChengJune 11, 2025

• Film

• Cultural Studies

FEW AMERICANS know the history of the Chinese in the Deep South. In colonial times, China was a distant source of material goods for Americans (tea, silk, porcelain), but after the Civil War, Chinese male workers were recruited to the South to fill the labor vacuum. They came to pick cotton in place of former slaves, or to build infrastructure. By the 1870s, in the Mississippi Delta, many of these Chinese immigrants, resistant to the exploitation of indentured labor, left plantation labor to open family-run grocery stores that largely served the Black community.

Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, set in the Jim Crow South of 1932, references not only this little-known history of Asians in the United States but also the larger, multiracial, and multiracially mediated landscape of the Mississippi Delta. The film itself is a testament to boundary and genre crossing: a vampire movie that aspires to be a musical, a Western set in the Deep South, a frontier story where the “cowboys” are Black and Brown. The cast of characters are diverse: Smoke and Stack (Black twin brothers played by Michael B. Jordan); Remmick (Jack O’Connell), the dulcet-toned Irish vampire who sings sweet folk songs and does a fine Riverdance; a town of racist Southern whites who are Klansmen and Klanswomen; the local Black community; a lone Asian family called the Chows; and a group of Choctaw vampire hunters. The stage is thus set for not only the deep antagonism of Black and white relations in the South but also the fraught mediating presence of the Chinese, as well as a reminder of the original Indigenous communities. (Let us remember that the Mississippi Blues Trail is the Mississippi Mound Trail, a layered history.)

What Sinners finally has to say about this complex racial history, however, is less clear. At one level, it seems to offer a racial morality play. The Asian female adult in the film, Grace Chow (Li Jun Li), takes on the key role of triggering—indeed, inviting—the film’s major action and its bloody denouement. Trapped in the barn with her friends and other people of color, threatened by a throng of hungry vampires on the outside, Grace sounds the battle/suicide cry that launches the plot and her comrades into action. She emerges as the voice of existential agency, the person who looks at Afro-Asian pessimism boldly in the face (because all the people of color in that barn were going to be killed anyway, either by the vampires that night or by a lynching KKK mob in the morning) and chooses action in the face of certain death. Is this choice meant as a gesture to grant agency to a character who, in real life, was likely to have had none? The very presence of the Chows’ nuclear family (a father, a mother, and a child) already feels a little sentimentalized, given the decades of Chinese exclusion that trapped indentured Asian men in the United States and prohibited the entry of Asian women. Women and children are in fact grieved absences in the history of Asians in the US. Similarly, it is difficult to parse the presence of Native Americans in the film: a Choctaw band of vampire hunters who appear as the only morally unambiguous racial group in the movie but whose screen presence amounts to less than five minutes.

In reality, the early Chinese in the American South, merchants and laborers alike, lived in the cracks of a segregated system designed for Blacks and whites, maligned by whites who found them subhuman and resented by Blacks who saw them as competition. They took jobs that white men were unwilling to do. They socialized within their small communities and only ventured out to places they knew were safe. They were cognizant of their precarious position in the Black-white schism and survived on tenterhooks of uncertainty, mostly ignored, barely tolerated, and always on the edge of being victims of violence.

The film’s mise-en-scène—its staging of bodies and landscape, its attention to a quotidian world casually structured by racism and segregation—does more political work than the plot. Stack’s tragic, mixed-race girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who passes as white and who is often positioned as a go-between straddling two social worlds, reminds us of the invisible and tangible legacies of hypodescent. Similarly, the two general stores owned by the Chows, one that caters to white clientele and the other to Black customers across the street, emblematize the complicated landscape of being “in the middle” in the Jim Crow South. When the Chows’ daughter Lisa (Helena Hu) is asked by her father Bo (Yao) to run across the street to give her mother a message, her young, blithe figure immediately provokes anxiety for those in the audience aware of the implications of “crossing the line”: what will go wrong for that young girl in that danger-filled journey?

In the film, young Grace makes it across the street without incident. Yet the viewer remains gripped by the film’s claustrophobic physicality. We cannot let go of our awareness of the potential, pending, quotidian racial violence barely submerged under the veil of Southern civility, epitomized by that narrow dusty street that divides two radically irreconcilable world orders, or by the smiling white man who sells his broken-down barn to Smoke and Stack while plotting to subject them to murder and theft all along. Lisa running between her two parents and their stores plays out like the daily shuttling between “Black” and “white” that Asians in the United States have always had to navigate, the Scylla and Charybdis between which all immigrants have had to pass. Even without vampires, Smoke and Stack’s dream of running a Black-owned business in the heart of the segregated South is wildly ambitious and precarious. The ominous threat underlying the whole movie thus comes not from the bloodsucking vampires but from the deeper insight that, for a person of color living and surviving in a white supremacist world, paranoia is indistinguishable from perspicacity.

So, yes, Bo and Grace Chow should be wary of their “in-between” status. And Smoke and Stack should be suspicious of the unctuously friendly white people who come calling at the door. Those who are not paranoid enough—like Mary, who goes out in the night to check out the white strangers seeking admittance into a Black nightclub—are the first to become victims. Vampirism is but a literalization of racism’s violent hunger.

The most daring politics entertained by the film can be found in its crisis, rather than affirmation, of morality, and the source and site of this profound moral ambiguity is the blues. Music is such a critical presence in this movie that its representative, the musician Sammie (Miles Caton), will be the sole human survivor of this night of terror. At the center of the film is a musical sequence inside Smoke and Stack’s newly opened “juke joint”: the pre-attack, pre-fall moment, a scene of musical and cinematographic saturation that marks Sammie’s birth as a virtuosic musician. The film tells us that music from musicians like Sammie can be so “true” as to pierce the veil of time and to conjure spirits, past and future. Sammie’s music opens the gate to musical forms and dances across time and geography. As if in answer to Sammie’s call-and-response, the film soundtrack summons sounds and music from multiple genres, including jazz, reggae, rock and roll, and hip-hop, merging diegetic and extradiegetic sounds, producing rhythm and cacophony. At the same time, the film begins to populate its screen with spectral bodies, ghostly figures from various dance traditions that intermingle with the human bodies writhing in that barn.

The juke joint becomes a mirror held up to cinema itself, as the scene flickers and conjures bodies and sounds out of shadows. Here is a scene of sonic and cinematic seduction: a play of chiaroscuro and motion, a sensorial plunge into visual, sonic, and corporeal multiplicity. We are meant to see this scene as a moment of reprieve and joy for the otherwise marginalized people in a town that exploits and treats them as disposable bodies. At one point, director Coogler offers a quick exterior shot: the barn from a distance, a little black box with slivers of light (hinting at the vibrant life within) sitting silently and alone in a vast, pitch-black, empty field. We might see Coogler’s barn—a light box itself—as a salve to what Get Out’s Jordan Peele had called the “Sunken Place” (the dark, silent crypt that traps the Black subject), an alternative space of fierce Black celebration in the provisionally safe enclosure of the barn-turned-community.

The spirits conjured by “true music,” however, can be good or evil. Music is indifferent to its users. It is Sammie’s virtuosic playing that draws the vampires to the barn. And when the vampires do show up, their strategy of talking their way inside is supplemented, unexpectedly, by bursting into pleasing song. Thus evil-at-the-door and salvation-within speak a similar language. Precisely because music can offer alluring, metaphysical possibilities; because it is a medium that traverses time and geography; because it is disinterested (that is, amoral rather than immoral), it can easily become a language for the wicked as well as the sacred.

Music’s doubleness and its inherent amorality become the very tools for what may be the film’s most radical critique: the critique of religion, and specifically of American religious fundamentalism. How can we not notice that the sweet-voiced king of vampires is himself priestlike? Whether Remmick is dunking his prey in the water as a form of vampiric baptism, trying to “turn”/convert a grieving Mary (a loaded name) by offering her solace in the afterlife, or seducing the people of color through the voice of Afro-Asian pessimism itself (this earthly world is not meant for someone like you, come with me), we understand that he is the preacher.

The film in fact makes a daring, explicit parallel between Sammie’s conservative minister father and Remmick: in the opening sequence, we see a disheveled and wounded Sammie finding his way to the little white church in which his father and the Black congregation have gathered. When Sammie walks into the room and advances toward the open arms of his father, Sammie (and our) vision is interrupted by harsh jump cuts of scenes and figures of monstrosity and the Devil. We will not know until the end of the movie that these jagged jump cuts suggest not contrast as much as continuity; we will not know until the end that Sammie was facing a choice between the embrace of the church (and an immortality not dissimilar to what the vampiric life promises) and the potentially ruinous path of music, symbolized by the broken guitar handle in his right hand. Sammie chooses music and mortality, hangs on to the broken guitar (his choice for a mortal, broken world), and leaves the salvation offered by both Remmick and the Black church. Redemption, the film argues, may not be found in the Devil or the godly, but instead in the earthly practices of art and coalition-building.

It is only at the end of Sinners that we come to understand what was at stake, in that more than two-thirds of the film is devoted to setup (both the twin’s setting-up of their business and Coogler’s setting-up of tension for the vampire action). Only after the massacre do we see the film’s meditation on the nature of freedom as deeply haunted and melancholic, tied to that “prequel” moment when everything is about potentiality: Smoke and Stack’s return, their dream for the juke joint, their efforts to draw in the help and company of old friends and estranged families, Sammie’s uncertain hopes for his own talents, and so on. Freedom in a segregated world is only possible and felt in the moment, can only be prospective in this world of Afro-Asian pessimism—a world, in short, that has no place for people of color. Freedom in such a world of unfreedom can only live within the brief duration of the aspirational that existed when Smoke and Stack had a vision; when they had the hope, in spite of both paranoia and perspicacity, of a community-to-be; when the dream of a future could be held in the mind, suspended between pastness and (no) future.