Sinners is an Allegory of the Perpetual Destruction of Black Capitalism

WARNING: The following essay contains spoilers for the 2025 film “Sinners” written and directed by Ryan Coogler, starring Michael B. Jordan.

After watching Sinners for the third time in 2025, I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that Coogler was exploring Black American’s repeated attempts to participate in system of capitalism in America. The meaning of it hit me after I finally got around to FD Signifier’s video on Sinners. In the video, he stated that the anti-capitalist critique of Sinners comes off as toothless, citing that the narrative around vampires throughout history had always been anti-capitalist, but that Coogler didn’t really take it all that deep. He stated he felt Coogler’s stance on these issues felt ambiguous. I’m going to assume that he’s analyzing this narrative with respect to American politics, and that’s how he drew this conclusion.

I disagree. I believe there’s another dimension in this narrative that’s not being considered. The caveat is that Signifier is only reviewing the perspective of capitalism through the lens of an economic structure itself, but not through the lens of capitalism from a cultural standpoint. To be fair, I am doing some extrapolating in this analysis because there are some gaps (really, more like gradients) in the story. But I believe that they’re not fallible, and they can be addressed when you take into consideration the historical context within the story. I don’t think this should be overlooked. Coogler could have technically written this story in other eras of Black music and the narrative as a whole would still make sense. But I believe there was a specific reason that the Jim Crow south era of the Blues was the appropriate setting for this story.

I believe the deaths of Smoke and Stack reveal the critique of American capitalism from a cultural perspective. Not just the fact they died, but specifically the manner with which they die, the context around it, and the outcomes of said events. It may seem that Coogler’s perspective on capitalism isn’t well grounded, but it becomes apparent when you add the dimension of culture to the analysis. That’s when the criticism becomes more evident.

Doomed From The Start

Smoke and Stack both possess a tragic flaw in Sinners. For context, a character’s tragic flaw can be a trait or personality that the character has that is responsible for that character’s failure or demise. For Smoke and Stack, it’s not just their criminal past, and isn’t Smoke’s proclivity and efficacy of violence nor Stack’s silver-tongued devil persona and adulterous activity. Instead, when viewed with the context of the culture of Jim Crow, their tragic flaw is their arrogance (or naiveté depending on your disposition) that they believe that they could successfully participate and operate in the American capitalist system at that time. Their demise is a direct outcome of them attempting to participate within this system. Remmick, while he immediately asserted that he was not a member of the klan, is obviously just as much of a parallel to white supremacy and systemic racism as the klan members that Smoke eradicated at the end of the film. Not just because of contributing to their deaths, but also because of the cultural ramifications that transpired.

I recently stumbled upon the “Grits and Eggs” Podcast, and found an episode where host Deante Kyle held a conversation with Johnathan Doss, a Senior Research Manager and political commentator. The most compelling portion of the conversation was when Kyle brought up a framework that calls out 2 American archetypes: the “racist” and the “capitalist”. He states that they had to come to a compromise about Black people’s role in society, which then lead to social integration. Not as a means to uplift the Black community, but to stifle it from growing too powerful. Sinners takes place before any compromise was put in place, but this perfectly encapsulates the headwinds that Smoke and Stack were fighting against. The destruction of Black community and the extraction of its capital is a universal tenet. “American capitalism has always been racial capitalism”, says Doss.

Assimilate and Appropriate

Stack was not only murdered, his body was co-opted and forced to culturally assimilate into Remmick’s expression and experience of vampirism. The same way that a person in the black community may “sell-out” and become a husk that uses its voice to advance American capitalism and white supremacy rather than combat it. More of this can be explored in Pillboy’s breathtaking video essay “The Price of Self Respect”. This is a specifically cultural consequence for Stack, showed by Remmick’s river dance scene. In a matter of a few minutes, the assaulted partygoers had already been forced into rejecting their previous culture and accepting their new culture of capitalist pursuit.

This is the ramification of the capitalists encountering the power and magnetism of the Black community’s culture, and deciding to take it for themselves for personal gain. This may seem skewed because when we think of “capital” we often immediately liken it to “money” or “resources”, and Remmick never seemed to be in the pursuit of money. But those are the tangible forms of capitalism. There’s an intangible part of capitalism called “value” that is ever present within the story of Sinners. It’s a conceptual engine that propels the story forward throughout Act 1. From the beginning, when Smoke and Stack purchase the property that will become the juke joint, they begin procuring resources and marketing for their hard launch. We are literally watching them amass value throughout the first act. They buy land, gather employees and partner with vendors. We also observe Stack’s tragic flaw in the scene when he asks Miles to play his guitar. When he encounters Miles’ cultural gift, he instantly explodes with joy. But, he doesn’t say anything about the beauty or the power of the music, he says “We gon’ make some money!” His excitement comes from the new expectation that Miles will be the catalyst to their future capital success.

But, in the Jim Crow south, this is an incredibly dangerous endeavor, which is why they eventually run into the challenges of karmic justice. The same way that they ambushed the mob to steal their money and start a new life, Remmick and the klan are now ambushing their new business to extract value from them (with respect to the klan, they’re technically reneging on a previous valid transaction in order to steal back the value that they sold). When the actions of Remmick are explored through the lens of cultural capitalism, Remmick clearly perceived value in Sammy’s voice and was compelled to force him to assimilate. The klan was compelled to attack Smoke for the same reason; they perceived value in the destruction of Black capitalism. Their actions are the concrete manifestation of the same forces that drove Remmick’s actions.

The reason this may have been ambiguous is because the cultural aspects of Smoke and Stack’s deaths are more hidden in the subtext. But because of the context of Jim Crow, that cultural context inherently becomes capitalist as well, kind of like a literary transitive property. On the surface, Smoke may seem to have succumbed to plain old racism. But that’s not sufficient enough to cover the cultural critique of Smoke’s death. We have to extrapolate into the surrounding cultural context for Smoke, because we need to highlight something about Black culture.

One of the biggest struggles of Black culture is that it is forced to exist as a subculture within a greater American culture, where it is co-opted, appropriated, denigrated and manipulated. That also means that it’s subjected, however loosely, to the judgment and authority of said larger culture. The best example of this is Hip Hop. This genre has been a massive driver of wealth and value in American society, while at the same time, rappers were criticized for being overly aggressive, criminal, and brutish, promoting negative values like demeaning women, promoting criminal behavior and activity, and homophobia. In other words, Hip Hop exists in a cultural climate that vilifies it while simultaneously promoting and capitalizing off of it. It’s important to emphasize that while Black people are held solely responsible for the innovation and development of this culture, we are not the owners of the capital that drives its economics. It’s largely been argued that Hip Hop has long been co-opted as a tool to create a negative image of Black Americans while simultaneously generating profit for the greater entertainment industry. This is loosely explored at the end of Sinners. In particular, with Hip Hop’s commercialization beginning to pick up steam in the 90s, Stack’s outfit at the end poses an external question: is this representation of Black culture true to form, representing Black life at the time? Or, is it just a costume that was appropriated and sold back to the Black community for further capitalist gain? If it’s the latter, it would support that Stack’s tragic ending was not actually his death, but being forced into an eternity of vapid cultural appropriation for the sake of capital.

This dichotomy is a part of a greater theoretical framework about racism that I dubbed “Continuous Cyclical Implicit Destruction”. It poses the question “Who’s responsible for flattening a culture into its most negative qualities and ingraining it into the zeitgeist? Is it the producers of said culture, or the distributors and platforms?” Just in case you’re wondering how I lean, it’s certainly the latter. But that discussion, and a deep dive on CCID, will be saved for another time.

A Culture of Destruction

This is important because of the key characteristic about the setting of Sinners: Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow was a political and social structure that created a subculture of American society that emphasized these specific tenets: Black people were considered inferior, therefore they were not entitled to the same rights as white Americans. This social order needed to be uplifted and protected in order for the white race to prevail. And, violence and destruction were permissible means by which the other 2 tenets could be maintained. Jim Crow may not have had any laws that explicitly supported the destruction of Black towns like Tulsa, Oklahoma and Rosewood. But, it certainly cultivated a culture that compelled these events to occur, going so far as to spawn the KKK. This is exactly what we see when the klan decides to come attack Smoke to take the barn back towards the end of the film. Sure, racism is the overarching reason. But Jim Crow is what created this culture of racism that then compels these men to attack Smoke for this establishment.

Thus, Smoke’s demise is the outcome of encountering (perhaps, from the racist perspective, even encroaching on) the racist agenda. The Juke Joint stood against everything Jim Crow stood for. This was a plot of land, however small, where white people were not considered superior, shown perfectly in the scene where Smoke interrogates Remmick’s crew by asking “Y’all klan?”. In this area, whiteness was not protected. The klan attacks Smoke not just because of racism, but Smoke and Stack, and what they wanted to build for their people, were seen as a threat to white supremacy. Therefore, the klan invoked its third tenet to ensure that the other 2 could not be infringed upon.

Jim Crow itself was an abstraction that was created to not just uphold racism and culture, but to uphold capitalism. From the conception of American slavery, American capitalism used Black people as one of the main engines of economic prosperity. This is actually what gave birth to Jim Crow. Racism is a factor, but it was not inherent to civilization. It was cultivated through American culture specifically to enforce this dynamic in society. We all know now that capitalism has to have a perpetual underclass to exist. Black people have been in that underclass since the slave ships departed from West Africa. Therefore, Jim Crow wasn’t just for the purpose of maintaining racism. It was built to maintain capitalism, and we’re still dealing with the ramifications.

That Which is Truly Indestructible

Smoke and Stack’s defiance of white supremacy is what drives the impact of the final scene of Smoke with Annie and their child. Annie specifically told Smoke that she wanted to die if she was bitten, because she refused to assimilate to their culture. Her decision was rewarded in the afterlife, and Smoke was given the opportunity to experience this peace as well. I believe Coogler was expressing that no matter what culture may reign over ours, there’s something bigger and more beautiful than anything that hate can produce. It’s worth believing in, it’s worth fighting for, and we should honor those that have died for it. The culture may have broken Smoke’s body, but it could not harm his spirit.

That spirit is what brought us the blues. That spirit invented soul food. That same spirit compelled Smoke and Stack to attempt to participate in capitalism in the first place. Sinners shows us the outcome most black people experience when they’re not careful. They’re either co-opted and forced to assimilate in hopes of a safer, more comfortable existence in subservience, or they’re dismantled and destroyed. That’s the culture that we’re subjected to, that we’ve adapted to, and that we’ve thrived in. As far as how we thrive, I believe Coogler ties this up beautifully with Sammy, who chooses that he doesn’t want to submit to anyone for anything. He doesn’t want to submit to capitalism and the fear of subjugation from the Jim Crow south, but he also doesn’t want to submit to the church in fleeing the pursuit of the devil. He instead chooses the freedom to do what he loves, and this is what helps him escape the capitalist pursuit that cost everyone their lives. As far as the efficacy of this message in the real world, I believe this holds up. What do we often see when white Americans are exposed to the joy Black people display at HBCU homecoming games, family cookouts and Juneteenth celebrations? Envious ineptitude. Because at the end of the day, Black culture holds tenets that really are infallible: We stand for freedom, creativity, joy and love. And no matter how malicious America gets, we all know those parts of us cannot be destroyed, so long as we refuse to submit.