American Vampires
American Vampires
Sinners, nominated for a record breaking sixteen Oscars, winner of four, depicts a story about vampires whose vision for ending societal racism is to kill black people in order to provide them with “heaven right here on earth.” But a supporting cast of villains - uniquely American - are the real monsters who snuffed out the economic lifeblood of black Americans after chattel slavery was abolished. What they each have in common is that they were determined to make life on earth a living hell for black Americans.
As I argue in my new book, Getting to Reparations: How Building A Different America Requires A Reckoning With Our Past, once chattel slavery ended, the law’s subordination and control of the formerly enslaved did not. That is because slavery shape shifted. No matter where black people went, no matter what they did, their blackness placed a target on their back, and Sinners brings that horror to life. The movie was appropriately set in October1932 in Mississippi, because Mississippi was the last state in the Union to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment.
The Lynching demon appears early on, when Hogwood, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, sells a building to the Smokestack twins so they can start their own business - a juke joint. A place for black joy and escape from the daily indignities of racism. Hogwood’s plan was to take the twins’ cash and return the next day and kill them, taking the land back. Racial violence as a means of stripping black property away was de rigueur after chattel slavery ended. Research showed the aftermath of lynchings “detracted from Black wealth and added to the wealth of whites, who … almost always …claim[ed] the abandoned assets.” This particular demon was omnipresent, always lurking in the background seeking to destroy black wealth.
If the Klan hadn’t killed the twins to take back the property, they could have gone to the courthouse and burned it down eliminating the title records. That’s what happened in Paulding, Mississippi on the night of September 10, 1932, “when 15 whites set fire to the Paulding courthouse on Sept. 10, 1932, only the records for the mostly black section burned.” As I describe in my book “Once it was no longer clear who owned title to much of the property, Masonite, a company specializing in wood products, swooped in and won legal ownership of more than 9,500 acres of land in the area.”
The next predator appears when Delta Slim describes how his friend was lynched – Mass Incarceration. A casual viewer could be forgiven for missing why they were arrested in the first place. They were arrested for the crime of vagrancy. In order to mass incarcerate black men, states enacted vagrancy laws making unemployment a crime, among others, and it was almost exclusively used to arrest black people. Mass arrests of black Americans led to convict leasing which allowed private companies and plantation owners to pay the state for the privilege of using prison labor in their profit-making ventures. Black men could not earn their own wages but enriched white people and white institutions. State revenue from convict leasing helped financially rebuild a bankrupted south after they lost the Civil War.
While sundown was the beginning of “life” for vampires, it created fear in the hearts of black Americans across the country. Sundown towns are places where black people could not be found after the sun went down if they wanted to live. Black people could work during the day but when the sun went down, they had better be gone. They could not buy homes or build wealth there or “take advantage of amenities available to white Americans.”
Sinners graphically displays the economic terror and violence that black Americans lived through after chattel slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment. Those horrors however have pierced the veil of history and inflict continuing trauma today. States with historically higher levels of black lynching have higher levels of poverty today – for both black and white Americans. A black child born into a neighborhood previously subjected to federal government redlining decreases their future annual earnings by $15,000. Sundown towns have also left a legacy. The hoarding of resources to benefit white residents has unsurprising intergenerational effects. Black Americans deserve reparative justice that will drive a stake through the heart of American vampires that continue to walk the earth. Are you ready for that?
“I’m not scared of werewolves, vampires. But man I’d always lose sleep when I dream that I could set my people free.” Sinners lyrics