I am genuinely proud of Michael B. Jordan. That Oscar win for Sinners felt earned, overdue, and frankly so satisfying to watch. Especially after the mess at the BAFTA Awards, where he had to stand there, composed and professional, while being disrespected in a way no actor should ever have to endure.
To be publicly diminished like that, to have that ugliness thrown at you on an international stage, and then to come back and be recognized at the highest level was not just a win. It was reclamation. I love that for him.
But I gotta be honest with Y’all . . . I still can’t get through this movie. I tried, multiple times, but I just can’t.
I tried to watch Sinners the first time when it came out, and that was my mistake. I was deep in the trenches writing my next book Strung Up. I was still making my way through the archives. Through a chamber of Jim Crow era horrors where I saw Black children brutalized and lynched. Where families were shattered and communities lived in terror and unyielding generational grief and trauma. My brain was already saturated with the machinery of racial violence. So when I hit play on Sinners, it wasn’t entertainment for me.
So I said, okay. Maybe it’s just bad timing. Maybe I’m too close to the material. So I gave it space. Months. Almost a year. I let my nervous system breathe. And I finished my book.
Then Michael B. Jordan wins the Oscar, and I’m like, alright . . . let’s try this again. New day. New spirit. Maybe now I can sit with it, appreciate the artistry, and see what everybody’s been raving about.
Once again, the film starts off strong.
We’re dropped into this world where Black folks are doing what Black folks have always done in racist capitalistic America. They make life out of no-life conditions. You see the hustle, the planning, the quiet negotiations with a system designed to choke the hell out of you every which way. You see Jim Crow hanging in the air like smog that never leaves. But Black folks are still loving, still dreaming, still figuring out how to grab snatches of joy anyway. They still have the audacity to love on each other.
There’s that love scene between Jordan’s character “Smoke”and Annie, the Hoodoo practitioner, and herbalist. It’s tender, grounded, and not performative. You see it in the way they look first. It’s not hunger alone, but knowing. The kind of look that says, I see you in all the ways this world tries not to. And we get to see the kind of intimacy that rarely gets centered when Black stories are told through the lens of suffering.
The noise drops out.
The world narrows.
And suddenly it’s just the two of them in this pocket of softness carved out of a hard world. The light is low, almost honeyed, touching skin in a way that feels warm rather than exposed. Nothing about it is rushed. There’s a patience to it, like they’re not just reaching for each other, they’re recognizing each other.
Their bodies come together. Hands linger. Breaths slow and sync up. There’s a tenderness there that feels almost defiant, given everything pressing in on them outside those walls. It’s two people allowing themselves, for a moment, to be held without fear. And that’s what makes it hit. Because in a Jim Crow world engineered to deny Black people privacy, safety, softness, vulnerability, and the right to just be human, that kind of intimacy is not just desire, but sacred refuge.
So now I’m leaning in. I’m like, ooo-kayyy, I see why people love this movie. I’m in it. I’m settled. I’m letting the story take me somewhere. Then the film expands and we get to that juke joint scene.
My god. That beautiful scene.
It moves from that private tenderness into the collective where that same energy opens up into community, music, movement, and joy. It’s like the story zooms out from two bodies finding each other to a whole room full of Black life refusing to be suffocated.
The music doesn’t just play, Y’all. It rolls through the room like heat. Like something you can taste. The bass hums low in your chest. The guitar cries out and laughs at the same time. The piano skips like it’s got somewhere to be.
The air is THICK. I can smell it all through the screen. The liquor. The sweat. The perfume. The wood. Breath. All of it mingling into something alive. The room itself feels like it’s pulsing. Like the walls know the rhythm.
Black folks are everywhere, past and present and across space. They’re moving, turning, leaning into each other, hands finding hips, shoulders, necks, and backs. Dresses catching the light. Shirts sticking to skin. Laughter spilling out in bursts. Feet hitting the floor in time like they’re answering a call older than memory. Bodies are remembering something the world outside has tried, and failed, to beat out of them.
It’s not just dancing. It’s release. It’s testimony. It’s the sound of people refusing to die while they’re still alive. And for a moment, just a moment, the outside world disappears. There’s no Jim Crow. No watching eyes. No calculating how to survive the next insult, the next threat, the next day. There’s just music. Just touch. Just breath. Just being.
And in that room, under that low light, with that music wrapping itself around everybody like a promise, you can almost . . . almost . . . believe in something like freedom.
And then, here come the white folks. Standing outside the door with their eyes glowing red like they just clocked in for a shift at Hell, Incorporated. And I swear to you, the moment I saw them red eyes, my whole body said: “Absolutely TF not.”
I had a full-body veto. There was no internal debate. No “maybe it’ll get better.” No “let me just see where this goes.”
Nope.
I do not do vampire movies. I don’t do red eyes. I don’t do neck biting. I don’t do blood doing acrobatics in midair. I don’t do evil spirits clocking into people’s bodies. Because the way my nervous system is set up, the moment the horror shifts from metaphor to “oh we ‘bout to start biting people’s necks,” I am no longer a viewer.
No ma’am!
Where is the remote?
Turn it OFF.
Because I already knew. I know what that metaphor is doing. I know what it’s about to ask me to sit through. I know we are about to pivot from Black joy to Black terror, and my spirit said, “Ma’am… you have read enough lynching accounts for one lifetime. You will not be clocking in for a double shift tonight.”
Click. TV off. Lights on. My dog looking at me like, “You good?” No. No, I am not. And I will not be.
And that’s the part folks really don’t talk about when they say a film is “powerful” or “important.” Sometimes it is. And sometimes your nervous system is like, “Important for who? Because I’ve already done my time.”
Here’s the thing, Y’all, I have spent my professional life studying the most brutal corners of American history: lynchings, murdered children, racial terror, and the socialization of violence. Which means my brain isn’t encountering those images as abstract storytelling the way many viewers do. For me, the imagery connects to archives, testimony, photographs, coroner reports, newspaper headlines, and the neurological conditioning I’ve spent years analyzing.
And so when the film moves from the beauty of the juke joint, the music, the joy, the Black communal space, and into the sudden intrusion of white violence coded as something supernatural, my nervous system recognizes the pattern instantly. It’s not fantasy to me. Instead, it’s historical memory.
Psychologists call this kind of reaction vicarious trauma or secondary traumatic stress. People who work closely with traumatic material, folks like historians, journalists, therapists, archivists, and lawyers, often develop a heightened sensitivity to depictions of violence because our brains have already built deep associative networks around those images. Our brains don’t treat such scenes as “genre horror.” They get treated as another representation of something we already know too well.
There’s also another layer that scholars of Black media talk about a lot and it’s racial fatigue from spectacle. For decades, film and television have repeatedly staged Black suffering as a central dramatic device. Sometimes it’s historical drama. Sometimes it’s horror. Sometimes it’s prestige television. But the visual grammar often ends up the same with Black bodies threatened, hunted, brutalized, or consumed. Even when the story ultimately critiques racism, the audience still has to sit through the spectacle.
A lot of people reached that point with shows like Them, which used extreme racial violence as a horror device. Others felt it with 12 Years a Slave, Antebellum, or even parts of Lovecraft Country. These works may be artistically powerful, but they still ask viewers, especially Black viewers, to endure repeated visualizations of terror.
My reaction at the moment when the white characters’ eyes turn red is especially telling. Horror films often use supernatural imagery to symbolize social evil. But in this case, the metaphor is very literal: white predation, white consumption, white extraction, and white violence invading a Black sanctuary. For someone who has spent years documenting how white communities historically turned racial violence into spectacle through lynch mobs, postcards, crowds, and even children watching and participating, my brain simply refuses the invitation to sit through another version of that ritual.
And this is why I keep stopping at the juke joint scene. That scene represents joy, creativity, music, community. These are all the things Black people built in spite of terror. When the violence enters that space, my mind is rejecting the narrative shift. After studying so much historical destruction of Black life, part of me may be saying: I don’t want to watch them ruin this too.
People often assume historians and journalists become desensitized to violence. The opposite is frequently true. The deeper your knowledge gets, the harder it becomes to treat suffering as entertainment. Your brain is protecting itself from what it recognizes as another spectacle of Black pain, even if the film ultimately tries to critique it. And honestly, there’s a growing conversation among Black scholars and audiences about exactly this fatigue. Not every story about Black history, racism, or resistance has to be consumed visually in its most brutal form for it to be meaningful.
Also, let me say that it’s not just that I don’t do vampire movies. It’s that I don’t need vampires to understand what it looks like when something feeds on human life. Because we are living in that right now.
We are still watching Black bodies be taken on camera, over and over again. In 2025 alone, more than 1,300 people were killed by police in the United States, with Black people disproportionately represented in those deaths. That’s not horror fiction. That’s policy and practice.
Not to mention, we are watching militarized immigration raids sweep through communities, with federal agents shooting at civilians, detaining tens of thousands, beating and even killing people during enforcement operations. We are watching protestors, people simply demanding to live, met with tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades, and broken bones in the streets.
So when I see those glowing red eyes on the screen, that hunger, intrusion, and that sense of something arriving to consume, My brain doesn’t say, “Oh, vampires.” My brain says, “Oh. Extraction.” My brain says, I’ve seen this before. In archives, photographs, testimony, and in the quiet, clinical language people use to describe unbearable things.
So no, I don’t need to sit through another version of it wrapped in fangs and metaphor to understand what’s being said. I already understand it, deep in my bones, in my nervous system, in the parts of me that had to read, write, and witness what this country has done to Black life.
And maybe that’s the part we don’t say out loud enough. Sometimes opting out is not ignorance. It’s not avoidance, a failure to engage, or intellectual cowardice. Sometimes it’s wisdom, knowing exactly how much you’ve already carried, and deciding, very intentionally, that you don’t have to carry this too.
Because I have done my time in the archives. I have sat with the ghosts and I have followed the paper trails of cruelty all the way down. And at some point, you earn the right to choose where you place your attention.
So yes, please, let’s give Michael B. Jordan his flowers. Let’s celebrate the artistry of this film. Let’s have the conversations.
I’m choosing the music. The laughter. The beautiful bodies in motion. I’m choosing the room where Black people are still here, still breathing, and still finding each other in the dark.
I’m stayin’ in the juke joint. And this time, I’m locking the door.
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