The Logic of the Lie: Remmick, Annie, and the Tautologies of Whiteness.
Remmick wanted to live forever. Annie wanted to die in the juke joint—if that’s what it took to live free. So who really refused to surrender to the lo
Remmick’s Dream, Annie’s Refusal
In the movie sinners, Remmick longs for a world white Christianity said was possible—a world of unity, purity, and eternal peace. A utopia without conflict, without disruption. But that peace was never peace for everyone. It was sanitized, ordered, controlled.
And like every settler dream before it, Remmick’s utopia demanded a body count.
Meanwhile, Annie chooses presence over purity.
She dances in the juke joint. She practices African spirituality. She knows how to ask the right questions when a vampire shows up. Her discernment isn’t doctrinal—it’s ancestral. Her logic doesn’t bend toward empire—it bends toward freedom.
Annie isn’t trying to live forever.
She’s trying to live free.
Vampires, Memory, and White Salvation
Remmick couldn’t admit that he was a vampire because he didn’t want to.
To see clearly would require him to acknowledge what the system is, what he feeds on. And when your safety depends on denial, truth looks like danger.
But Annie just knows.
She doesn’t analyze the evil—she recognizes it. Even when it bears a resemblance to a friend. “Why can’t you walk in?” She asked. “What’s changed?” That’s the difference between institutional discernment and spiritual knowing. One waits for permission. The other listens to the drumbeat in the chest-what Ifa calls the feeling.
The Tautologies of Whiteness
I will say it until I am blue in the face:
Whiteness is not just a social category. It’s a logic.
A closed loop. A self-reinforcing narrative.
It says:
Goodness = whiteness.
Badness = not whiteness.
And “badness” is always coded:
Black. Queer. Immigrant. Disabled. Poor. Loud. Free.
So when white people move toward what’s been coded bad, they begin to feel what it’s like to be contaminated by association. That’s the rupture. That’s why they panic. They’re feeling, maybe for the first time, what it means to be socially marked—to be seen through the lens of suspicion. Yesterday in our class Starlette said: No one is born from a country named Black or White.
She’s right.
These aren’t ethnicities.
They’re positions in a racialized world.
When Black Progress Isn’t Progress
Now flip the mirror.
When Black folks move toward whiteness—toward its languages, its aesthetics, its systems—we often call it “progress.”
But is it?
Assimilation is not the same as liberation.
Because the empire isn’t built for your freedom.
It’s built for your compliance.
And when we measure our growth by how well we’ve conformed, we may gain visibility, but often at the cost of wholeness. The wild, unruly, sacred parts of us must be tamed or erased.
That’s not resurrection.
That’s respectable death.
Resurrection Technology Breaks the Loop
Resurrection Technology doesn’t fix the system.
It refuses it.
It’s not about being seen as good. It’s about being true.
It’s not about earning a seat at the table. It’s about building a new table altogether.
Progress is not proximity to power.
Progress is collective agency, embodied wisdom, and ancestral refusal.
Remmick trusted the myth of empire.
Annie trusted the memory of liberation.
And in the end, only one of them broke the loop.
Remmick wanted to live forever.
Annie wanted to live free.
One trusted whiteness.
The other trusted wisdom.
That’s the choice.
Every day.
For all of us.