It’s been three days since I watched * the Ryan Coogler film that I can’t name because the algo is doing something weird with it, * and I’m still singing “Picked Poor Robin Clean,” the haunting blues song that the vampires sang outside of the juke joint.

The entire third act is so gratifying because it is so utterly creepy. The creepiness seems to stem from the vampire storyline and how they played on race and racial identity in the film. I’m assuming that by the end of the week, there will be many other thinkpieces about this incredible film, especially the racial politics. However, I will share my thoughts because it so closely ties to how I teach about the social construction of race in my classes. Making Remmick, the primary vampire, Irish was a clever choice because vampire mythology has roots in Celtic culture (Bram Stoker’s Dracula was allegedly inspired by Irish folklore and Celtic stories). But what made this decision truly brilliant was the connections made to the social status of the Irish in early America, who were not considered white.

When I teach Omi and Winant’s Racial Formation Theory/the concept that race is a social construct co-constituted by various social and political factors that evolve over time, I do this through the lens of whiteness before I discuss any other racial groups. This framing resonates more with my white students and everyone else because we do not often discuss the histories of how, in early America, some groups — Jewish people, Irish and Italian immigrants, most Eastern Europeans, etc., were not initially considered white when they came to America.

When I lived in Illinois, I used the story of Chicago’s immigrant communities as a teaching aid and cultural touchstone because so many students can trace their family history back to these immigrants or are familiar with Irish culture because they grew up in Chicago. We read things like this New Yorker piece, “Noel Ignatiev’s Long Fight with Whiteness” [Noel Ignatiev is the author of How the Irish Became White (1995)], and watch videos in class like this one:

(My apologies in advance for how the host mispronounces Illinois, I know that makes natives cringe)

Now that I’m teaching in New Jersey, I talk about it through the stories of Irish and Italian immigrants who came through Ellis Island and landing in the tenements of lower Manhattan. I do a virtual field trip to Tenement Museum and because it’s a media class we watch (and analyze) some “Sopranos” episodes, like this one:

Many students are a little taken aback by this approach especially those who identify as Irish, Italian, and white, because most have never heard this history. I remind them that that erasure is by design. To assimilate into whiteness, you have to completely shed whatever was there before and (some) white folks have done this so well, they don’t even grow up learning that they were ever anything else but white.

As Black folks, our physical features (skin tone, shape of nose and lips, hair texture, etc.) have barred the vast majority of us from this kind of assimilation but as outsiders we’ve always clocked it. When Black folks fled the South en masse for Chicago and the rest of the midwest during the Great Migration, we ended up renting in areas with high Jewish, Italian, and Iran populations. That close proximity fostered a passing familiarity (that Black spaghetti didn’t come from nowhere!) but in some cases that familiarity bred contempt especially when it came to the workplace (both before and after slavery’s abolition). We often fought over the same scraps and the white power structure pit us against each other over and over again. All of us were racialized.

Now I’m not drawing a false equivalency here between anti-Black racism and so-called “cultural racism” against the Irish people who were slightly elevated above us in the racial hierarchy, I’m just saying that they were racialized as “other” in a different way.

Like consider the “simianization” of Irish caricatures in the late 1800s/turn of the century:

[Source]

Stereotypical tropes of “Paddy” (a slur for an Irish man) and “Bridget” (a stereotypical representation of an Irish woman) featured harsh stereotypes. “Paddy” was a violent drunkard who has an affinity for trouble. Hence why police vans in early America were offensively nicknamed “paddy wagons.” Bridget was big, brute and angry. Both stereotypical caricatures were depicted as apes. Coincidence? No.

The typical first step of dehumanization is rationalizing why a person is sub human, perhaps by comparing them to an animal. Hence the antisemitic tropes about Jewish people as “vermin” and that they would “contaminate the pure white race.” Or the simianization of Black folks. Dehumanizing language or animal-like caricature often lays the groundwork.

I read the film as being about the pursuit of freedom from white supremacy and racism, something that the Remmick character knows something about which is why he tries to lure the Black folks into his vampire cult of “fellowship and love.” Vampires are tricksters who know how to appeal to someone’s sensibilities to get them to befriend them or “let them in” (literally and figuratively).

Remmick knew (from experience) the purpose of the juke joint. Not only was it a space for joy, but he intuitively knew that the Smoke Stack Brothers were trying to make money and be free with their people. They wanted to foster a little bit of joy and freedom outside of the harsh living conditions, but at the same time they wanted to monetize it. Remmick’s pitch was all about empathy and getting “what they all really wanted” love, fellowship, and freedom from white supremacist racism. His entire pitch to them is one of empathy— Remmick expressed that he knew what it’s like to work in harsh conditions for little pay because that was the plight of the Irish too in early America. The haunting song “Picked Poor Robin Clean” is about starvation and poverty so dire that a person kills small birds to feed his family.

When I was a kid, my granny would tell me about people who ate water rats in Mississippi. Like most things my elders from the country tell me, I didn’t initially believe her. That is, until I read Quincy Jones’ memoir, which opened with him talking about catching and eating water rats. I later learned more about the history of impoverished eating practices in America. There’s a reason all those folks in the South still have those recipes for cooking raccoons.

Remmick’s deceit is obvious in the light of the historical understanding of Black Irish relations in early America. Particularly how Irish folks did not engage in solidarity but rather chose to lean into anti-Black racism as a mechanism to distance themselves from Blackness and ascend into whiteness.

After leaving the theater I sat with the eerie presentation of race in this film. The first truly scary scene is the sight of the three white people appearing at the juke joint door in the cover of night, in the middle of the woods in 1930s Mississippi is actually terrifying in and of itself. No vampire backstory required. If three white people knocked on my door in the middle of the night right now, my stomach would drop into my shoes and there’s no amount of “nice and friendly” that could subvert that for folks who have been socialized to be fearful of white intentions. Especially not in the 1930’s American South.

I’m bracing myself for weeks of listening to reductive takes on this film. I’ve already seen folks draw on themes of “cultural appropriation” or “why we can’t trust allies,” reminders to me that film readings tightly reflect one’s own personal ideological lens—not necessarily the filmmaker’s intent or the text’s full complexity. Art is inherently polysemic, and while critiques of power dynamics are vital, reducing a layered work to a single interpretation often flattens its potential for dialogue. This goes for me too.

If the film is, as I understood it, primarily about seeking freedom from white supremacy and racism. Then the film provides insightful commentary of where freedom is and where it is now. Mary seeks freedom through “passing” or assimilation but is miserable because she can’t be who she is or be around the people she loves. Preacher Boy’s father finds it through religion and offers the same to his son, but he finds joy in his art and wants to make music. The Smoke Stack brothers seek it out in Chicago only to find that the big city is just another Mississippi up north, commenting that “Chicago ain’t nothing but Mississippi with skyscrapers.” So they hatch a plan to find it via Black Capitalism, only to be foiled by the plantation money. The next routes for freedom are through death and ascension to heaven (which one of the twin brothers chooses) or the hell on earth that Remmick tries to sell (the trap that the other brother fall into). They search for happiness everywhere but at the end (in the mid credit scene set in 1992) they recount that the only time any of them ever new freedom was during that infamous day, when they were all in community, working together to build something.

For me, the message was that freedom can’t be found in a place, a bottle, or a bank account, it’s found in the fleeting moments of love, joy, community and solidarity. The biggest hinderance to community not the people themselves but white supremacist racism and individualism.

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Also found this film review that touches on the solidarity angle. It also introduces some thing I didn’t know about the connection between the Choctaw and Irish folks. Fast forward to 22 minutes: