We Are All SINNERS

After its shockingly successful run in theatres, SINNERS is now available on home digital services (and on DVD/4K/Blu-ray on July 8) and it’s one of the best films you’ll see this year. I say “shockingly successful” because even though Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan directed and co-starred in the massive hit BLACK PANTHER, Warner Brothers had little confidence in their new horror movie, agreeing to an unprecedented deal that gave Coogler final cut, a bigger share of the profits and full ownership of the film in 25 years. While the entertainment press huffed that the movie’s $90-million budget was too big a risk, Coogler’s belief in his cast and crew paid off, as SINNERS has grossed over $360 million so far, spectacular for a spring release. It’s another example of what Breakfast Culture has always shown with hard data, that the creativity and new ideas that diversity, equity and inclusion bring to companies result in greater profits.

But SINNERS isn’t just a great financial achievement, obviously: the movie works as both an exciting, entertaining action film and a clever, fascinating exploration of American Black history and cultural appropriation. In his dual role as the Smokestack brothers, Jordan leads a group of characters—Black, white and Asian—collaborating on opening up a juke joint nightclub while under threat from the Ku Klux Klan. That alone is a tense setup but then things get weird when a battered Irishman arrives, pursued across the plains by Choctaw tribe members. What? Why?

I promised a while back in my White Privilege Diaries to tell a story of the Irish and the Choctaw. I love it utterly. Upon learning of the suffering wrought by Ireland’s potato famine, the Choctaw in Wyoming collected the modern equivalent of $5,000 in 1847 and sent it to the town of Midleton in County Cork, south of Dublin. This was an incredible act of charity from a people who’d only recently endured the Trail of Tears themselves. Learning of this history in recent decades, Ireland’s President Mary Robinson visited the Choctaw in 1995, the “Kindred Spirits” sculpture honoring them (pictured below) was erected in Midleton in 2017 and, most urgently, the Irish people raised money in 2020 to “pay it forward” and support the Navajo and Hopi tribes hit hardest by COVID-19. A grateful Chief Gary Batton said, “Sharing our cultures makes the world grow smaller.”

“Kindred Spirits” by artist Alex Pentek

Ryan Coogler knows this history and weaves it into his celebration of Black culture in SINNERS, especially in a pair of spectacular musical sequences. It quickly becomes terrifyingly clear why the Choctaw are hunting this Remmick from Ireland and he’s the most interesting, even sympathetic, screen villain since the X-Men’s tortured Jewish mutant terrorist Magneto. Remmick attacks the Smokestack twins and their friends with a disturbing blend of violence and admiration. The joyous Black culture on display here is most enticing of all to a man with no soul and his perversion of Chief Batton’s message is both a safety net and a horror all at once. Cultural appropriation can give as much as it takes and the movie genuinely wrestles with that, like we all do in our lives. It’s a thrilling film. 

Breakfast Culture’s vision of sharing our cultures has more in common with the Choctaw and Cork than SINNERS’ blood-splattered nightclub, thank goodness, but as it happens, I’m editing this on Juneteenth, America’s day of honouring the end of slavery. Amidst the DEI backlash we’ve been facing, Juneteenth has become another focus of white-supremacist outrage and subsequent corporate retreat. It’s a dismal time but we can learn from the cooperation of the Irish and Indigenous Americans, we can learn from the huge success of SINNERS, and we can learn from the data-driven human-capital approach that Breakfast Culture has used to uplift many companies. We are better together and that juke joint is waiting. Let’s break some eggs!

~ scott dagostino, JEDI Consultant, Breakfast Culture™ Inc.

P.S. We are hosting a free webinar Thursday, July 9 at 1pm EST in which organizations will learn WHAT DEI is and is not, WHY DEI is important, and HOW to properly implement DEI initiatives to meet organizations goals. Please pass the link around to anyone you think will benefit and I hope to see you there!

P.P.S. Download Breakfast Culture Inc.’s Capability Statement here:

https://bit.ly/BreakfastCultureCapabilities