Sinners, Minstrelsy, Roman Comedy, and the problems we still have contextualizing slavery and colonialism

It’s been a while since I saw Sinners! I loved it there, I wish I could go back and watch it for the first time again. Sinners managed to hit about every single aspect of who I am as a person. Vampires? Black people? Michael (my) B(oyfriend) Jordan? Music? Church hating?

Well!

But I came here to somehow connect this to the other part of my identity, Rome.

A little while ago I gave a guest lecture in a friend’s Roman Comedy class about Blackface Minstrelsy and its connections to Roman Comedy. If you’ve read any Roman Comedy, you’ll probably immediately think about ancient mask comedy, the “Clever Slave” trope and that movie A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. To this I'd say, wow you know so much about Roman Comedy.

As a Black American the stink of chattel slavery haunts me, quite personally I’d say. While watching Sinners, when we crossed the cotton fields to get to Sammy’s father’s church and later to meet Cornbread, a shiver went up the collective Black spine in the theater. Even the mention of the crop makes me wince. There’s plenty of discourse about so-called “trauma porn” in movies that cover Black people and Black themes, and this essay is not about that. But something about Sinners is special. Black people from different age groups regions and faiths are pouring into this movie, these actors, this director, this story, in a way I don’t think we’ve seen since Black Panther. People are not just watching this movie in theaters, they’re rewatching it in theaters! The movies are expensive and nobody cares. And they are right to! I simply cannot stress how amazing Sinners was. It was complex and layered in not just its plot, not just its characters, but in its setting, in its themes, in its villains, and in its protagonists.

This complexity is what made me think about my talk in the Roman Comedy class. You may think, why are we discussing minstrelsy in a class about Ancient Rome? And my answer to that is why I’m writing this essay about the three most random things you’d ever think to connect.

Roman Comedy, in general, was the Romanized version of Greek New Comedy. Typically, it was characterized by its Greek setting, its cast of stock characters, and a loose plot of slave shenanigans. Romans were, apparently, very immature. Their changes and contributions to the genre being far more lewd jokes about violence against slaves, potty humor, and sex jokes.

Blackface minstrelsy was a genre of mostly musical entertainment considered uniquely American as it came out of the “Jim Crow” era of American history. Jim Crow actually got its name from a popular minstrelsy character invented by Thomas “Daddy” Rice, known as the father of minstrelsy, from imitating stereotypical Black mannerisms and speech patterns as well as donning tattered clothes and Black shoe polish on his face. A typical minstrel show was one that consisted of imitation, music, and dance.

Minstrelsy as a genre evolved and changed to encapsulate various aspects of Black culture, from playing Black instruments like the dry bones, to making fun of the hair styles Black children wore. Countless stereotypes from this theatrical cast still impact Black people today. The “Mammy” and “Uncle Tom” characters still exist to relegate both fictional and real Black people to side roles in service of white self-actualization.

The genre has inextricable ties to chattel slavery and the constant service Black bodies must play in this country to whiteness. This was very similar to the jolly and “clever” slave character that typically propelled the plot of a Roman Comedy. It is interesting to me, now, not just academically how these characters impact modern life still thousands of years later, but how we talk about slavery in the ancient world, and pedagogically how that impacts the people learning about these things.

Classics teaching, much like how American schools teach American history, is heavily sanitized. It is common to hear how slavery in the ancient world was not at all like how the transatlantic slave trade operated. And it’s not that this isn’t true, the ancient world as a pre-colonial, pre racial, pre capitalism world is always interesting to see how culture and society operated and what can be done differently. However, our callous attitude towards ancient atrocities is reflective of our attitudes toward modern atrocities. It is typical for Julius Caesar to be absolved of all wrongdoing despite committing a genocide against the Gallic and Germanic tribes he made his name off of. It doesn’t quite ring to us that Spartacus is known for leading a long and quite successful slave revolt.

In general, and I know controversial take, slavery is bad. Slavery also has lasting impact on people and society long after it is done. Minstrelsy theater is one of the first uniquely American art forms to exist. American culture makers staked American identity on making fun of Black people. Roman culture was similarly, after the second Punic war when its theater started blossoming into a plot structure, in the business of making culture and decided making fun of slaves was the culture they wanted to make.

It’s even more complex how the attitude towards slavery has impacted art. Two of the most famous authors of Roman comedy were Plautus, whose background we are unsure of, but many have postulated that he was a former slave or probably a traveling actor, and Terence, a former slave from Carthage, a city in North Africa. Despite their backgrounds slavery was still the butt of the joke.

Several Black people were able to rise above their class strata by leaning into minstrelsy and performing for whiteness. We all know about Hattie McDaniel, the first Black person to win an Oscar for her performance as “Mammy” in Gone with the Wind, which was a movie glorifying the American South in the time periods surrounding the Civil War (at best).  Bert Williams, a Bahamian-born American entertainer is well known for his many achievements as the first Black man in several arenas, possibly as a film star, as a Broadway star, and as a well-known Vaudevillian. His success came on the heels of his popular minstrel performance.  The so-called “trauma porn” of today’s media along with several mainstream shows that center lighter skinned, proximate to whiteness tv shows are lambasted in Black spaces for pandering to the “white gaze” as opposed to making movies for Black people.

This is why these three random topics were connected in my chaotic mind. Sinners is what we get when the movie is made by and for its audience. Ryan Coogler is a deeply talented man with such complex and loaded ideas. Sinners explores this through the intersections of Black Americans and the Irish, as opposed to focusing on the diametrically opposed relationship between Black people and the KKK. Like, yes, the KKK is the ultimate villain of the story, but they don’t take up much space. Instead, there’s an exploration between the Smokestack Brothers of what it means to gain absolute freedom. Their violent yet altruistic means are unsuccessful, but never condemned as absolute evil. Remmick, the shapeshifting Irish vampire, is also never condemned as absolutely evil. Just like the brothers, he is misguided and searching for community. The violence he enacts on the people in the juke joint is horrible, and yet revivifying. He is a perfect foil for the brothers who shoot and steal and harm the people around them, despite their goal being to make and have community. I will admit Mary and Grace, being equally morally gray characters who ultimately cause damage to the people around them for selfish reasons, elicited a harsher response from me initially (we all have our moments of internalized misogyny, kids.) But they, too, were just looking for community and safety amongst the constant violence.

At no point do these people, including the Choctaw earlier in the movie do “good” or “evil” things. That nonsense is made clear as the Christianity floating around in the background and oppressing the people. When Remmick and all the vampires recite the Lord’s Prayer along with Sammy, the thesis of the movie is made clear- that is the language of the colonizer. Christianity does not allow any of the people at the juke joint any freedom or salvation. Sammy’s ultimately must reject his father’s values (because wtf do you mean your son has CLAW MARKS in his face and all you’re worried about is a guitar????) in order to survive.

All in all, this movie and its layered complexity breathed life into so many people. This is because it was damn good art. Every person involved put their foot into their performance, and I am deeply happy to see such a multifaceted, weird, and scary and BLACK film mean so much to so many in the world we are currently living in. It’s important to me as a writer and educator to see how the movie succeeds where art that came before it for thousands of years fails. The colonizer and his language and ideals are NOT the center of marginalized identity. While this may cause these people to be at odds with each other in many capacities (and this is something Coogler explores in both of his Black Panther movies) it is important to start seeing people for more than just the stereotyped, condensed, and watered down version of them that their oppressor invented and reifies every single day. We are multidimensional. We are complex. And we make damn good music.

Sinners (2025) starring Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Wunmi Mosaku, and Hailee Steinfeld is now available to stream on HBO Max.

Sources:

Jim Comer, Jim Crow Museum - Rite, Reversal, and the end of blackface minstrelsy

George Duckworth, Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment. Princeton University Press, 1952.

Esther Terry,  Performance Pedagogy and Blackface Minstrelsy Confronting Racial Performance History in the Classroom, https://ushistoryscene.com/article/performance-pedagogy/