Shared Struggles, Intertwined Futures: The Historical and Ongoing Bonds Between Chinese and Black Americans

— The Interwoven History of Chinese and African American Resistance

by Ma Siwei

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2024) is an ambitious genre-bending film that uses horror and musical elements to explore a little-known chapter of American history – the intertwined lives of Black and Chinese Americans in the Jim Crow-era Mississippi Delta. Set in 1932, this “sweaty, gory Southern Gothic horror musical” combines vampire folklore with historical reality to portray co-marginalized communities struggling under the yoke of white supremacy. The film centers on a Black family and their Chinese American friends who attempt to establish a safe haven (a juke joint) free from the era’s pervasive racism, only to face literal bloodsucking monsters as an allegory for racist violence. Beyond its chilling genre trappings, Sinners offers rich sociological insight. It situates Black and Chinese characters as partners in survival and resistance, reflecting the real history of solidarity and tension between these groups.

This review provides a detailed plot summary of Sinners and analyzes its sociological significance in context. It examines the historical backdrop of Chinese-Black relations in the Deep South, the film’s critique of white supremacy as a force devouring communities of color, and the ways Black-led Civil Rights struggles paved the way for Asian American advances in citizenship and education. Critical responses to Sinners are incorporated throughout, alongside reflections from Eileen Huang’s public letter “To the Chinese American Community,” which urges Asian Americans to confront anti-Black racism and recognize shared struggles. Finally, the review concludes with thoughts on how younger Chinese Americans today are embracing solidarity with other marginalized groups – a generational shift that Sinners’ ethos poignantly amplifies.

Jim Crow Delta: Chinese and Black Survival in History

The unlikely collaboration between Black and Chinese characters in Sinners is not a mere fantasy – it is rooted in the real history of the Mississippi Delta. During the Jim Crow segregation era, Chinese Americans in the Deep South occupied a tenuous “in-between” status in a fiercely biracial society. White Mississippians initially classified the Chinese on the same low social rung as Black peoplemshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov. Barred from the privileges of whiteness but not enslaved like African Americans had been, the Chinese had to develop unique survival strategies to navigate this racial hierarchy. One key strategy was economic: many early Chinese immigrants in Mississippi became small merchants, opening grocery stores in Black neighborhoods. Historical records show that after Reconstruction, Chinese laborers were recruited to Mississippi to replace freed Black slaves on plantations, but “working on a plantation did not produce economic success” for themmshistorynow.mdah.ms.govmshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov. Instead, by the 1870s some turned to running humble shops that sold necessities to Black sharecroppers and laborersmshistorynow.mdah.ms.govmshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov. These “Chinese groceries” were often tiny shacks carrying basics like meat, cornmeal, and molasses, serving a clientele of poor Black families in plantation countrymshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov. In Sinners, the character Bo Chow exemplifies this history: he “operates a grocery catering to Black customers in Clarksdale”, having found a niche meeting the needs of the Black community. Meanwhile, his wife Grace running a store for whites across the street mirrors how some Chinese sought any foothold in the white economy as well. This dual arrangement underscores the tightrope Chinese walked – needing Black patronage to survive, yet aware that catering to white customers could confer a degree of protection or status in the segregation order. The Emancipator’s review of Sinners astutely notes that the Chow family’s “proximity to Whiteness enables their navigation of Jim Crow’s codes” – by splitting their business into separate white and Black establishments, they obey the letter of segregation while maintaining connections in both worlds.

Another survival strategy – and a profound human connection – emerged through interracial relationships. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinese immigrants in Mississippi were overwhelmingly male (female immigration from China was severely limited by racist laws, as discussed below). These Chinese men often lived among Black neighbors and, in some cases, formed families with Black women. Historian James Loewen documented that by the early 1900s “as many as 30 percent of Chinese men in Mississippi were married to or living with Black women”. This statistic reveals that a significant minority of the Delta Chinese community built intimate ties with African Americans despite the strict taboos of the Jim Crow South. Sinners subtly alludes to this phenomenon through its characters and casting. The presence of mixed-heritage figures like Mary – a woman of part-Black ancestry who can pass as white – hints at the legacy of those Black-Chinese unions (though Mary’s backstory is not fully detailed, the Emancipator suggests her “biblical name juxtaposed with overt sensuality” intentionally invokes the mixed-race trope common in Southern Gothic literature). In historical fact, children born to Chinese-Black couples were usually absorbed into the Black community, since the racist “one-drop rule” would classify them as Black, and anti-miscegenation norms prevented their acceptance as Chinese or white. Contemporary accounts from Mississippi newspapers reveal the racist anxieties swirling around these relationships. In 1904, one local paper warned of “the danger… that [the Chinese] would leave behind them a progeny known as Chinois, the mixture of Chinese and negro”. White supremacists feared the erosion of racial boundaries, yet these unions did occur, giving rise to multiethnic kinship networks. A case in point recorded by Loewen is the family of Wong On (also known as Charlie Sing): a Chinese immigrant who married a Black woman named Emma in 1881 and together they raised 13 children while running a grocery store in the Delta. The Smithsonian Magazine recounts how Wong On’s mixed-race descendants later sought to understand their dual heritage, reflecting on the “complex story about how the groups coexisted at a time when society positioned both communities against each other for survival”. In other words, even as Jim Crow laws sought to pit marginalized groups against one another, everyday people found ways to cooperate, whether through commerce, friendship, or marriage.

Legally and socially, Chinese Americans occupied an ambiguous middle ground in the Jim Crow South – “not the same social location as Black people,” yet undeniably “subject to the whims of a white-supremacist order” that kept all non-whites subordinate. The infamous 1927 Supreme Court case Gong Lum v. Rice made this clear. Martha Lum, a Chinese American child in Mississippi, was barred from attending a white school and told she must go to the Black school (or none at all). The Court upheld Mississippi’s right to exclude Chinese from white schools, effectively affirming that the segregation of “colored” races was not limited to Black and white, but a general principle separating whites from everyone else. Chinese parents like the Lums were thus forced either to send their kids to segregated Black schools or establish separate Chinese-only schools. This legal precedent underscored that under Jim Crow, Chinese Americans would receive second-class treatment – they were not enslaved, but they also were not accorded the privileges reserved for whites. Sociologist Violet Wu describes this status as a “race in-between,” noting that the Chinese were neither accepted as white nor relegated entirely to the Black caste, but rather floated in a confusing middle status within a biracial hierarchy. In practice, many Chinese chose to align their interests where they could. Some distanced themselves from Black people in hopes of gaining a modicum of white approval (for instance, by discouraging their children from interracial socializing or dating, as documented in 20th-century Mississippi Chinese communities). At the same time, the reality of daily life – living in Black neighborhoods, attending Black schools, serving Black customers – meant that Black and Chinese Mississippians developed a rapport and a degree of mutual respect at the grassroots level. Civil rights activist Unita Blackwell, reflecting on her youth in Mississippi, recalled that local Chinese “were kinder than white folks” in their treatment of Black customers. Sinners amplifies this historical truth by depicting Bo Chow and the Moores as genuine friends and business partners. Their relationship in the film is “rooted in business and mutual respect” – Smoke, Stack, and Bo love each other like family. The film’s multiracial juke joint thus represents a historically grounded vision of solidarity born of shared oppression. It is an aspirational vignette of what the Mississippi Delta’s cross-racial alliances could be, even under the long shadow of Jim Crow.

Co-Marginalization Under White Supremacy

By placing Black and Chinese American characters side by side against undead white oppressors, Sinners offers a powerful sociological allegory of co-marginalization. The vampires in the film are not subtle in their symbolism – they stand in for white supremacist violence that has historically terrorized communities of color. From the moment the pale, folk-singing trio appears, the threat is clear to the audience: this is the Klan in another guise, the “many-headed hydra” of racism that “devours Black and Brown communities” across generations. The Emancipator’s review of Sinners highlights how the film “offers a scathing critique of racism as a vicious, many-headed hydra” and portrays the “ever-present” threat of racialized violence, whether from literal Klan night-riders or the metaphoric vampires on screen. The choice to make the monsters Irish immigrants-turned-vampires (singing old-country songs and bearing old coins) is an interesting nuance – it suggests that whiteness itself is an invented tradition, drawing power from Old World hierarchies and yet willing to consume even those who were once oppressed (the lead vampire Remmick is hinted to have himself been a victim of colonial subjugation before adopting the role of colonizer/vampire). This aligns with a theme in the film: oppressive systems perpetuate themselves by turning victims into victimizers unless the cycle is broken. But ultimately, Sinners’ primary focus is the unity of Black and Chinese folks in the face of white terror.

Throughout the film, the Black and Chinese characters are shown as co-marginalized, meaning they occupy a shared space at society’s margins. They are bound not by identical experiences – the film acknowledges differences in their cultures and status – but by a common subjugation under Jim Crow. In Sinners, both groups are confined by segregation (illustrated by the Chows having to run dual stores) and both are targets of the KKK (the Klan leader sells the property intending to later unleash violence). This reflects sociological reality: while anti-Black racism was the driving force of Southern apartheid, other minorities were also oppressed under the same system of white supremacy. The film pointedly warns against any complacency or division among people of color. One reading of the vampire narrative is that it cautions communities of color about letting “whiteness in.” The Roger Ebert review notes that the way the vampires gain entry “feels like Coogler warning against the dangers of whiteness in spaces built for people of color”. In other words, the film suggests that only through solidarity and vigilance can marginalized communities maintain safe spaces; if they are seduced by the trappings of white power (as Mary was by the coin, or as Grace perhaps was by her partial inclusion in white society), they become vulnerable to being literally destroyed from within. The ghastly fate of the juke joint – a supposed refuge – once the vampires enter illustrates how racial terror has historically shattered Black safe havens (from the burning of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” in 1921 to the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963). Sinners compresses these themes into a single night of horror, making the abstract “stains of American racism” viscerally concrete on screen.

Critics have noted that amidst its genre thrills, Sinners never loses sight of this sociopolitical commentary. Robert Daniels writes that the film “makes bare the stains of American racism” even as it delivers vampire movie chills. Halimah Abdullah observes that Sinners indicts “economic and faith-based exploitation” alongside its supernatural storyline. Indeed, the film portrays how exploitation takes multiple forms: sharecroppers are economically bled by unfair wages (plantation scrip and debt bondage are depicted, echoing how Delta Slim recounts a chain gang scene and a lynching, connecting them to blues music), while the community’s spiritual expression (the juke joint’s joyous communion) is co-opted and violated by the vampires. The “insatiable appetite of White culture vultures” is a theme Sinners explicitly tackles – the white vampires literally crave the magic and vitality of Black culture (they come drawn by the music to steal its power). As a Black Nerd Problems review put it in more colloquial terms, Coogler “display[s] the monsters that work beyond lifetimes to acquire the magic we [Black people] hold,” and makes the audience “feel the undeniable draw of our power” even as we witness attempts to appropriate or extinguish it. The “monsters” here operate across generations – a nod to how white supremacy is a trans-generational monster that outlives individuals. But Sinners also suggests the converse: the strength of Black and Asian American communities likewise spans generations, rooted in ancestral resilience and cultural excellence.

By including Chinese American characters centrally in this Black Southern story, Sinners broadens the typical discourse on race in the South. It reminds viewers that American racism has never been simply a Black-white binary; other ethnic minorities have also been ensnared in the “many-headed” beast of white supremacy. In the Mississippi Delta, Chinese Americans were few in number but proved that “the South has never had just two racial groups”. The film’s multiracial juke joint is a microcosm of that plural South, and its destruction dramatizes how white terror was a threat to any and all who challenged the racial hierarchy. The solidarity shown by the characters – Blacks and Chinese fighting side by side by the climax – carries a sociological message: coalition is necessary for survival. No single minority group could fully withstand Jim Crow alone, but together there is a chance to resist and perhaps overcome (even if Sinners gives a bittersweet ending, with survival coming at great cost). The Emancipator article notes that Sinners ultimately posits “there is strength in community, united by purpose, though those bonds are made brittle by the racial politics” around them. In the film, that brittle bond almost holds – it is only broken by the extreme incursion of supernatural evil coupled with momentary human frailty. In reality, the bonds between Black and Chinese Southerners indeed bent and sometimes broke under the pressures of segregation and later societal changes. Yet the fact that Sinners portrays these bonds at all – and does so lovingly, as in the scenes of communal music and fellowship – is significant. It prompts a reevaluation of how we remember American racial history: not only as stories of conflict between whites and non-whites, but also as stories of interconnected struggles among the oppressed. As Eileen Huang writes in her open letter, “our liberation is intertwined with liberation for Black Americans, Native Americans, Latinx Americans, and more”. The film Sinners visualizes this very principle by entwining the fates of its Black and Chinese characters. In short, it sociologically frames Chinese and Black Americans as co-victims of white supremacy who have much to gain by seeing each other as allies rather than competitors.

Contemporary Reflections: Eileen Huang’s Letter and Chinese American Solidarity

While Sinners is set in the past, its themes reverberate in our present, especially within discussions in the Chinese American community about anti-Black racism and solidarity. In 2020, amid nationwide Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality, a young Chinese American writer named Eileen Huang penned a public letter titled “To the Chinese American Community.” In it, she directly challenged her elders on the “rampant anti-Blackness in the Asian American community” and called for unity with Black Americans. Huang’s letter serves as a modern parallel to the consciousness that Sinners tries to evoke through art. Both the letter and the film implore Chinese Americans to acknowledge that Black lives matter – and by extension, that Chinese lives matter too, precisely because the destinies of both groups are intertwined in the fight against white supremacy.

In her letter, Huang reflects on growing up hearing “relatives, family friends, even my parents” make disparaging comments about Black people – echoing a mentality of many immigrants who internalized the “model minority” myth and saw Black Americans as a group to distance oneself from. “They grow up in bad neighborhoods. They cause so much crime. I would rather you not be friends with Black people,” she recalls being told. This heartbreaking candidness reveals how some in the Chinese American community have historically bought into racist stereotypes, seeking approval from white society by disdaining other people of color. Huang summarizes the unspoken message she absorbed: “We are the model minority… We have little to do with other people of color; we will even side with White Americans to degrade them [Black people]”. This attitude, of course, is precisely what Sinners warns against through its narrative. In the film, Grace and Bo Chow have to navigate that fine line – they have friendships with Blacks but also a foot in white society. The tragic events of the film (with Grace’s misstep and Mary’s downfall) suggest the perils of prioritizing proximity to whiteness over solidarity. Huang’s letter explicitly makes that point: she notes that many Asian Americans remained silent or neutral about anti-Black violence, even as they were vocal when Asians were attacked during the COVID-19 pandemic. She expresses deep disappointment in those Chinese Americans whose “silence on the murder of Black Americans has been deafening,” pointing out the hypocrisy of demanding justice for our own people but not for Black victims like George Floyd or Breonna Taylor.

Crucially, Huang emphasizes that anti-Black racism actually harms Asians too, because it upholds the same system that can turn against us. “Even when anti-Blackness is so closely aligned to our own oppression under structural racism,” she writes, many Asian Americans still fail to speak out. This is a powerful realization – one that Sinners conveys through its depiction of shared struggle. The film’s title, Sinners, may refer to the complex moral compromises people make to survive (e.g., Smoke and Stack’s criminal past, or perhaps the notion that everyone in a racist society bears some stain). But one could also interpret “sinners” biblically: as all those cast out of an Eden of equality into a fallen world of prejudice. In Jim Crow Mississippi, both Blacks and Chinese were treated as “sinners” who must be kept separate from the sanctified realm of whites. Huang’s letter flips the script by suggesting the real sin is anti-Black racism itself – and she calls on Chinese Americans to atone by joining the fight against it. Her call to action is unambiguous: “I urge all Chinese Americans… to seriously reflect not only on our own history, but also on our shared history with other minorities” and to recognize that “our liberation is intertwined” with theirs. This ethos of interlinked liberation is exactly what Sinners dramatizes via the literal intertwining of Black and Chinese lives facing the vampire onslaught.

Furthermore, Huang’s letter and the wider discourse in 2020 revealed a generational shift. Younger Chinese Americans, often educated in diverse environments and inspired by ideals of social justice, were far more likely to support Black Lives Matter and speak out against anti-Black racism than their elders. Sociological surveys and commentaries have noted a “generational divide” in Asian American attitudes: the younger generation is more inclined to see common cause with Black Americans, while older immigrants sometimes cling to prejudices or a strategy of non-involvement. This played out in families across the country, with young people writing letters, translating documents, and patiently explaining to parents why standing up for Black lives was both morally right and ultimately beneficial for Asians too. Huang’s open letter is itself a product of this moment – a Yale student reaching out (in both English and Chinese, as her letter was circulated in translation) to implore her community to overcome fear and bias. In one interview, Huang said she saw “a lot of people criticized me for speaking out about the Black community when it ‘does nothing’ for the Asian community,” but she countered that such views ignore the long history of Black-Americans helping advance Asian American rights. This backlash she faced only underscores how deeply some of the older mindset runs. Yet, just as in Sinners, there is hope in the new generation forging unity. The film’s hero at the end is Sammie – young, idealistic, and musically bridging cultures (recall his blues performance summoned Chinese dancers and African griots together). He survives to carry the light forward. In reality, young activists like Huang and many others (for example, the organizers of the “Letters for Black Lives” project in 2016 that provided multilingual open letters for Asian families) are carrying forward the light of cross-racial solidarity.

Black Civil Rights Activism and Asian American Advancement

One of the clear messages, both in Sinners and in broader historical analysis, is that Black American struggles for freedom paved the way for other minorities – including Asian Americans – to gain rights in the United States. The film is set in 1932, long before the modern Civil Rights Movement, but it foreshadows how Black resistance would ultimately dismantle legal segregation and benefit all. After all, we witness in the film a Black-led endeavor (the Moores’ juke joint) that, albeit fictionally, includes Chinese participation and offers a glimpse of an egalitarian community. That vision was deferred by Jim Crow and racist violence in the film (and in reality many such attempts were crushed), but by the 1950s and 1960s, Black activists would lead a nationwide push that finally broke Jim Crow’s back.

For Chinese Americans, the Civil Rights Movement was transformative. Eileen Huang’s letter emphatically reminds us that Asian Americans “owe everything” to Black Americans’ fight for equality. Prior to mid-20th century, Asians in America faced discriminatory laws at every turn. Chinese immigrants had been targets of exclusion since the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and even those born in America were often denied full citizenship rights under laws that reserved naturalization for “free white persons” (and later also persons of African descent). It was legal precedent and activism led by African Americans that finally overturned these barriers. Huang writes: “It is because of the work of Black Americans – who spearheaded the civil rights movement – that Asian Americans are no longer called ‘Orientals’ or ‘Chinamen.’ It is because of Black Americans, who pushed back against racist naturalization laws, that Asian Americans have gained official citizenship and are officially recognized under the law”. This is a historically accurate statement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, primarily victories of Black activism, ushered in a new era of legal equality. In 1965, race-based immigration quotas were abolished and policies were enacted that allowed Asians to immigrate in larger numbers and to become citizens, effectively nullifying the vestiges of Exclusion-era statutes. Even before that, in the late 1940s, Black civil rights attorneys working to dismantle segregation helped establish broader principles of equality that Asian Americans later benefited from. The Princeton University Department of African American Studies notes that Chinese Mississippians “were ultimately beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement. When desegregation came, their fortunes changed in school and business”. Indeed, Chinese children in Mississippi were finally allowed to attend white schools after integration, solving the dilemma that Gong Lum v. Rice had upheld decades earlier. Similarly, Chinese-owned businesses were no longer confined to segregated Black neighborhoods; they could expand and serve all customers on an equal basis after Jim Crow – a major economic boost that came “when desegregation came” as a result of Black-led activism.

Black activism also directly influenced Asian American activism. During the late 1960s and 1970s, inspired by the Black Power movement, Asian Americans (many of them college students or second-generation youth) began to organize politically as never before. They formed groups like the Red Guard Party in San Francisco (modeled after the Black Panthers) and joined in multiracial coalitions such as the Third World Liberation Front. Even earlier, African American leaders showed solidarity with Asian Americans in their struggles. A striking example, invoked in Huang’s letter, is the aftermath of the 1982 murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American beaten to death by two white autoworkers in Detroit who blamed Asians for economic woes. When Chin’s killers received a mere $3,000 fine and no jail time, both Asian and Black activists were outraged. Huang recounts how Black civil rights activists like Jesse Jackson physically stood alongside Chinese Americans in protest, even literally protecting Vincent Chin’s mother at rallies: “in all of [Lily Chin]’s footage, she is surrounded by Black civil rights activists… They guard her from news reporters…and later, they march in the streets with Chinese American activists, holding signs calling for an end to racist violence”. This moving real-life alliance illustrated that the fight against racism transcended individual communities – a Chinese American seeking justice could count on Black allies who understood that injustice for one minority is injustice for all. As Huang emphasizes, “we did not gain the freedom to become comfortable ‘model minorities’… by virtue of being better or hard-working, but from years of struggle and support from other marginalized communities”. In short, every advance that Asian Americans enjoy – from legal citizenship, to the ability to live in any neighborhood or attend any school, to the mere dignity of not being explicitly derided by racial slurs in officialdom – was achieved on the coattails of Black-led civil rights victories.

The film Sinners, while not explicating these later developments, resonates strongly with the theme of linked fates. It shows Black protagonists taking the lead in a struggle (albeit a fictional supernatural one) that also saves Chinese lives in their community, which can be read as a metaphor for how Black activism saved and uplifted Asian American lives in reality. When Smoke and Stack put their lives on the line to destroy the white vampires, they are in effect liberating everyone in the juke joint – Black and Chinese alike – from that terror. The coalition of Black and Chinese characters in battle dramatizes the ideal of what political theorist Claire Jean Kim calls “interethnic solidarity” against a common oppressor. It is no coincidence that Coogler chose to include his father-in-law’s Chinese ancestry inspiration in the story; Sinners implicitly acknowledges that Black history and Asian American history in the U.S. are deeply interconnected, much as Huang’s letter spells out in plain terms. “Our survival in this country has always been conditional,” Huang writes, reminding Chinese Americans that without Black Americans’ brave fights, we Asians would “still be called Orientals… live in even more segregated neighborhoods… be illegal aliens” and worse. The Civil Rights Movement, led by Black Americans, opened the door for the 1965 Immigration Act which allowed Asian families (like Grace and Bo Chow’s hypothetical descendants in Sinners) to become fully part of American society. Sinners honors that legacy by showing a precursor: a Black-led fight in 1932 where Chinese and Black fates are tied, foreshadowing the real alliances to come in the 20th century. It is therefore fitting that modern reviews celebrate Sinners as an inclusive story. One review noted the film “offers a historically anchored, inclusive view of the American South” in contrast to those who would whitewash the contributions of Black and Brown people. By highlighting the bonds between Chinese and Black Americans, Sinners helps ensure that the history of cross-racial solidarity – and the debt Asian Americans owe to Black civil rights struggles – is not forgotten by audiences today.

A Generational Shift Toward Solidarity

Chinese Lives Matter Too – the title of this review – is not a statement of competition with Black Lives Matter, but rather a call, in the spirit of Sinners, to recognize that the fates of marginalized peoples in America are interwoven. The film Sinners reminds us that Chinese Americans, like Black Americans, have suffered under white supremacist systems and that their struggles are historically connected. In the Jim Crow South, Chinese and Black communities each navigated oppression in different ways, yet found moments of alliance and mutual support. Those histories were long overlooked, but Coogler’s film brings them to life for a new generation. The sociological lesson it offers is that unity is our strength – a message that resonates strongly today.

In recent years, especially in the wake of nationwide protests against racism, there has been a discernible generational shift among Chinese Americans (and Asian Americans broadly). Younger members of the community are increasingly vocal about standing in solidarity with African Americans and other groups. They are rejecting the “model minority” isolationism that pits minorities against each other, and instead embracing a vision of collective liberation. We see it in activists like Eileen Huang; we see it in community initiatives where Asian Americans join Black-led rallies for justice; and we even see it in pop culture, where films like Sinners receive acclaim for celebrating “the understanding of our connectedness through cultural excellence”. Sinners has struck a chord with audiences and critics precisely because it bridges Black and Asian narratives. As one review rejoiced, “Sinners is every bit of generational slang that was and will be… once you see the film, you will understand the transcendent experience” that it delivers in connecting histories.

That transcendent experience is ultimately one of empathy across communities. By the film’s end, we mourn the losses of both Black and Chinese characters – their blood is shed together on the same floor. It is a haunting metaphor for how, in the real world, we have bled together (sometimes literally, as in wars fought side by side or hate crimes perpetrated by the same supremacists). But Sinners also leaves us with a note of hope: the blues rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” suggests that even after unspeakable tragedy, the flame of resistance and hope is not extinguished. In the audience’s mind, that light could represent the torch of solidarity passed from one generation to the next. Today’s young Chinese Americans are picking up that torch. They are remembering that Chinese lives matter – not in opposition to Black lives, but because Black lives matter and have mattered in securing Chinese Americans’ place in this country.

Thus, a new set of values is taking root: one that values cross-racial friendship, acknowledges shared oppression, and seeks shared liberation. We can see this as a restoration of a forgotten legacy – much like Sinners restored the story of Black and Chinese cooperation in the 1930s Delta. As Huang wrote in her letter, reflecting on both Asian and Black histories: “We did not gain the freedom… by virtue of being better… but from years of struggle and support from other marginalized communities”. The survival of Smoke, Bo, and Sammie in Sinners required each other’s support; so too has the advancement of Asian Americans been possible only through the prior struggles of Black Americans and others.

In conclusion, Sinners is more than just a film – it is an allegory of interracial solidarity and a critique of the forces that oppose it. Its academic significance lies in how it prompts us to re-examine a complex history of Chinese-Black relations and draw lessons for today. The film urges viewers to reject the false dichotomy that one group’s progress must come at another’s expense. Instead, it champions a vision where communities find strength in unity against the true evil: a system that would drain us all. As the generational tide shifts and Chinese Americans (especially youth) increasingly stand with Black Americans in calling for justice, the mantra “Chinese Lives Matter Too” finds its proper context – a compassionate, inclusive affirmation that in the struggle for equality, no marginalized group is alone. Sinners beautifully illustrates this interwoven struggle, and its resonance in our times indicates that audiences are ready to embrace a future in which, indeed, solidarity is the light that guides us all.