Reproduction of Racial Inequality in Sinners (2025)

Raga Riswanda

Abstract


This study examines how Sinners (2025) dramatizes racial domination through the vampire genre by organizing inequality as a structural condition rather than an isolated act of prejudice. The film is selected because it places Black cultural space especially music, communal gathering, and tradition at the center of conflict, allowing racial power to appear through both admiration and coercion. Using a qualitative film-text analysis, this research interprets key scenes through Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital, and field to explain how domination becomes embodied, how cultural value is targeted and seized, and how space is reorganized through boundary control. The findings show that racial inequality in Sinners operates through three interlocking mechanisms: (1) habitus as bodily recalibration and anticipatory restraint during intrusion, (2) capital as the capture and conversion of Black cultural gifts (especially musical talent) into resources for domination, and (3) field as spatial expansion and forced rule-change that collapses Black autonomy from within. Together, these mechanisms reveal racial reproduction as a repeated process sustained through symbolic legitimacy and cultural extraction. The study highlights how horror cinema can expose the everyday workings of racial hierarchy beneath the surface of inclusion.

Keywords


Sinners; Pierre Bourdieu; Racial Reproduction; Habitus; Capital; Field

References


Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–167. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700107078139

Anderson, E. (2015). “The White Space.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 1(1), 10–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/2332649214561306

Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, J. D. (1992). Chapter II, 4: Interest, Habitus, Rationality. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 115–139. https://books.google.com/books/about/An_Invitation_to_Reflexive_Sociology.html?hl=id&id=rs4fEHa0ijAC

Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters : on the surveillance of blackness. 213. https://books.google.com/books/about/Dark_Matters.html?hl=id&id=snmJCgAAQBAJ

Bujgoi, M. (2025). Film as a Reflection of Society: Analyzing Social Issues through Cinema. Hilaris Publisher., 16:01, 202.

Bultmann, D. (2024). Pierre Bourdieu’s relational theory of social inequality. Springer.

Cherid, M. I. (2021). “Ain’t Got Enough Money to Pay Me Respect”: Blackfishing, Cultural Appropriation, and the Commodification of Blackness. Cultural Studies - Critical Methodologies, 21(5), 359–364. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086211029357

Coleman, R. R. M. (2023). Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present (2nd Editio). Routledge.

Cramer, L. M., & Zimmer, C. (2023). Dossier: Spectacles of Anti-Black Violence and Contemporary Black Horror. Black Camera, 14(2), 319–363. https://doi.org/10.2979/blc.2023.a883820

Creswell. (2014). Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitave, and Mixed Method. Sage Publication Inch.

Dima Kagan, Mor Levy, Michael Fire, G. F. A. (2022). Ethnic Representation Analysis of Commercial Movie Posters. ArXiv. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2207.08169

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. (2014). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America. Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.

Erigha, M. (2021). Racial Valuation: Cultural Gatekeepers, Race, Risk, and Institutional Expectations of Success and Failure. Journal of Cultural Economy, 756–770. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaa006

Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press.

Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Sage.

Lafebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing.

Lamont, M., & Molnár, V. (2002). THE STUDY OF BOUNDARIES IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES. Annu. Rev. Sociol, 28, 167–195. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.28.110601.141107

Liam Clancy, T. M. (2022). Makem And Clancy. RTÉ Archives. https://www.rte.ie/archives/2022/0207/1278319-makem-and-clancy/

Loyal, S., & Quilley, S. (2017). The particularity of the universal: critical reflections on Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power and the state. Theory and Society, 46(5), 429–462. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9298-y

Omi, M., & Winant, H. (2014). Racial formation in the United States: Third edition. Racial Formation in the United States: Third Edition, 1–329. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203076804

Passeron, P. B. & J. . (1977). Reproduction in education, society and culture. Sage.

Pierre Bourdieu, Passeron, J.-C. (1990). Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. Sage.

Pierre Bourdieu. (1986). Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Greenwood Press.

Pierre Bourdieu. (1990). The Logic of Practice.

Pierre Bourdieu. (2001). Masculine Domination (R. Nice, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Race/Ethnicity – On‐screen in film, TV, and episodic content inequality in 1,800 popular films. (2025). USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Rogers, R. A. (2006). From cultural exchange to transculturation: A review and reconceptualization of cultural appropriation. Communication Theory, 16(4), 474–503. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00277.x

Schirone, M. (2022). Field, capital, and habitus: The impact of Pierre Bourdieu on bibliometrics. MIT Press Direct, 4(1), 186–208.

Sheldon Lyn, Jonathan Dunn, Nony Onyeador, A. Z. (2021). Why we need to tackle racial inequality in TV and film. World Economic Forum.

Sudarisman, Y. (2016). SASTRA SEBELAH: PERLAKUKAN FILM SEBAGAI FILM! Al-Tsaqafa: Jurnal Ilmiah Peradaban Islam, 13(2), 243–254. https://doi.org/10.15575/al-tsaqafa.v13i02.1975

Thapar-Björkert, S., Samelius, L., & Sanghera, G. S. (2016). Exploring symbolic violence in the everyday: Misrecognition, condescension, consent and complicity. Feminist Review, 112(1), 144–162. https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2015.53

Tisdell, E. J. ., Merriam, S. B. ., Stuckey, H., & Haidet, P. (2025). Qualitative research : a guide to design and implementation. 420. https://books.google.com/books/about/Qualitative_Research.html?hl=id&id=tRpCEQAAQBAJ

Turcios, M. A. (2023). Metaphors of extractive capitalism and fabulation in Nope. Afterimage, 51(1), 27–44.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Race Ethnicity and Education Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Online) Journal, 1470–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006




DOI: https://doi.org/10.31004/jele.v11i3.2429

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2026 Raga Riswanda

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.