What ‘Sinners' And Juneteenth Reveal About America's Delayed Reckonings

Forbes

4 hours ago

Michael B. Jordan attends the European premiere of "Sinners" at Cineworld Leicester Square in ... More London, England.
This Juneteenth, AMC theaters across metro Atlanta will screen Sinners and preview 40 Acres, two scalding Black films that weren't made to entertain but to indict. Both films boldly probe the costs of silence, the aftermath of racial betrayal and the impossibility of justice arriving on time. AMC's decision to offer discounted screenings is part marketing, part reckoning—a nod to the uncomfortable truth that Juneteenth remains unfinished business.
There's something quietly unnerving about watching Ryan Coogler's Sinners on Juneteenth—not because the film misreads the moment, but because it affirms a truth the holiday itself has always carried: in America, freedom is rarely immediate, and justice almost always arrives late. Sinners premiered to critical acclaim and commercial success earlier this year, grossing $362 million worldwide, making it the eighth-highest-grossing film of 2025.
Today, AMC theaters nationwide are offering $5 screenings of Sinners and the post-apocalyptic thriller 40 Acres as part of their Juneteenth programming. This is not a coincidence but appears to be a quiet act of curation since both films address the consequences of freedom that was promised but never fully delivered.
In Sinners, Michael B. Jordan portrays twin brothers returning to the Mississippi Delta after serving in World War I, backed by Northern ambition and just enough capital to open a juke joint. They've outrun the trap of sharecropping, but what greets them back home is more sinister than poverty: white vampires offering eternal life on the condition of total submission. It was a different kind of bondage—one with better marketing but the same brutal terms.
The metaphor isn't subtle, nor should it be.
The fact is, Sinners is not about sin in the religious sense but more about America's most significant secular violation: its refusal to face itself. The plot is intimate but also represents a modern political parable of what happens when accountability is delayed so long that it begins to feel like mercy. If that sounds familiar, then it should because that's what Juneteenth is: a national lesson in the cost of delay.
On June 19, 1865, two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Union troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved people they were free. In the gap between law and emancipation, white landowners reaped profits, and Black families remained in bondage, unaware of the paper promises made in Washington. Freedom, technically granted, was functionally withheld. And the aftershocks still inform the framework of our economy, legal system and cultural memory.
A Juneteenth flag flies on a float during the 45th annual Juneteenth National Independence Day ... More celebrations in Galveston, Texas.
This pattern of delayed justice didn't end with emancipation but became ingrained in the framework of American policymaking, where the distance between what's promised and what's delivered often benefits those already positioned to win. Take housing. The GI Bill, often praised as a cornerstone of the American middle class, largely bypassed Black veterans. The Federal Housing Administration underwrote millions of home loans in the 20th century, just not in Black neighborhoods. Redlining wasn't a policy failure—it was a policy, full stop. The consequences are measurable: the racial wealth gap today remains nearly as wide as it was in 1968.
Coogler has called Sinners a tribute to his Uncle James, a Mississippi bluesman who passed away during the filming of Creed. That lineage pulses through the film's juke joint scenes, where music, memory and defiance converge. And this is where the film's business lessons become most pointed. The juke joint that Jordan's characters establish is an ecosystem that controls space, talent and revenue streams. They've created what economists call 'economic sovereignty': the ability to generate wealth within their community rather than simply participating in someone else's.
Discounted tickets and celebratory panels are nice. But reckoning demands more. It demands that we interrogate the original harm and the infrastructure that made it possible. That's partly why AMC's decision to screen Sinners and 40 Acres is so powerful: these films refuse to let America look away. 40 Acres—a pointed satire—revisits the failed promise of reparations with razor-sharp wit and historical fluency. It reminds us that the unpaid debt is not just financial but political and very much still on the books.
J. E. Clark, a Black business owner, stands in his pineapple farm in Eatonville, Fla., 1907.
For today's business leaders, the lesson isn't abstract. The companies that will define the next decade are those building new systems rather than retrofitting old ones, and the most successful diversity initiatives follow similar logic by not trying to make exclusionary systems more inclusive but creating inclusive systems from the ground up.
AMC's $5 Juneteenth screenings represent more than a programming strategy; they're a recognition that liberation requires economic accessibility. But the real power of pairing Sinners and 40 Acres lies in their shared vision, one that recognizes that authentic freedom isn't granted by existing institutions but created despite them.
A century and a half after Union troops reached Galveston, that choice between accommodation and self-empowerment remains the defining challenge for anyone who is serious about justice. The vampires in Coogler's film promise eternal life through submission. The freed choose mortal struggle through self-determination, and in boardrooms, classrooms, and ballot boxes, that same choice presents itself. The question is no longer whether freedom is possible—but whether we're brave enough to insist on it.