A St. Patrick’s Day Reminder: Ireland Was a Colony, Not an Empire
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I found myself perplexed recently watching a segment of the typically otherwise liberal online community insist—often belligerently—that Remmick, one of the antagonists in Sinners, should be interpreted as a colonial villain.
This framing seemed to take hold almost instantly in online discourse, despite the fact that the film’s director, Ryan Coogler, has explicitly said the character was not intended to represent a colonizer, nor to symbolize racist power structures or cultural appropriation.
Setting aside the filmmaker’s own explanation for a moment, what struck me most about the argument was something deeper: the insistence that the character’s Irish identity somehow fit neatly into the historical role of “oppressor.”
That claim reflects a remarkable erasure of Irish history.
During those conversations, it became clear that many people advancing this interpretation simply did not know the historical reality of Ireland or the experiences of the Irish diaspora.
