Charlie Kirk: Sinners and a Sinnerman

By Roderick A. Ferguson

Charlie Kirk died on Wednesday September 10 th in a horrible assassination, and soon thereafter tales of his eminence filled the air. Conservatives and liberals alike talked about him in lofty terms. The columnist Ezra Klein said, “He practiced politics the right way.” California governor Gavin Newsome tweeted, “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” And President Donald Trump said, “Charlie was a giant of his generation, and an inspiration to millions and millions of people.”

Like the wave of a wand, Kirk’s death has washed from public memory even the
most recent events and headlines. Exactly a week before he was murdered, eight survivors stood outside the capitol and talked about the sexual abuse they suffered as girls by the financier Jeffrey Epstein and other powerful men. On June 14 th of this year, Minnesota Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortmann and her husband were killed in what is believed to be a politically motivated assassination. But it’s hard to remember these events when the public’s attention is so forcibly directed toward Mr. Kirk.

What’s even more extraordinary is how the nation is asked to ignore Kirk’s own
words in the name of an obligatory mourning. Where is the Charlie Kirk who talked of the “prowling Blacks” who “go around for fun to go target white people?” Where is the man who said of Black women professionals, “You don’t have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously?” Where lies the individual who argued, “MLK was awful… He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.” In the name of 2 condolences, we are asked not only to purge our memories of all these failings but to look upon him as an idol that requires our worship.

I can’t help but think of Ryan Coogler’s blockbuster film Sinners at this moment.
Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, the movie tells the story of two gangster
brothers—Smoke and Stack—and their cousin, the extraordinary musician Preacher Boy. After running jobs for Al Capone in Chicago, the brothers return home to Clarksdale. On the opening night of the juke joint, Preacher Boy plays a song so stirring that it draws an Irish vampire named Remmick to the club.

We’re first introduced to Remmick as Choctaw vampire hunters are pursuing him. Fleeing from the men, he lands on the doorstep of a white couple named Bert and Joan—his body burning with sores from a setting sun. Realizing he can appeal to the couple’s racism, he says: “They took my wife… Them dirty Indians meant to rob me. Don’t let ‘em hurt me no more.” Significantly, Remmick uses racist stereotypes about Native Americans to lure his way inside Bert and Joan’s house.

 The notion that Native Americans were torturers and rapists was foundational to European colonialism in this country. In fact, The chronicler and colonial officer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Edward Johnson recalled a well-wisher who in 1630 said to the Puritans as they boarded a ship in England called the Arabella, “[After] two, three, or four months spent with daily expectation of swallowing Waves and cruell Pirates, you are to be Landed amongst barbarous Indians famous for nothing but cruelty.” The idea of indigenous people as social and sexual savages was also a key part of the genocidal campaign against the Pequot nation, an operation that resulted in the mass murder of innocent people, the seizure of Pequot territory, and the founding of Connecticut. But 3 Remmick uses a different tact with the Black people at the juke joint. There, he tries to get inside by appealing to their sense of justice: “We believe in equality…,” he says. “Can we just-for one night-just all be family?”

 Remmick and his vampire progeny eventually make it inside. During the bloody attack, he reveals to Preacher Boy his own colonizing agenda: “I want your stories, and I want your songs. And you gone have mine.” We soon learn that Remmick is the child of colonial oppression himself. After Preacher Boy begins to recite the Lord’s Prayer, Remmick tells him, “Long ago, the men who stole my father’s land forced these words upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort.”

According to the historian Jane Ohlmyer, the English began invading Ireland in
1169. Discussing that moment, she says, “The colonists brought with them their
English language, fashions, culture, and commercial ways, which parliamentary
legislation privileged while outlawing Irish language and dress, together with Irish agricultural, social, political and cultural practices.” Invoking how most English people thought of the Irish, the eminent British historian James Anthony Froude said in 1874, “The Irish…were, with the exception of the clergy, scarcely better than a mob of armed savages.” Dreaming of the ways that he can make the Black people his, Remmick is the former Irish “savage” who has now become a white man.

After Kirk’s murder, the writer and scholar, Jeff Sharlet said of his political
prowess: “Despite his racism, he managed to find a perverse way of fooling a number of young Black people into believing him. He was an effective organizer.” We can situate Kirk’s work with Turning Point USA in the multicultural agenda of the right wing. In their book Producers, Parasites, and Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of 4 Precarity, Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph Lowndes discuss how Kirk and other far-right activists “paradoxically [conjoin] non-whiteness with invocations of white supremacy.”

In the version of the movie that I’ve imagined, an old Black person asks
Remmick, “How did you get this way? Who turned you and convinced you that bloodlust is the same as living?” Peering into the vampire’s face and marshaling an ancient training centered on change and redemption, the old person—without fear—leans forward a little bit and asks, “How did you come to think that this was your power rather than your degradation? I don’t know how you came by this affliction, but even you can lay this burden down.”

What if Kirk had built a legacy based on empathy rather than believing it’s “a
made-up new age term that does a lot damage?” What if he had dreamed of young people who were educated in creating opportunities for people less fortunate than hemselves, people who could look upon people’s differences with the wonder they deserve, rather than individuals who would be taught—like picnickers at a lynching—to delight in public executions? What if he had thrown off the burden of racial ideology and the encumbrance of whiteness? What possibilities might he have won for himself and others?

Just before Joan is made into a monster, she is holding a shotgun at Chayton,
the Choctaw detective. Warned by his colleague that nightfall is coming and knowing full well that she is gripped not only by racial supremacy but also by fear, Chayton’s parting remarks are delivered like a condolence: “May God watch over you and be with you.”