Beyoncé and Ryan Coogler: The Freedom to Speculate
What comes with thriving instead of surviving isn’t fast food and takeout multiple times a week. It’s the freedom to think. To breathe in. To breathe out. Dreaming of rest. Of wonder.
A Love Letter to Us: Beyoncé’s Radical Reconnection
Beyoncé spent so much time pouring out what she learned into her art. Lemonade and The Gift are love letters to Black Americans. They’re think pieces on Black families, our history, our roots. They show where the brokenness began and the reliance on God to save us. They remind us that we are all connected—not just through complexion, but through history. To each other. To our ancestors on plantations and our ancestors back in Africa.
Her work doesn’t just revisit the past—it reclaims it. It invites us to heal out loud. It invites us to reflect, to hold each other close in the complexity of love, betrayal, faith, and legacy. There is grief, yes. But there’s also glory.
Sinners and the Search for Radical Freedom
Ryan Coogler does something different in Sinners. It’s exploration, yes—but on freedom. The freedom that has been stripped from us since the beginning. Freedom of choice. Freedom to move. To wander. Religion helps us to be content, but it also controls us, filling us with fear and fairytales. What if we were allowed to do it differently? Not give it up completely, but decide how much of our lives it consumed? There’s no all-in or all-out.
Sinners takes us on a journey through the complexities of choice, autonomy, and the systems that try to strip them away. Where Beyoncé roots us in collective healing, Coogler presents a quieter, more internalized exploration—the kind that’s not just about fighting for what’s right, but wondering what’s possible when our choices are limited.
The characters in Sinners are caught between faith and liberation, questioning whether true freedom can exist inside a system designed to limit them. It introduces the idea of radical freedom—freedom not just from external control, but from inherited expectations. It’s not about rejecting faith or family, but reclaiming the power to choose how much of those institutions define us.
It’s the kind of freedom that’s both exhilarating and terrifying. It’s the ability to step outside the lines and breathe.
The Freedom to Flip the Coin
So, what did that teach me? Is one right and the other wrong? I don’t think so.
I think what’s happening is we’re seeing the freedom to flip the coin. To say it’s not all or nothing. It’s not a box—it’s a prism. A multidimensional, multilayered entity that exists in us all.
Being Black in America, being someone whose roots are here—whose grandmothers and grandfathers spent a third of their lives going to segregated schools and paying to vote—it’s not about rejecting the past. It’s about the ability to slow down and wonder. To explore every aspect of our identity with care and curiosity.
When Black artists are allowed to create for Black audiences, they’re allowed to tell stories of pain and suffering without it being trauma porn. When the lens through which art is born is curiosity instead of spectacle, the quality shifts. It deepens. It stretches.
Thank you, Beyoncé. Thank you, Ryan Coogler. For making me wonder what all is inside me.