Vote with More Than Your Dollar: The Sacred Economics of Exchange
How Every Purchase, Post, and Pause Becomes a Prayer for the World We Want
Lately, I've been sitting with the spiritual weight of negotiation, what we give, what we get, and the systems we’re feeding with our “yes.” Watching Sinners only amplified what I’ve long felt in my bones: that every exchange - whether financial, energetic, spiritual, or communal, is a kind of prayer. A deal made. A threshold crossed.
In Sinners, exchange is everywhere. From the twin negotiating catfish and flowers, to Smoke helping a little girl ask for what she's worth, to supernatural beings who must negotiate entry into human lives. The film keeps asking: What are we trading? What do we value? It’s about much more than vampires and folklore; it’s about the soul of commerce, the sacredness of deal-making, and the moral terms of our transactions.
And that hits deep because those questions are the ones I’ve been asking for years.
We live in an economy of extraction, where your time, body, spirit, and attention are constantly in a state of negotiation. Most of us are entering into contracts unconsciously: the name-brand item we pick up without a second thought, the way we scroll past one local artist to buy from a corporation that exploited one, the quick fix that comes with a long shadow.
We forget: All of that is a vote.
You don’t just vote every four years, you vote every day with your dollar, with your attention, with your energy. We live not only in a capitalist economy, but in an attention economy. And when we forget our power in both spheres, we become easy prey for systems that rely on our silence and convenience.
What Sinners reminds us what so many Indigenous and African Indigenous Diasporic traditions have always known - every exchange has meaning, and when we stop paying attention, we start paying in other ways.
When Annie and her son call a spirit to the afterlife, they’re dressed in white, adorned with white flowers, the flowers negotiated into a deal earlier in the film. That’s not coincidence. That’s commentary. That’s culture. That’s spirit.
But it’s not just a cinematic metaphor. It’s a mirror.
And when I look in it, I see a society where:
Corporations pink-wash and green-wash and Black-wash our values just to get our money.
DEI gets rolled back after it was momentarily profitable.
Black creators were celebrated in 2020 and [quietly] sidelined by 2022.
Representation is confused with transformation.
Let’s be real: these companies didn’t suddenly discover a love for Blackness, queerness, or sustainability. They saw a market. They wanted the bag. And in many cases, they got it from us. Because we were tired and craving change. And because sometimes convenience feels like the only option.
But the truth is: our buying power is power. Our attention is power. And our dollars? They are deals. Every day we decide which systems we’re willing to feed, and which we’re willing to starve.
That’s why I say: vote with your dollar and your spirit.
When you spend, ask yourself:
Is this aligned with my values?
Is this a regenerative act or a consumptive one?
Who am I venerating by supporting this?
Because veneration isn’t just something you do at an ancestor altar. It’s in every “yes” you give. It’s in how you build your business, what labor you ask for and how you compensate it. It’s in how you say no to urgency, fast fashion, and underpaid service workers. It’s in your refusal to play the master’s game with the master’s tools.
And yes…it’s hard. We’re all moving through scarcity systems that were built to extract from us. But the lie is that there isn’t enough. Look around. There is food being thrown away. Clothes being discarded. Billionaires becoming trillionaires. The abundance is here - it’s just being hoarded. And every time we reclaim a little piece of our agency by supporting small businesses, paying our neighbors, growing our food, slowing down, we chip away at that hoarding.
We say: not like this.
And if Sinners teaches us anything, it’s that some deals are holy and others are hellish. The trick is knowing which is which. And remembering that we always have the power to choose.
So choose with your eyes open.
Choose with your spirit intact.
Choose like your freedom depends on it because it does.