Inspired by the film Sinners, this blog develops the concept of epistemic vampirisation within the context of Black-led or racially minoritised organisations to theorise the oppressive processes through which Black community knowledge is extracted, appropriated and repurposed. These processes, which I conceptualise as a form of vampirisation, simultaneously render Black-led organisations invisible and undervalued.  

The acclaimed horror film, Sinners, revolves around twin brothers returning to the 1930s Mississippi Delta to build a cultural juke joint rooted in Black music and history, only to be violently disrupted by a supernatural vampire presence drawn to the power of Black blues music and culture. The vampire functions metaphorically here, symbolising forms of extraction and appropriation. It is from this metaphor that the concept of epistemic vampirisation emerges. 

Epistemic vampirisation describes the processes linking structural conditions, organisational practices and discursive strategies wherein Black-led organisations are rendered structurally marginal, under-resourced, yet symbolically valuable for knowledge and social capital. In this blog, I discuss how epistemic vampirisation can be achieved through the institutional mechanism of tokenism, which is legitimised through the non-performative language of diversity and inclusion within the context of racial capitalism. In what follows, I outline how these processes work together. 

Previous research discussing tokenism has shown how racially minoritised groups or community organisations are often symbolically included in various institutions, settings, projects and other activities—not to achieve genuine equality, but to create the appearance of diversity or fairness while underlying inequalities remain intact (Childress et al., 2024). In this sense, Black-led organisations may be invited into advisory roles or consultations and/or positioned as representatives of “community voices.” However, this inclusion remains structurally constrained, as the decision-making authority stays within dominant institutions, limiting and at times hindering meaningful redistribution of power. Thus, tokenism provides the organisational mechanism through which access is granted but controlled, creating the conditions under which extraction can occur. 

Sara Ahmed’s influential work on the non-performativity of antiracism (Ahmed, 2006), explores how institutions such as universities apply antiracism strategies, declaring commitment to antiracism through policies and speeches. These ritualistic declarations allow institutions to present an image of progressiveness, where institutions “do not do what they say: they do not, as it were, commit a person, organization, or state to an action. Instead, they are nonperformatives” (p.104).  

Through acts of tokenism, institutions and organisations can use symbolic inclusion of Black-led organisations, often citing so-called partnerships with these organisations as evidence of change, to discursively (rhetorically) declare commitment through institutional rituals. These non-performative acts not only fail but most importantly reproduce the same institutional norms of inequities, protecting institutions and organisations from accountability and hence act as barriers to substantive forms of transformation (Hamed, 2022). Non-performativity, therefore, provides the discursive cover under which tokenistic inclusion is framed as meaningful transformation, while structural inequities remain intact and often reproduced.  

To understand how tokenism and non-performativity work together to produce and maintain epistemic vampirisation, it is important to situate these processes within the broader social context. Here I draw upon Cedric Robinson’s theory of racial capitalism (Robinson, 1983). Robinson (1983) argues that capitalism is inherently racialised and has historically relied on racial differentiation to organise exploitation and accumulation of wealth. Racial hierarchies are not incidental to capitalism but constitutive of it, shaping which populations are positioned as exploitable and how value is extracted from them. Within this framework, racially minoritised groups are rendered structurally available for extraction, wherein value is produced through unequal relations of power and dispossession.  

While most focus has been on the extractive nature of capital with regard to labour, extraction also relates to epistemic and affective forms of value, including culture, knowledge and social relations (Said, 1993). If, for Edward Said (1993), imperialism depended upon the power to narrate and control knowledge about the colonised, epistemic vampirisation names a form of epistemic imperialism in which Black knowledge is not simply excluded but actively sought out, mined, and repurposed within institutional agendas. Under the mask of supposed collaboration, inclusion and community engagement, Black-led organisations become sites of value production from which institutions derive legitimacy, insight and authority, while leaving intact the very inequities that structure these relationships.  

Confronting epistemic vampirisation demands a fundamental shift in how knowledge, power and resources are distributed. This shift should recognise Black-led organisations not as inputs into institutional processes, but as producers of knowledge whose autonomy, authority, and material conditions must be fully acknowledged and recognised.  

This also requires stronger forms of collective organising, strategic mobilisation and networking between Black-led organisations themselves. Building independent infrastructures of collaboration and support may help reduce dependency on dominant institutional structures within which epistemic vampirisation is (re)produced.