Blaxploitation

Blaxploitation

Poster of the Blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
Years active	1970s
Location	United States
Major figures	Pam Grier Richard Roundtree Melvin Van Peebles
Influences	Exploitation film race film Black power movement
Influenced	Allen and Albert Hughes Spike Lee John Singleton Quentin Tarantino Hip hop culture

Blaxploitation is an ethnic subgenre of the exploitation film that emerged in the United States during the early 1970s, when the combined momentum of the civil rights movement, the Black power movement, and the Black Panthers spurred black artists to reclaim power over their image, and institutions like UCLA to provide financial assistance for students of color to study filmmaking. This combined with Hollywood adopting a less restrictive rating system in 1968.^[1] The term, a portmanteau of the words "black" and "exploitation", was coined in August 1972 by Junius Griffin, the president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood NAACP branch. He claimed the genre was "proliferating offenses" to the black community in its perpetuation of stereotypes often involved in crime.^[2] After the race films of the 1940s and 1960s, the genre emerged as one of the first in which black characters and communities were protagonists, rather than sidekicks, supportive characters, or victims of brutality.^[3][clarify] The genre's inception coincides with the rethinking of race relations in the 1970s.

Blaxploitation films were originally aimed at an urban African-American audience but the genre's audience appeal soon broadened across racial and ethnic lines.^[4] Hollywood realized the potential profit of expanding the audiences of blaxploitation films.

Variety credited Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song and the less radical Hollywood-financed film Shaft (both released in 1971) with the invention of the blaxploitation genre, although Cotton Comes to Harlem was released the prior year.^[5] Blaxploitation films were also the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music.^[6]