Blaxploitation birthday should mark rethink, urges historian

A cultural historian at The University of Manchester says we should change our minds about “blaxploitation” films, exactly 40 years after the term was first coined by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Dr Eithne Quinn says that though films such as Shaft (1971) and Super Fly (1972) did contain sex, violence and racial stereotypes, what is rarely acknowledged is that they had more black workers on screen and behind the camera than almost any previous mainstream film productions in US history.

The term blaxploitation first appeared, in the wake of Super Fly’s release, as a Junius Griffin quotation in a Hollywood Reporter story called “NAACP Takes Militant Stand on Black Exploitation Films,” on 10 August 1972. Griffin was head of NAACP at the time.

The films, says Dr Quinn, were a major influence on ‘hip hop’ culture, typified by a silver tongued Oakland pimp called Goldie in one of the most popular ever blaxploitation films, The Mack (1973)....