Mackin’ Ain’t Easy

In American cinema, Blaxploitation is the film subgenre of action movie derived from the exploitation film genre that began in the late 1960s and flourished throughout the early to mid-1970s, consequent to the combined cultural momentum of the Black civil rights movement and the Black power movement, political and sociological circumstances that facilitated Black artists reclaiming their power of the representation of the Black ethnic identity in the arts. The term blaxploitation is a portmanteau of the words Black and exploitation, coined by Junius Griffin, president of the Beverly Hills–Hollywood branch of the NAACP in 1972. In criticizing the Hollywood portrayal or mockery of the multiracial society of the US, Griffin said that the blaxploitation genre was "proliferating offenses" to and against the Black community, by perpetuating racist stereotypes of inherent criminality. After the cultural misrepresentation of Black people in the race films of the 1940s, the 1950s, and the 1960s, the Blaxploitation movie genre presented Black characters and Black communities as the protagonists and the places of the story, rather than as background or secondary characters in the story, such as the Magical Negro or as the victims of criminals. To counter the racist misrepresentations of Blackness in the American movie business, UCLA financially assisted Black students to attend film school. The cultural emergence of the Blaxploitation subgenre was facilitated by the Hollywood movie studios adopting a permissive system of film ratings in 1968. Initially, blaxploitation films were Black cinema produced for the entertainment of Black people in the cities of the US, but the entertainment appeal of the Black characters and human stories extended into the mainstream cinema of corporate Hollywood according to David Denby, writing in 1972. Recognizing the profitability of the financially inexpensive blaxploitation films, the corporate movie studios then produced blaxploitation movies specifically for the cultural sensibilities of mainstream viewers. The movie-business magazine Variety reported the films Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) and Shaft (1971) as the mainstream blaxploitation films that followed the assimilation of blaxploitation into mainstream cinema, by way of the film Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970). Blaxploitation films were the first to feature soundtracks of funk and soul music.