Black Power & Pulp: The Radical Legacy of Blaxploitation

Pop’s Art Theater and Griot Arts are proud to announce the 2026 installment of “Through the Black Lens,” an annual program centering on Black voices in film for Black History Month.

For this year’s series, every Wednesday and Thursday in February we’ll be taking a look at Blaxploitation films from throughout the genre’s heyday:

Was it exploitation, or empowerment?

The wave of Blaxploitation films that began in the 1970s, endlessly parodied and referenced, might seem on its face to be an exercise in shlock and poor taste. A spin on the slowly expanding list of exploitation genres, the films featured Black actors playing womanizing pimps, drug dealers, vigilantes and kung fu heroes fighting the powers that be. However, what started out as a vehicle to sell tickets to young black teens in the cities quickly became an artistic powerhouse intricately tied to the Black Power movement of the 70s, with an immense influence of American film even to this day.

The funky, pulpy nature of Blaxploitation films allowed Black creators to bring their culture and politics into the mainstream. Films like SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSSSS SONG and SHAFT incorporated direct Black Power language into their narratives with Marxist themes and ideas of solidarity, while later films like SUPER FLY and THREE THE HARD WAY softened those ideas from radical change to anti-capitalist and anti-racist resistance. The films, while problematic in their own right, served as a counter-example to pervasive misrepresentations of Blackness in Hollywood films, like the famous “Magical Negro” or “Helpful Mammy” archetypes. This was the first time since the race films of the early 1910s-1940s that Black directors were producing films with predominantly Black casts and crews within the Hollywood machine, and they were using the newfound platform to reclaim their agency and power to represent their own identity in the arts.

Soundtracks from funk and soul all-stars like Isaac Hayes, Curtis Mayfield, The Impressions, Earth Wind and Fire, J.J. Johnson, and Roy Ayers took the record stores by storm, popping up even today in DJ sets and Hip-Hop samples.

The genre was not without controversy, of course: accusations of aggravating racial stereotypes, excessive glamourization of drug and pimp culture, overt misogyy, and more were rampant – including from the NAACP, which actually coined the “Blaxplotation” portmanteau. And in reality, they weren’t wrong.

Despite this, the Blaxplotation genre is an important part of Black cinematic history – a moment in time when Black directors had mainstream audiences in a stranglehold that wouldn’t be replicated until the Black New Wave of the 90s. And truth be told, the films are fun as hell.