blaxploitation

Junius Griffin, president of the NAACP's Beverly Hills-Hollywood branch, coined "blaxploitation" in 1972 to complain that Hollywood had found a Black audience and was selling it back its own stereotypes. By then it was already the business: MGM was close to bankrupt when Gordon Parks shot Shaft for about half a million dollars in 1971, and the film brought back around thirteen million and told every other studio there was money in this. Melvin Van Peebles had proved a year earlier that none of that money was required. No studio would finance Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, so he shot it himself in nineteen days on a loan from Bill Cosby; his character kills the two cops sent to make him a scapegoat for a killing he had nothing to do with, and spends the rest of the film staying ahead of the manhunt that follows. The audience Griffin was describing kept paying for exactly that story, and Jack Hill built Coffy on it longer than anyone: a nurse who spends her days on hospital shifts and her nights hunting the dealers who hooked her younger sister, doing to the underworld what Shaft had already shown a studio there was money in filming. You watch someone win in a city built to stop them.

Distinguish from New Hollywood is the simultaneous mainstream revolution — white auteurs in studio infrastructure. Blaxploitation operated outside that system, in lower-budget independent production, with Black audiences as the primary market. Both movements shared the era's gritty urban aesthetic.