Black Film’s Brilliantly Reparational and Excellently Blaxploitational Moment Will Be Bittersweetly Brief

This is just the true Blaxploitation renaissance, but — again, bittersweetly — better.

Had COVID-19 not imperiled the globe, multicultural and diversely representational cinema almost, once again, saved the movie industry. Instead, the latest — and arguably most brilliant — moments of Black onscreen excellence in fifty years leave the film industry in a bizarre stasis. The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned a Black mainstream film evolution that has served all masters well. Films have been both Afrocentric and Afrofuturistic, plus representing excellence in documentary-style and long-form mediums. Moreover, they’ve been historic and historical, too. But like the film industry does every time it leans upon Blackness for salvation, it never leads to Black cinema establishing itself as the movie industry’s traditions fade into obsolescence.

In the face of the present and future, recapping the past is noteworthy.

Due to white people in newly-purchased homes in suburban communities buying television sets, staying at home, and watching broadcast TV, the American film industry saw a 60-plus percent drop in revenue between 1940–1970. Frightened by this loss in revenue, the…