Pun Salad

In all these ways, the blaxploitation era created opportunities for Black artists and technicians that remained largely closed to them on television, but the films ignited a two-front war. From the outside, they faced condemnation from civil rights groups, who understandably accused them of projecting a distorted and demeaning view of Black life. Black protesters picketed showings of films such as Super Fly, waving signs that insisted "We Are Not All Pimps and Whores!" The movies defenders countered that the films also constituted a form of Black empowerment. The typical blaxploitation plot showed a confident, dynamic African American star ([Richard] Roundtree's Shaft or Pam Grier's Coffy and Foxy Brown) conquering a complex and dangerous urban landscape while attracting Black and white lovers alike. To the extent that white society touched Black life at all, it was in the form of corrupt cops and politicians and sadistic mobsters, who make the big money while dribbling crumbs to the Black pimps and drug dealers. When Pam Grier's heroic nurse, Coffy, outwits and kills a bigoted white drug kingpin, after first dispatching the corrupt white cops on his payroll, she portrays a form of black empowerment and retribution in the face of racism that Hollywood had rarely shown on-screen. Still, the case for blaxploitation films like Coffy as a form of social subversion was diminished by the fact that Grier also spent much of the movie with her top off and a good deal of her time tearing the tops from other prostitutes working for a "Super Fly"-like Black pimp and pusher who struts through the movie in a gold jumpsuit (until he's brutally murdered by the white kingpin).