Racialicious Crush Of The Week: Pam Grier

By Andrea Plaid

Pam Grier. Courtesy: Image Stock Nice

What can you say about an actor whose blessed several generations of pop-culture afficianados–especially young Black girls–with indelible images of Black female badassery? Well, you know we at the R can wax rhapsodic and ecstatic about the folks we love…and this is Pam frickin’ Grier, so we’re gonna wax thankful–along with rhapsodic and ecstatic–for her life and legacy.

Grier, of course, is dubbed The Queen Of Blaxploitation, that genre of 70s action flicks full of low-budget aesthetics and love for Black communities dealing with the harsh realities of drugs, crime, urban disintegration (no thanks to “white flight”), and exploding racial tensions. Grier starred in twenty of them. In a 2011 Guardian interview she says this about that time in cinema:

People had only seen African-American women depicted a certain way in film and it was about time that changed…You know, I had to bump heads with a lot of men in the industry. They were not comfortable with showing a progressive black female in an action role. As a strong woman, I was seen as a threat. There was a fear that women would mimic me in real life. I remember certain people saying: ‘Oh, she’s taking our jobs, she’s castrating men’–as far as I was concerned, I thought: ‘We don’t need to walk behind you, we should walk beside you.

That “certain way” were spins on the usual stereotypes of Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire. The Blaxploitation protagonists are Black people fighting The System and its agents who wreck destruction on their fam and pals as well as the larger urban communities where they live; sometimes the family and friends serve as a proxy for the communities. As Lisa Jones Chapman says in her own ain’t-gonna-lie ode to what Grier reigns over in her 1994 Generation X classic, Bulletproof Diva:

Of course these films are “negative image” superfests. All we do in these movies, and by inference life, is sell drugs, sell our bodies, and shoot each other. For home-video releases, they should come with labels. “Warning: This film contains oppressive images of blacks that may be unsuitable, unpleasant, and downright unfit for some viewers.”

In their own contorted way, roles like Cleopatra Jones and Foxy Brown raised Hollywood’s threshold of black female visibility. Whatever you say about Cleo and Foxy, they are not shuffling mammies, teary-eyed mulattoes, or boozy blues singers. They talk back. They are political in that they are ridding “the community” of drug slavery and corruption. They take the law into their own hands (vigilantes Foxy and Coffy) or they are the law (special narcotics agent Cleo). Get Christie Love!, a supermama spin-off that ran for one season in 1974, starred Teresa Graves as television’s first black female cop.

Despite the confines of the genre–dim-witted plots and motivations, racial stereotypes, and slaphappy nudity–these actresses have moments of transcendence, of “attitudinous” rebellion; moments where they win the image war. (84-85)

And, as quiet as it’s kept, these same films also saved a Hollywood studio from bankruptcy.

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