Growing up in the early '80s, my heroes were not those found in comic books or in the sports world but, like many of my fellow "Generation X'ers," those I saw projected onto a movie screen.
Movies have replaced oral folk tales and literature in the last century as the new originator of mythical heroes. The visual appeal of Luke Skywalker, Rocky Balboa and Indiana Jones have replaced the oral musings of Robin Hood, Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes, who themselves have been introduced to recent generations through the medium.
I could identify with these heroes because they all had a strict moral code and the will to get the job done, they always got the girl and, last but not least, they were white.
I've always wondered what the experience of "hero worship" through motion pictures was like for children growing up as minorities in the American economic system. Did they look at these white heroes with the same awe that I did a decade ago?
Hollywood has never been willing to create credible heroes that were of Hispanic, Asian or African origins. Sadly enough, Hollywood's most popular achievements with minority heroes can be traced back to the "blaxploitation" films of the early '70s.
Sweet Sweetback's Badaasssss Song, Shaft, Superfly, Dolemite and Cleopatra Jones were all part of this very profitable genre. They all featured heroes who film historian Daniel J. Leab called the "superspade." These were usually black males who led violent lives filled with black women, white sex and fast cash.
These films equated the ghetto as a noble territory, the pimp as an anti-hero and women in general as nothing more than indulgent whores. The romanticized perception of a black world order these films projected appealed to black audiences in large part because the white man always got his due.
Shaft, easily the most popular of these films, starred Richard Roundtree in the title role, and as the theme song says, the "black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks." Backed up by Isaac Hayes's funky score, private detective John Shaft prowled the streets of New York with his turtleneck and leather jacket in tow in search of some action.
Excessively violent and needlessly sexist, Shaft set the standards that other films would imitate. Its enormous success helped rescue troubled MGM studios from bankruptcy and led to two sequels and a television series.
Shaft was directed by Gordon Parks, a distinguished black photojournalist who once worked for Life magazine. Many of the "blaxploitation" films were written and directed by black artists, yet produced and distributed by the white studio system of Hollywood. Hence, criticism from black writers of such films was enormous because they seemed to offer white-produced daydreams with no sense of reality-based triumph for black characters.
Although the genre died out in the mid-'70s, the legacy of such films can still be seen in action films as well as rap music today. Recent films like Action Jackson, Tougher Than Leather and the Wesley Snipes vehicles Passenger 57 and Boiling Point still rely heavily on the "superspade" stereotype. Rap stars such as Ices T and Cube have transported the pimp anti-hero into the modern gangster rap scene.
Yet directors such as Spike Lee, John Singleton and Charles Burnett have been able to tap into the realism of black life in their films. Their works have proved that heroes don't necessarily need lots of ammo to be valiant.
But it's still a scam. Hollywood is more than willing to pour millions into established white heroes like Schwarzenegger and Stallone yet rarely ever make films with minority heroes that transcend the low-budget, B-movie parameters. Minority heroes never become anything more than stereotypes in today's film world. It's just ironic that I got Luke Skywalker the Jedi as a child while someone else had to settle for Superfly the Pimp.
