'Power': The New Age of Blaxploitation
What if Starz's hit TV show and its surrounding universe aren't just a guilty pleasure? We're exploring how the successful series carries the legacy of Blaxploitation into the modern era—flaws and all.
Image property of Starz.
Truth be told, I thought I was too good for Power. Everything I'd seen—every clip, meme, tweet—made the show look like some gaudy, melodramatic show that relied on sex, violence, and basic, familiar Black tropes for viewership. Despite its massive popularity, it still (and I say this with love) felt like the go-to show for guys whose favourite book was 40 Laws of Power or Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
All these things are true about Power—and they're also why I couldn't stop watching it. Enjoying Power (for me) just required acknowledging that its unseriousness is what makes it work. Just when you think it couldn't get more absurd, more brazen, more over the top, it does. And now it's getting its institutional flowers for it. Power is more than just a campy take on Black social realism—it's the spiritual successor and the closest thing we today have to Blaxploitation.
Blaxploitation is a very specific sub-genre of Black American film that came to a head in the post-civil rights, Black Power era of the '60s and '70s. It's often very formulaic: a driving funk soundtrack plays while a suave, impeccably dressed, impossibly masculine Black leading man (although sometimes a woman, like in Cleopatra Jones) is faced with an arduous task that forces him to traverse multiple different sides of his city and himself.
Sometimes, he's a conscious cop with a soft spot for Black Power, like in Shaft and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Sometimes he's a pimp with book smarts and street smarts, like in Super Fly and The Mack. But regardless of whether the leading man is cop, pimp, or pusha man, he is always presented as a confident, stoic, hyper-intelligent, hypersexual being in the midst of a chaotic urban landscape dominated by the iron fist of 'the man'.
Blaxploitation confidently presents themes of masculinity, sex, violence, and self-determination—depicting Black characters with an agency and edge that had never been seen on screen before that era.
"The total picture is important… you have to understand that in the early 1970s and late 1960s, they were still siccing dogs on Black people… more than ten Blacks on a corner constituted a riot, so it was time to call out the dog squad. So there was no way of fighting back," said Blaxploitation action legend Fred Williamson. "So what we brought them at the time was a guy who won the fight. When the smoke cleared, they were still standing. There wasn't no butlers. There wasn't no porters. There wasn't no shoeshine guy."
Williamson describes the power, agency, struggle, and peril—the profound multiplicity that lies at the core of Blaxploitation and now Power. Courtney T. Kemp, who created the franchise, essentially said it herself.
"I wanted to ask a question: What did it mean to be a Black man in America after Obama was elected? … What would it mean if you'd been raised with the idea that a Black man could never be president, to find out that was a lie?" she told The Los Angeles Times in 2020.
"And so I created James St. Patrick, a brilliant, self-educated man with no jump shot and no mixtape, a man who believed that his only way out of the hood was to sell the very substances that destroy it," Kemp continues. "Ghost was a hero for the post-Obama era, a Black man with the money and the freedom to tell his own story. For better or for worse."
Kemp's description of her now iconic James "Ghost" St. Patrick holds the essence of the Blaxploitation protagonist. Someone with enough swagger to successfully cut his teeth in the business world while simultaneously keeping a foot in the underworld, with enough confidence to look "the man" in the eye and tell him to fuck off.
For characters like Shaft, Priest and Black Dynamite, that was the White man, or the system, or literally Richard Nixon. For Ghost, it was Simon Stern and the greater organised crime apparatus. At the same time, some may note that Power's cast reflects a modern, post-racial New York that blurs the racial hierarchy between White, Black, and Latino, which was also a key aspect of Blaxploitation. Protagonists often manoeuvred through multiracial cities and looked powerful White men in the eye the same way Ghost and Tariq do in Power.
Ghost is basically an updated, glamorised version of Youngblood Priest, the silk-pressed protagonist from Gordon Parks Jr.'s Super Fly. Priest is a stylish, confident coke dealer (addict) with a real mean streak. Within the first 15 minutes of the film, he's threatening to put a dealer's wife on "whore's row" because he wasn't selling enough coke for him.
Quoted excerpts from Super Fly (1972):
Youngblood Priest: "I'm tryna give you a chance…if you don't get me my money toNIGHT, I'll put your girl out on Whore's Row!!"
Fat Freddie: "Listen Priest, that's my wife!"
Youngblood Priest: "So WHAT??!"
An often angry, emotional, hypersexual, 'too smart for the streets' drug dealer desperate to get legit who keeps a White woman around while taking his inner turmoil out on himself and his own community? Ghost is Priest, Priest is Ghost.
And his wife Tasha—smart, able, and motivated rather than static—is reminiscent of many of the women of Blaxploitation. While much has changed since the term's first inception, Power presents a Blackness that is often morally ambiguous and self-contradictory—something that defined the Blaxploitation character, and something the genre often received a harsh rebuke for.
In the late 1970s, the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the National Urban League formed a literal Coalition Against Blaxploitation because the genre merely exploited the same negative stereotypes about Black Americans that they had spent the entire Civil Rights Era fighting against.
Hence the issue with any kind of Black social realism (à la the 2023 movie American Fiction): does depicting Black people in often unappealing, unflattering situations that often still are realities for Black people—squalor, violence, hedonism—have a net negative impact in our perception as a whole?
Addison Gayle, who was a pretty chill Black literary critic who advocated for a more Afrocentric aesthetic, levied his own criticism on the genre:
"The best example of this kind of nihilism/irresponsibility are the Black films," he wrote. "Here is freedom pushed to its most ridiculous limits; here are writers and actors who claim that freedom for the artist entails exploitation of the very people to whom they owe their artistic existence."
Promotional still from Power. Left to right: Kanan (50 Cent), Tommy (Joseph Sikora), and Ghost (Omari Hardwick). Image property of Starz.
This freedom that Gayle opines—the freedom for Black characters to be evil, to be worldly, to be heroes and anti-heroes—is the exact freedom that Kemp harnesses with Power. "A Black man with the money and the freedom to tell his own story. For better or for worse."
The Power universe faces many of the same questions and critiques surrounding identity and representation that the Blaxploitation genre did, and it will likely continue to as its universe expands and as Michael Rainey continues to mature and grow as a leading man. Is there an absurd plot and often eye roll eliciting dialogue? Yes. Does it depict Black people in ways that may make Addison Gayle and the SNCC elders roll in their graves? Absolutely. But Power, like Blaxploitation, allows subjects to be neither good nor evil—it lets them simply be.
"A prohibition against criminal Black characters comes from the fear that White people will think that's all that we are," Kemp said in that same Los Angeles Times interview. "But to me, the victory is not 'good' or 'holy' or somehow 'better'. The goal is complex, complicated and therefore equal."
Recommended Blaxploitation Films and Spiritual Successors:
Shaft (1971)
Super Fly (1972)
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970)
Black Dynamite (2009)
The Mack (1973)
They Cloned Tyrone (2023)
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971)
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988)