Blaxploitation and Gangstas

Well of course there are certain differences between Blaxploitation and Gangsta films, starting with the characters. Blaxploitation depicted a variety of characters, who were usually on one or the other side of the law. In the Gangsta film, as the name suggests, the protagonists were usually gang members or hoodlums. A similarity in both genres is that the protagonists usually come from the ghetto or at least a black neighborhood, and feel oppressed and alienated by an overall racist white society. However, the Blaxploitation protagonists usually take matters into their own hands, and fight the white oppressors that try to oppress and exploit their people in their respective neighborhood, whereas the Gangstas rather fight each other for every little bit of turf or money. In this sense, in my opinion the Gangsta films capture the hopelessness of the ghetto and the social tensions created by hegemony and oppression in a far more realistic way than Blaxploitation films' unrealistic and overblown plots.