For a white woman born midway through the genre’s top years, I have a serious fondness for blaxploitation films. I think it was started when a college roommate was obsessed with Superfly and “Theme From Shaft.” But I don’t think she ever watched much of it. Mostly Original Gangsters, really, and I think she mostly thought the whole thing was funny. But in time, I started actually watching the movies, and certain issues aside, I have become very fond of them.

One of the things I like about them is that, to a certain extent, they allowed for stars like Pam Grier. She was of course outweighed by the hard-drinking, two-fisted men of the genre, goodness knows, but there were also more than a few fierce women who held their own and wouldn’t have taken any of John Shaft’s guff.

Of course, there’s also the problem that Foxy Brown, in order to take down mobsters, had to pose as a prostitute. Blaxploitation films could never quite get all the way away from that sort of thing, because of course that was what they drew upon—the attitudes of what life was “really” like for inner-city black people in the ’70s. Or other stereotypes, come to that; in Scream, Blacula, Scream, she plays a voodoo priestess with the power to defeat the African vampire Mamuwalde, known as Blacula.

Tarantino gets a lot of credit for reviving Grier’s career, but I’m not sure that’s fair. For one thing, in the year before Jackie Brown came out, she had already appeared in three movies of which I’m certain two were cashing in on the nostalgia factor. (I haven’t seen Escape From L.A.) For another, the consistency of her work has never really changed. She isn’t starring much anymore, but that didn’t change after her single movie with Tarantino, either.

For all Pam Grier starred as voodoo priestesses and women posing as prostitutes and so forth, at least blaxploitation let her star in movies, not a thing Hollywood in general has allowed for black women. Not in the ’70s and not since. I’ve tried to keep a certain amount of diversity in this column, because there’s more to the entertainment industry than white people, but the lists I get of people I “totally need to get to soon” tends to be heavy on old white guys. The one thing you have to admit about blaxploitation was that it gave onscreen opportunities to people who didn’t fit that description. For that if nothing else, it’s a genre worth celebrating, and Pam Grier is one of the most notable people from the genre.