Reddit mentions of Negrophobia: An Urban Parable : A Novel

Describe how this film is , on it's own merit, with no black peer films, seeing as though it had none at the time, exploiting anything.
You'll have to offer something in the way of a debate if this is to be considered a debate.
1971. No other contemprary black films exist. Who or what could Melvin or the film possibly be exploiting? It has more in common with Cassavetes films than it does with 90% of blaxploitation films. [See: ''Shadows'' ] It's just honest independent film making, with zero expectations of even getting to an audience, forget exploiting this non existing audience. No one thought it would be received and shown in theaters.
Being an all black film does not make it ''exploitation''.
Here's another black independent film that also has zero to do with ''exploitation''.
Love Your Mama - 1990
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76Y_sIJVdcw
Black directors can make non exploitation films you know.
Spike Lee's first film is certainly not exploitation either. His film ''School Daze'' certainly is, as he aimed for a black audience with insider joke stereotype characters. He knows the difference.
My friend Darius James wrote a book on Blaxploitation film .
https://www.amazon.com/Thats-Blaxploitation-Roots-Baadasssss-All-Whyte/dp/0312131925
$4. You should get a copy of that and also his blaxploitation masterpiece novel too.
https://www.amazon.com/Negrophobia-Urban-Parable-Darius-James/dp/0806512938/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
'' Mikel J Koven in Blaxploitation Films: despite Van Peebles’ claim that the film was rated X due to the film’s unrelenting realism, this his “all-white jury” wanted to suppress the ideas of the film, the truth is more banal - the film is more pornography than Blaxsploitation. Conventional wisdom on the film (i.e. Film and Media Studies folk) like to note that the film’s box-office success indicates that it spoke to a contemporary black audience. It strikes me that the $1.5 million it made domestically was due more to curiosity about the sex in the film, than an engagement with the socio-politics of it...''
''Van Peebles is writing:

'...a Cezanne orange isn't like any other orange. And it only makes sense in the image itself, in the visual, the actual visual. It’s not literature, its painting. Some of the heaviest cats who have ever been in cinema defy description in purely verbal story line terms. Just as an orange only gives us the vaguest inkling of a Cezanne orange until we see it, verbal descriptions of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights or Kurosawa’s MacBeth don’t begin to touch the cinematic dimensions of the films themselves, no more than a concert can encompass a novel by Richard Wright. But words are cheap, like they say, and film’s expensive. So we continue to try to make one medium do the work of another. The cinematic qualities in American films are usually by-products because an American film is usually literature first...'

Darius James in That’s Blaxploitation calls Sweetback an ‘urban visual-poem’ (page 8) and this seems to me a good way to understand the film. It is pointless comparing Sweetback to studio produced blaxploitation fodder like Shaft (1971, directed by Gordon Parks Senior) or more recent work by Afro-American directors like Melvin’s son Mario Van Peebles, the real line of development lies elsewhere (and not just in the 1920s black American director Oscar Micheaux as both Melvin and Mario Van Peebles might have you believe). Stan Brakhage has something to do with this, as does Jack Smith and also George and Mike Kuchar. Van Peebles’ nearest contemporary is not Gordon Parks Junior (great as his 1972 cocaine actioner Superfly undoubtedly is) but John Waters, the maverick director responsible for kitsch classics like Mondo Trasho (1969) and Pink Flamingoes (1972), prior to his partial absorption by the studio system. While not quite a totally out of the closet, in your face and up your ass, screaming queen, Van Peebles is no shrinking violet when it comes to polymorphous cinematic perversity. An obsession with sexual transgression and gender confusion is something he shares with Smith, the Kuchar brothers, Warhol, Morrissey and Waters.''
http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/rated-x-all-white-jury
....
http://www.waxpoetics.com/blog/features/articles/thats-blaxploitation/