Page "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" Paragraph 23

Black nationalist poet and author Haki R. Madhubuti ( Don L. Lee ) agreed with Bennett's assessment of the film, stating that it was " a limited, money-making, auto-biographical fantasy of the odyssey of one Melvin Van Peebles through what he considered to be the Black community.

" The New York Times critic Clayton Riley viewed the film more favorably, commenting on its aesthetic innovation, but stated of the character of Sweetback that he " is the ultimate sexualist in whose seemingly vacant eyes and unrevealing mouth are written the protocols of American domestic colonialism.

" In another review, Riley explained that " Sweetback, the profane sexual athlete and fugitive, is based on a reality that is Black.

We may not want him to exist but he does.

" Critic Donald Bogle states in a New York Times interview that the film in some ways met the black audience's compensatory needs after years of asexual, Sidney Poitier-type characters and that they wanted a " viable, sexual, assertive, arrogant black male hero.