XiaNaphryz
LATIN, MATRIPEDICABUS, DO YOU SPEAK IT
Interesting article in today's SF Chronicle:
Black belt jonesing
The history of American martial arts culture is rooted in the black community -- and so, too, is its future
By Jeff Yang, Special to SF Gate
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
For fans of the 1984 Pat Morita and Ralph Macchio blockbuster "The Karate Kid," the spy photos that leaked out of China last month were like a crane-kick to the heart.
The half-dozen blurry pics, snapped from the forest surrounding Hubei Province's Wu Tang Mountain, showed for the first time Jaden Smith, the young martial-arts loving son of box-office superstar Will Smith, in his role as "Dre," the protagonist of the film's forthcoming remake -- due in theaters next June. (Meanwhile, action icon Jackie Chan is waxing on as the story's wise but reluctant master.)
Online commenters were outraged by the images: Andrew Mack of the genre film fansite Twitch even linked to the shots with the headline "Hey Look! It's Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith Trouncing on My Childhood!" After all, they visually confirmed what fans had been hearing since September 2007 -- that their beloved martial-arts melodramedy was being "updated" for the 21st century with a wildly different script and cast.
And while most critics have sidestepped gingerly around the racial landmines embedded in their anxiety, some haven't been as careful: "Every remake these days, they change the main character to a black guy," groused commenter Kevin, over at the movie blog Cinematical. G.J. at E! Online was even more blunt: "A 10-year-old black kid as Karate Kid? What a joke. I hope this kid gets scarred for life for doing this movie."
What such detractors overlook, however, is that turning white suburban Daniel-san's journey into the story of an inner-city African American kid using martial arts to learn self-defense -- and self-control -- is less of a perversion than it is a correction.
Rumble in the Bronx
The fact is, African Americans were the first community to embrace martial arts in the U.S., and without that community's active support, Asian fighting disciplines would never have gained the foothold they now have in the American consciousness, as both a practice and a pop-culture influence.
"The story of martial arts in black communities is part of a much bigger narrative of African American interest in Asian culture," says Amy Obugo Ongiri, assistant professor of English at the University of Florida and author of the forthcoming book "Spectacular Blackness." "People want to read African Americans and Asians as being in conflict rather than engaged in creative exchange. But black interest in Asian culture has a long history, and what you see is that by the '60s and '70s, a bunch of factors led to the consolidation of that interest."
The return of soldiers from Korea and Vietnam; the growth of Asia as an export power; white flight from the inner cities, and the rise of black nationalism -- all of these phenomena set the stage for the unique cultural intersection that was the rise of martial arts cinema. "As white people abandoned the cities, all these downtown theaters became spaces for people of color," says Ongiri. "Theater owners started screening stuff that was less marketable, mostly cheap imports -- and that meant martial arts movies."
And for generations of urban black youth who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, grindhouse theaters screening kung fu double features had an irresistible gravitational pull. "We'd go and watch films all day," remembers Warrington Hudlin, best known as the producer behind films such as "House Party" and "Boomerang" and the children's television series "Bebe's Kids." "The whole time we'd be going, 'Oh man, how'd they do that?' Because it happened so fast, you'd have to screen a film three or four times to get the technique. So we'd be like, 'Okay, man, you watch his feet, I'll watch his hands, and we'll compare notes in the lobby.' Me and my friends, we used to live in those theaters."
The Art of War
Like many of his peers, Hudlin did more than just watch. He first took up martial arts training in 1968, calling it a logical reaction to growing up in an environment where trouble was a fact of life. "I grew up right outside of St. Louis, a city that to this day is one of the roughest in America," he says. "We're always neck and neck with Detroit on who has the highest homicide rate in the nation. And if you're in a violent place, if you're fighting all the time, you really have no choice but to get good at it."
Hudlin, like other young African Americans back in the Sixties, gravitated toward martial arts as a way of leveling a playing field in which they felt outnumbered and on hostile ground. "What most people don't know is that martial arts was always a key part of black activism," he says. "The Black Panther Party, Ron Karenga's Kawaida movement, the Nation of Islam -- all of those groups were heavily invested in martial arts."
He points out that unarmed combat has always been the secret tool of oppressed minority groups -- from peasants in Okinawa and Manchu-occupied China, to slaves in Brazil and the Caribbean, to the underclass in urban America. "The empty hand is the weapon that can hide in plain sight," he says. "So the martial arts have always been the art of resistance."
But Hudlin, who has a black belt in jiujitsu and now studies "internal" kung fu techniques as a "closed-door" disciple of Chinese Grand Master Doo Wai, is quick to point out that the allure of martial arts was never simply tied to their use in combat. "It's about taking on a mindset that allows you to survive," he says. "The situation we lived in was highly stressed, not just because of physical encounters, but because of emotional pressure. Martial arts gave us a refuge, both through their meditative component and through the way they tied us to one another and to a lineage that extends back into antiquity."
Fists of Fury
Actor Michael Jai White, who grew up more than a decade and after Hudlin, in an equally tough urban setting -- the drug and arson-scarred Bushwick region of Brooklyn -- agrees with Hudlin's analysis.
"When you grow up in harsh surroundings, you look for ways to connect to something -- to anything -- so you can build armor around yourself," he says. "For some people, it's gangbanging. The most violent gangmembers are actually the sensitive ones, the guys who turn displaced love into passion toward their street or their hood or their homies. Me, I put my energy into martial arts. That's where my passion went; that's how I built my armor."
White says that in the mid-1970s, martial arts schools were largely staffed by ex-G.I.'s, who brought their training in karate and tae kwon do back from tours of duty overseas. "If you were a G.I. and you wanted to start a karate school, you went straight to the ghetto," says White. "It wasn't seen as a polite thing back then. You didn't have dojos opening up in Beverly Hills or at the suburban YMCA. It was a step away from barbaric: There was no padding or protection, and you were training your knuckles and shins and elbows by slamming them into hard wood and hard concrete. And back then, the 'martial' part of martial arts really meant something: It was all straight military discipline."
By his early teens, White -- who was already six feet tall by age 13 and says he "hasn't grown an inch since" -- was fighting in tournament competitions with grown adults, and beating them, hands down. He also admits to taking his love of fighting to the streets, where he engaged in illegal street bouts, using his skills to take out people he felt were deserving of a beating. "You know that Showtime series 'Dexter,' about the serial killer who kills other serial killers? I was like freaking Dexter. I'd get high on knocking out guys who were thugs or bullies," he says.
The temptations associated with the darker side of a fighter's life led White to reevaluate his priorities; despite having earned seven black belts in disciplines ranging from the Shotokan, Kyokushin, and Goju Ryu forms of karate to kobudo, tae kwon do, tang soo du, and wushu, he went to college to study communications, and then followed his other love, acting, to Hollywood, where he largely avoided roles that required him to demonstrate his skills. In fact, when he was cast in his first starring role -- playing Mike Tyson in HBO's 1995 biopic "Tyson" -- the producers were initially concerned that they'd have to double his ring scenes. "I got the Tyson role based on my acting," he laughs. "When I booked it, they were all set to hire someone to do the boxing sequences, until I showed them that yeah, I knew how to hit."
Return to the 36th Chamber
But after decades of downplaying his combat skills in favor of his other talents, White recently made the decision to unleash them full bore -- shooting back-to-back films that, while very different in tone and concept, nevertheless play as impressive showcases for his martial arts ability.
"Blood and Bone," a sharply drawn street-fighting thriller that pits White as ex-con Isaiah Bone against the minions of a ruthless ganglord played by Eamonn Walker, is chock-full of skull-shuddering combat sequences choreographed by White himself. Released straight to video earlier this year, fans and critics have legitimately dubbed it a must-see movie for fans of authentic screen combat. (It's the first film I've seen in a long time that featured fights that actually made my teeth ache, and I mean that in the best possible way.) Meanwhile, the in-theaters-now blaxploitation spoof "Black Dynamite," cowritten, produced by and starring White, has received an avalanche of praise for its heady brew of funk, wit and general badassery, with White demonstrating his deft ability to balance credible, hardcore screen combat and deadpan comic timing.
The two projects are intended to be White's opening left-right combination in what he sees as a battle for the heart and soul of action cinema. "I got to a point where it was blatantly obvious to me that Hollywood doesn't know how to make this kind of film anymore," he says. "They think that audiences for these films want to see big stars, but that's ridiculous. Real action audiences want to see people who really know how to fight. Who are part of the lineage. There's a huge, underserved audience for this genre, and the studios are killing it."
White has launched a production company, Goliath Entertainment, through which he's developing a slate of action films for a global audience, featuring the kind of bona fide screen combat that continues a tradition seeded from Asia, but transplanted and rooted in urban America. "I've been waiting for the right time," he says. "It's why I spent part of my early career in Hong Kong -- I wanted to learn the camera angles, the style, the rhythm, so I could carry on that legacy."[/u]
White's not alone: Hudlin, who's currently developing his own take on an "authentic martial arts movie" with producing partners Ken Mok and Lawrence Bender, has launched an online reality series on YouTube that follows the ongoing training of masters < http://www.mosha247.com/>Sensei Mo and Novell "The Black Taoist" Bell as they prepare for a live iron-ring match in December, intended to demonstrate once and for all which discipline is superior -- the Japanese art of karate, or the Chinese art of kung fu.
For both Hudlin and White, the decision to leap feet-first into the turbulent waters of martial arts moviemaking is motivated not just by a lifelong passion for the form, but the recognition that the genre has reached an inflection point. Hong Kong has lost its way; Hollywood never had it. Old guard screen fighters -- icons like Jackie Chan and Jet Li -- are growing long in the tooth, and the torch has yet to be successfully passed.
"We were the early adopters of martial arts in this country," says Hudlin. "That's why it was so irritating to me that a movie like 'The Forbidden Kingdom' was made, in which Jet Li and Jackie Chan teach their skills to a white kid from Boston."
Whatever one might say about the appeal of Will Smith's "Karate Kid" remake, at least it closes the circuit -- reinforcing the pioneering role of African Americans in popularizing martial arts cinema, while underscoring the personal stories of Hudlin and White and hundreds of thousands of other young black Americans who found themselves in an ancient Asian discipline.
"White people came late to the party; we were there from day one," says Hudlin. "It's not overstating it to say that all of us who came up in that era grew up with one foot in Africa, and one foot in China."
