23rd Anniversary of Rush Hour: Reflecting on the state of contemporary Afro-Asian Unity
This past September 18th was the 23rd anniversary of the release of the film Rush Hour. It is by far one of the greatest comedy movies ever made, but something more significant about its release was its implications for intercultural kinship making between members of the Black and Asian community. Rush Hour was not simply a film, but a nascent cultural force that broke open a dialogue between African and Asian Americans that had laid dormant since the Black Power and Anti-colonial movements of the 60s & 70s. It is not an exaggeration to say that race relations between Afro-descendants and Asian Americans in the United States have had there fair share of collisions. The most famous being the 1992 L.A. Rebellion following the brutal public mutilation of Rodney King where Korean shop-owners opened fire on Black Americans under the justification of protecting property.
Image of “Roof Koreans” from the 1992 L.A. Rebellion
There is a lot of distrust and misunderstanding between members of the Asian and Black community born from our joint experience traversing the global reality of white supremacy, and our divergent ways of surviving its reign. Asian Americans in recent times have been able to seek some refuge from many overt acts of racism in ways that Black Americans have not been able to - due to the particular history of African chattel-slavery which governs our lives as non-human subjects. So I did a deep dive into the HistoryMakers Digital archive to find accounts of racism, interpersonal or institutional, that members of the Asian community have faced in order to speak to the plight of Asian-Americans. I started my search by searching “Chinese” in the archive due to the Rush Hour connection I am trying to make and I came across an interview with actor Aki Leonard, who is himself a Black and Asian man.
Afro-Asian Actor Aki Leonard
In his interview with the HistoryMakers Mr. Leonard talks about his experiences with racism in casting. Directors would try to box asians in as non-sensuous, non-emotional and by association, non-human - incapable of love. Aki recounts this by saying “they try to box me into saying or being an Asian, okay, and by playing it this way and they tried to sub--tell you like in the beginning when I said Asians don't hold hands and all that stuff you know. Hey man, they wouldn't have two billion Chinese from not holding hands, they don't get pregnant by excuse me whatever saliva whatever. They got to do something, they gotta love”. Racism was so entrenched in the industry Mr. Leonard recounts again that “Bruce Lee had to go to China, 'cause he couldn't get a job, and my good friend, David Carradine stole 'Kung Fu' away”.
White man David Carradine depicting an Asian man in his role as “Grasshopper” within the T.V. program “Kung Fu”
For me this is why Rush Hour was such an important film. Black and Asian people, specifically Chinese-Americans have lived in such close proximity in this country since the early 1800s and yet we have seemed worlds apart - part of different stories within the same country, despite the fact there has been countless convergences in our shared experience as colonial subjects within this country. Rush Hour was a means of Black and Asian people coming together through humor, laughing at the internal thoughts and questions we had about each other, that we never had the patience or courage to verbalize. Rush Hour for me represents the peak of Afro-Asian relations within this country specifically because Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, both Asian and Black men respectfully, were the protagonists of the story. They were not serving as a racial side kick to any white man, but they themselves were the architects of story - bringing with them their Blackness and Chineseness with their respective communities in mind when telling their story. The film was a means of Black and Chinese kinship formation and was a bridge which for many years was a large relational point between tow communities that rarely interact, except for instances of racial conflict.
Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan
It is telling that the villain within the film is a white man who uses non-white proxies to stop Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker from bringing him to justice. This is largely representative of the reality of the racial landscape in which Black and Asians globally navigate. There is conflict among and between the races, but behind it all is a small clique of white capitalists and imperialists who have monetary and social interest in keeping Black and Asian people divided amongst themselves and between each other. Going forward, especially in the era of a rising China and Africa and a conversely declining USA and EU, the implications of African and Chinese cooperation are enormous. The future of the global economy will be governed by the state of Afro-Asian relations.
Image from the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation
