Hip Hop Reinforces Black And Asian Stereotypes

But, hip-hop’s early days suggested that cross-cultural swapping would be more thoughtful. In 1993, a group of Black Staten Island rappers released a debut album that would become a lasting classic. But instead of a pounding bass drum, the album begins with an audio clip from a 1983 Hong Kong martial arts film. The Wu-Tang Clan were fans of the kung fu movies that regularly played in neighborhood theaters who later on became plain-old kung fu fanatics; they channeled its aphorisms, value systems, and vicious barebones aesthetic to animate their own hard-knock experiences. And while there was an exoticizing aspect to “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” the group would genuinely explore various aspects of Asian warrior culture. Albums by the group’s members would continue to heavily interpolate clips from Jidaigeki or Hong Kong gangster movies, and RZA scored Ghost Dog: the Way of the Samurai and even directed his own martial arts film, The Man With The Iron Fists, starring Cung Le and Lucy Liu. While their tributes did focus too narrowly on the mythological aspects of Asian culture, they still for the most part treated those stories with empathy and nuance.