Bruce Lee: a fighter for civil rights

Is there anything left to be said about Bruce Lee? As it did with its treatment of O.J. Simpson, ESPN’s “30 for 30” (9 p.m. Sunday) series uses the lenses of sports and entertainment to explore societal attitudes about race in the documentary “Be Water.”

Rich in home movies and videos, film clips and news footage, “Be Water” explores Lee’s life as a martial artist, actor and filmmaker, and as a man wrestling with his identity as an Asian male born in America and raised in Hong Kong.

Directed by Vietnamese American filmmaker Bao Nguyen, “Be Water” makes the case that Lee’s stardom occurred at a critical moment in America’s civil rights era and deeply affected filmgoers of color, both black and Asian, who cheered at the sight of a virile non-white star in action roles.

The film explores Lee’s family life, his brief stardom in ABC’s “The Green Hornet” and his return to Hong Kong to make martial arts movies on his own terms. It explores Hollywood’s resistance to casting an Asian lead with a discernible accent and how the studios and networks took Lee’s pet project “Kung Fu” and later cast white actor David Carradine in the lead role.

“Water” argues that while Lee was never an activist and projected an air more spiritual than political, he soaked up the ferment of the 1960s, particularly the dissent rocking Hong Kong, where native residents revolted against British colonial rule. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who studied martial arts with Lee and appeared in a fight sequence in “Game of Death,” underscores Lee’s role in the movements of the time.

This film reminds us of historical trends often overlooked in contemporary conversations about America and racism. The civil rights movements of the mid-20th century did not happen in a vacuum. They were deeply affected by anti-colonial movements in both Africa and Asia. Lee was not only rebelling against Hollywood’s depiction of Asians as subservient coolies, he was trying to assert himself as a male lead at a time when America was fighting a brutal war in Southeast

Asia, the third to pit Americans against Asians in as many decades.

Sadly, in its focus on the personal, the film reflects Lee’s all-too-truncated story, ending with his sudden death in 1973. It would have been fruitful to explore the decadeslong affinity between black audiences and Lee’s martial arts movies and legacy. Long after the 1970s blaxploitation era curdled into camp, Lee’s movies and others featuring kung fu fighting continued to be some of the few thrillers where the action hero wasn’t white.

› HBO promotes its own. Yvonne Orji, who plays Issa Rae’s friend and sidekick Molly on “Insecure,” gets her own comedy special “Yvonne Orji: Momma, I Made It” (10 p.m. Saturday, HBO, TV-MA). The standup parts were performed before a live audience at Howard Theatre in Washington, D.C. “Momma” also includes short filmed vignettes of her return

to her native Nigeria, her thoughts about her culturally traditional mother and a culture where cursing at someone can also mean putting curses on them.

› Eight compete in PBA Bowling (7 p.m. Saturday, Fox). The notion of a major network airing bowling in prime time reflects Fox’s desire to showcase elements of its Fox sports networks’ content; a desire for sports (and sports betting); fans starved for any kind of televised competition and the fact that the more television evolves, the more it reverts to its origins. Back in the early 1950s and the days when the DuMont Television Network still flickered, TV devoted many hours of prime time to boxing and bowling.

Fox is hardly alone in this back-to-the-future move. ABC’s Sunday lineup consists of game shows once consigned to afternoon syndication.