America is generally regarded as the land that subtitles forgot, the graveyard where foreign-language film goes to be buried, with a tombstone reading: "Negligible box office". But that's only if you ignore one special genre, which has had consistent success with a particular audience more loyal than the Cahiers du Cinéma-brandishing, iPad-pawing arthouse set. Since Five Fingers of Death in March 1973 – the first kung fu film to get a release by a mainstream US distributor – black Americans have stood staunchly by eastern martial-arts films like an outraged young acolyte ready to kick off for his sifu.

"Cross-cultural stuff has been going on in the ghettoes for a long time," says producer-writer James Schamus, whose Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon played big to black audiences, too. "Remember Bruce Lee was probably the greatest African-American star of the 70s. And that culture persists." That's certainly what comes across in new documentary I Am Bruce Lee, where one commentator goes as far as suggesting love for Lee ran so deep in the black community because, as Hong Kong's 1958 cha-cha champion, his footwork bore the hallmarks of a rhythm that ultimately had African roots.

There are more obvious reasons, though. In the 1970s, Lee was a rare non-white leading man, and an unfeasibly cool one at that. His four (completed) films amounted to a picture of a world in which oppression – whether from drug lords, Japanese imperialists or cat-executing pseudo-Bond villains – was swatted aside with hyper-kinetic ultraviolence. You can see why his creed of righteous self-reliance appealed to black audiences, who were emerging from the civil rights struggles, but were still subject to plenty of prejudice.

Martial arts films, like blaxploitation, were adrenalin-drunk revenge fantasies. In fact, the two genres crossed paths a few times before blaxploitation ran out of steam in the mid-70s, in films like Melinda, Black Belt Jones (both starring Enter the Dragon's Jim Kelly) and Cleopatra Jones and the Casino of Gold (a co-production between Warner and the ubiquitous Shaw brothers). In 1973 American audiences of all kinds were on a massive kung fu high – from late March to mid-October, six Hong Kong films held the No 1 spot, with around 15 successful imports in total – but it was the urban black crowd in fleapit theatres who kept the flame alight after the craze died down.

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, in his essay Black Audiences, Blaxploitation and Kung Fu Films, and Challenges to White Celluloid Masculinity, says that martial arts films benefited from a shift in the emphasis of the Black Power movement. The US-centric, survivalist Black Power nationalism gave way to more co-operative pan-Africanism and Black Internationalism ideologies that talked up global solidarity between all people suffering racial oppression. And this was at a time that America and the far east were pressed hard face-to-face against each other. "A broad sector of blacks not only opposed the Vietnam war, but also wished for a Vietnamese victory. China and things Chinese were very popular in Afro-America," writes Cha-Jua.

That Africa-China affinity is actually coming to have pretty serious geopolitical implications now – but you'd have to have been a phenomenal analyst to predict that 40 years ago from the cinema tastes of African-Americans. But those tastes have stayed consistent: one third of the US's most successful top 25 foreign language films mostly involve topless Asian men trying to tweak each other's pressure points (1: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; 3: Hero; 6: Jet Li's Fearless; 10: Kung Fu Hustle; 12: Iron Monkey; 18: The Protector; 22: House of Flying Daggers).

By the time of the millennial kung fu revival in the wake of The Matrix, martial arts had got "balletic", and some of the audience were probably a lot more affluent than in the 1970s. But as the new trailer for the RZA's Man with the Iron Fists or the recent The Raid show, the genre's trashy, unreconstituted heart (and guts) are never too far away. Ready your tiger claw style if I'm wrong.

• I Am Bruce Lee is out on Friday 20 July.

• Next week's After Hollywood will look at Dr Seuss adaptations. Meanwhile, what global box-office stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.