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28 WE WILL NOT BE USED ARE ASIAN AMERICANS THE RACIAL BOURGEOISIE? Mari Matsuda The Asian Law Caucus is the original public interest law firm serving the Asian-American community. It was built up from scratch by young, radical lawyers who carried files in their car trunks and stayed up all night to type their own briefs. The Asian Law Caucus has changed the lives of many—poor and working people, immigrants, and troubled youth—the least advantaged in the Asian-American community. The Caucus has also made history, successfully bringing landmark cases that have changed the law and the legal system. The supporters of the Caucus include many who participated in the civil rights and antiwar movements and who have worked all their lives in coalition with other people of color. This history is what inspired the words below, delivered at a fund-raising banquet in April 1990. It is a special honor to address supporters of the Asian Law Caucus. Here, before this audience, I am willing to speak in the tradition of our women warriors, to go beyond the platitudes of fund-raiser formalism and to talk of something that has been bothering me and that I need your help on. I want to speak of my fear that Asian Americans are in danger of becoming the racial bourgeoisie and of my resolve to resist that path. Marx wrote of the economic bourgeoisie—of the small merchants, the middle class, and the baby capitalists who were deeply confused about their self-interest. The bourgeoisie, he said, often emulate the manners and ideology of the big-time capitalists. They are the “wannabes” of capitalism. Struggling for riches, often failing , confused about the reasons why, the economic wannabes go to their graves thinking that the big hit is right around the corner. Living in nineteeth-century Europe, Marx thought mostly in terms of class. Living in twentieth-century America, in the land where racism found a home, I am thinking about race. Is there a racial equivalent of the economic bourgeoisie? I fear there may be, and I fear it may be us. If white, as it has been historically, is the top of the racial hierarchy in America, and black, historically, is the bottom, will yellow assume the place of the racial middle? The role of the racial middle is a critical one. It can reinforce white supremacy if the middle deludes itself into thinking it can be just like white if it tries hard enough. Conversely, the middle can dismantle white supremacy if it refuses to be the middle, if it refuses to buy into racial hierarchy, and if it refuses to abandon communities of black and brown people, choosing instead to forge alliances with them. The theme of the unconventional fund-raiser talk you are listening to is “we will not be used.” It is a plea to Asian Americans to think about the ways in which our communities are particularly susceptible to playing the worst version of the racial bourgeoisie role. I remember my mother’s stories of growing up on a sugar plantation on Kauai. She tells of the Portuguese luna, or over-seer. The luna rode on a big horse and issued orders to the Japanese and Filipino workers. The luna in my mother’s stories is a tragic/comic figure. He thinks he is better than the other workers, and he does not realize that the plantation owner considers the luna subhuman, just like all the other workers. The invidious stereotype of the dumb “portagee” persists in Hawaii today, a holdover from the days of the luna parading around on the big horse, cloaked in self-delusion and false pride. The double tragedy for the plantation nisei who hated the luna is that the sansei in Hawaii are becoming the new luna. Nice Japanese girls from Manoa Valley are going through four years of college to get degrees in travel industry management in order to sit behind a small desk in a big hotel, to dole out marching orders to brown-skinned workers, and to take orders from a white man with a bigger desk and a bigger paycheck who never has to complicate his life by dealing with the brown people who make the beds and serve the food.1 He need only deal with the Nice-Japanese-Girl-ex-Cherry Blossom-Queen, eager to, please, who does not know she will never make it to the bigger desk. The Portuguese...

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