Are Asian Americans the Racial Bourgeoisie? by Mari Matsuda

In the article “We will not be used: Are Asian Americans the racial bourgeoisie?” Mari Matsuda explains the ways in which the Asian American community is used to create a racial bourgeoisie. She states that the success of Asian American people, the racial middle, is used to overlook structural oppression and disavows any responsibility the government had over the safety of their struggling communities. In other words, any success the Asian American community achieves will be used to blame other communities for their failure to succeed in a society that has been structurally created to oppress them. What is interesting about this possibility of success the Asian American community has within the white American society is that it show how the “middle,” by this I mean the racial middle and middle class, has control over the continued reproduction of modes of oppression. Hence, if the middle refuses to fulfill the economic, racial, and social positions the elite has imposed on them, and forms alliances with oppressed communities, they will greatly contribute to the collapse of many oppressive structures.