ABSTRACT

The Racial Bourgeoisie In April of 1990, Mari Matsuda took the podium at a fund-raising banquet for the Asian Law Caucus (ALC). ALC is a progressive, grassroots group of lawyers committed to serving the most vulnerable members of the Asian American community. At the time, Matsuda was an unsurprising choice for the keynote. She was emerging as a central figure in what was coming to be known as the critical race theory [CRT] movement and she would later go on to become the first Asian American woman to receive tenure at a U.S. law school at UCLA in 1998. However, by her own admission her address was an “unconventional fund-raiser talk” that moved “beyond the platitudes of fund-raiser formalism [in order to] talk of something that has been bothering me and that I need your help on” (1996, 150, 149). Barely a moment into her speech, Matsuda turned to an unlikely source of inspiration, paraphrasing Karl Marx’s characterization of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie as an economic class “who were deeply confused about their self-interests . . . emulat[ing] the manners and ideology of the big-time capitalists . . . the ‘wannabes’ of capitalism. Struggling for riches, often failing, confused about the reason why, the economic wannabes go to their graves thinking that the big hit is right around the corner” (150). Noting that Marx limited his thinking to economic class, Matsuda pointedly asked, “Is there a racial equivalent of the economic bourgeoisie?” before answering, “I fear there may be and I fear it may be us.”