The problem with Bourgeoisie Representation
In the wake of a year marked by a 150% rise in anti-Asian hate crimes, I’ve seen the idea of more representation and visibility being increasingly brought up as a solution to combat discrimination.
At first glance, this seems fair: Asians are still some of the most underrepresented minority groups in both the media and in politics, despite the rise and prominence of Asian culture, such as K-pop. There are only 17 Congresspeople of Asian descent, and among the four major television networks this past year, only 5-10% of recurring and regular actors were Asian—the number is so low the statistics can’t even account for every individual Asian ethnicity and intersectional experience.
To many, it’s discouraging: I know that personally, as a child growing up in a predominantly white school district, I was desperate to see people on the screen who looked like me and embodied my cultural values. But that was me a decade ago. As a 21-year-old Marxist-Leninist standing firmly against all systemic forms of oppression, I ask for people to realize that bourgeoisie representation is meaningless. Arguing about the nitty gritty details of how good or bad representation is is wholly unproductive and detracts from the real problem: capitalism.
No representation brought to us by literal fucking billion-dollar corporations will ever be ingenuous. Hire all the writers, directors, producers, and actors of color you want, but at the end of the day, the profit goes to the top 1%. The Walt Disney Company sits on 65 billion dollars of profit made during the 2020 fiscal year at the same time employees at the theme parks are paid so low 1 out of 10 report being homeless. Worse, the desperation for representation overshadows other problematic components of the media. For instance, Crazy Rich Asians was celebrated as a win for all Asians, despite the fact that it predominantly featured East Asians, and only further emphasized the model minority myth. Considering that 12.3% of Asian Americans live below the poverty level, pushing the idea that all Asians are wealthy and glamorous is ignorant at best and dangerous at worst.
Of course, we can’t talk about media representation without tackling the biggest offender: Marvel movies. Every single MCU film is financially backed by the US military—the largest terrorist organization in the world—and promotes imperialist values, but as long as over half the cast are POC, that’s okay, right? The CIA actively instigates right-wing coups in the Global South to overthrow socialist movements, but you wouldn’t know that from watching a Marvel movie, because in Black Panther, CIA agent Everett Ross helped the Wakandans! Ironically, the very same people uncritically consuming these films will then claim other countries as oppressive authoritarian states for “spreading propaganda.” Buying into the idea that any representation from Marvel and other conglomerates can be good is buying into the idea that capitalism is good, and that is the biggest corporate scam of them all.
Similarly, clamoring for more Asian politicians is not the solution, either—all Western politicians regardless of race actively contribute to American imperialism. More self-proclaimed “top cops” like Kamala Harris in government just means that people of color get to bomb the Middle East alongside their white counterparts. Even the “progressive” ones—think AOC and The Squad— approve sanctions, vote on funding for ICE, and are willing to work within the constraints of capitalism instead of seeking to actively decolonize the imperial system.
The problem with this type of representation is that Asians (and all other marginalized people) desperately want to join the “in-group”, as opposed to eliminating an “in-group” altogether. However, the truth is that no amount of Asian representation in politics and the media will ever make up for the brutality Asian immigrants have faced at the hands of ICE, the fetishization of Asian women by American soldiers, and the exploitation of Asian labor in sweatshops to make the products we greedily consume today. Rather, I encourage my fellow Asian-Americans to make change by focusing their activism on a local level: donating to mutual aid organizations and challenging sinophobic and xenophobic propaganda may seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but it can fundamentally change someone’s life for the better.