Polemic ||
Akiko Ichikawa || Back
I Didn't Come Here To Be Liked (A.N.B.B.M.L.U.A.C.)
In 2014, I started a Facebook group, Asians Not Brainwashed by Media Lapping Up Amy Chua (A.N.B.B.M.L.U.A.C.). It played on the 17,400-member, private Asian Not Brainwashed by Media group, of which I am a member, and was intended as its offshoot, the original a gathering which tolerates a lot of sexism and anti-blackness in its comments sections. Seven years later, my private group has over 300 members, and, despite an explicitly anti-racist bar graph at the top of its page, has attracted member requests from right-leaning adults of Asian descent, including racists and the fascist adjacent. In short, A.N.B.B.M.L.U.A.C. has drawn Facebook users with a different critique of the famed author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother than what I had envisioned when I first started administering it. As well as being turned off by the Yale law professor's strict Confucian parenting style, the sensationalism around it, and/or the model minority myth she embodies, requests to join were received from those, whom I'm guessing, object to the writer being married to a white man. In I Didn't Come Here To Be Liked (A.N.B.B.M.L.U.A.C.), I compile the profiles of users who respond to my questions to join the group in virtually all the same way.
Akiko Ichikawa is a transdisciplinary artist, editor, and writer-activist. She has written on contemporary art and culture for Flash Art, Art in America, Hyperallergic, and zingmagazine and served as a legal observer at the Republican National Convention when it came to New York City and at Occupy Wall Street. Ichikawa's Net Art pieces have garnered inclusion on Rhizome.org, Tania Brugera's Pardido del Pueblo Migrante, and a Brown Arts Initiative microgrant: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (2004), Norwegian (Ridge)wood (2011), and BLM.htm (2020-).
Polemic is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and the
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
