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 group on Facebook, 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 Asian Not Brainwashed by Media private Facebook group, of which I am a member, and was intended as its offshoot, the original an online gathering which tolerates a lot of sexism and anti-blackness in its comments sections. Seven years later, my private group has 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 social media 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 my group. As well as being turned off by the Yale law professor's strict Confucian parenting style, the sensationalism around it, and the model minority myth that the writer represents, requests to join were received from those, whom we're guessing, object to Chua 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 round up users who responded to my questions to join the group in virtually all the same way.
Akiko Ichikawa is a transdisciplinary artist, editor, and writer-activist based in Brooklyn. 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 has presented her performances at Socrates Sculpture Park, Performa, the Spring/Break Art Show, and Philadelphia's Asian Arts Initiative as well as in Newark, Jamaica, Queens, Washington D.C., and Martinique and South Korea. Her 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-). Ichikawa is presenting new, equally interesting work at the Art in Odd Places performance festival in May.
Polemic is funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and the
New York City Department of Cultural Affairs
