In his May 2014 commencement speech to Yale’s Asian-American alumni, jazz musician and Harvard professor Vijay Iyer said, “To succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America — which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.”

He was referring to the upward mobility of large numbers of Asian Americans, which, he argued, came at the expense of other people of color.

A few months later, this sentiment was echoed by the online forum ChangeLab, which announced a new social media campaign, #ModelMinorityMutiny, designed to identify and reject the insidious construction of Asian Americans as a “good” minority, a designation that has been used as a means to justify and perpetuate racism against blacks in particular.