American Victims

Unpacking the American obsession with victimhood with Andrew Boryga

At the tail end of 2023, I wrote that 2023 was the year of the victim. A few months later, I met Andrew Boryga, a Bronx born, Miami based author whose debut novel, VICTIM, was published to rave reviews last year.

VICTIM is about Javi, a young man from the Bronx who loses his father in a shooting and realizes he can get attention and sympathy by weaponizing his identity in his writing. Parts of his story continue to shift and we follow him from high school to a career in media writing about Brown trauma. Immersive, propulsive, and funny, Boryga perfectly captures the smarminess of “well meaning white liberals” of the Buzzfeed era, and writes about Twitter and digital media with ease.

I wanted to get Boryga’s take on 2024 in discourse and culture as both a novelist and someone with a prophetic eye.

Victim of the Year

JL: Firstly, thank you so much for doing this! I’m so excited to get your take on what’s been going on in culture lately. Just for table setting, we met via email last year when Leigh Stein introduced us. It turns out we’re not only both from the Bronx but from the same exact neighborhood and went to the same elementary school, which is an insane coincidence. Part of me wonders if we have similar thoughts on these things because of where we come from, but I’m interested to see where we diverge as well.

Jumping right in, I know you worked on VICTIM for ten years. Can you talk about the shift you’ve seen between 2013 and 2023 when it comes to the way people talk and write about their identities?

AB: P.S. 86 what the fuck is up! Thanks so much for inviting me to do this–and for the very kind words about VICTIM. It is a true honor.

The shift you’re describing was fascinating to view and I had an interesting glimpse into it. In 2013, I graduated as a scholarship kid from Cornell and had a foot in the media because I’d interned for three summers at The New York Times–thanks to a scholarship for marginalized kids I won in high school.

At the time, identity wasn’t as prominent as it would become. People didn’t have their ethnicities in their Twitter bio’s and weren’t starting sentences with: “As a [Insert Identity Marker]...” Although Gawker and Buzzfeed were emerging, getting an essay published as a young writer of color was an uphill battle.

Then, somewhere around 2014 and 2015, things started changing. In the media, hearing from diverse, marginalized voices became popular. Personal essays and hybrid stories that had a little reporting but were grounded in an author’s identity went viral. Online, it felt like everyone was trying to figure out some way to distance themselves from whiteness or privilege by staking claims to identity markers they had loose or non-existent ties to (hello Rachel Dolezal). Others took to virtue-signaling in weird and cringy ways.

I was happy at first. In the media, at least, we really did need to hear from more diverse voices, and it was great to see more opportunities to crack the upper echelons of the industry (all the people at The New Yorker and The New York Times, for example, basically attend the same three colleges). But then celebrating identities morphed into this trench warfare where hierarchies of identities were erected and all this infighting amongst people who used to just call themselves liberals took place. In the media, I noticed that although writers like myself were getting opportunities, most were tied to performing the same trick; keep writing about our identities, our trauma, our marginalization, and so forth. Anything outside those bounds was often rejected.

I was writing my novel all through this period, but it was really after 2020 and 2021 that I landed on the idea of a character who noticed all of these odd trends around the commodification and performance of identity and decided to pimp them out. By the time I finished the draft and sold it in 2022, it felt taboo because we were still in the throes of a lot of this. But by 2024 conversations were starting to unfold in the open and the public was willing to think critically about what had been happening.

Image courtesy of Penguin Random House.

That’s so real. I think there’s been some pushback in publishing spaces around the commodification of Black and Brown stories too, where the only stories they want are about ancestral trauma and the weight of being a POC in America. It’s odd because in my circles, no one talks like this: we don’t sit around and talk about our identities in this theoretical way.

Do you think there’s a difference between the way people conceptualize their identities online vs. in real life, or sort of package them differently depending on the context?

Of course. I think we’re all doing that in some way or form. Social media and branding is so inherent to our culture. We’re all posting and thinking about what we’re posting and what message it might send about who we are. Whether that is trying to make people think you’re a good parent or you’re in the best relationship, or whether you’re trying to advertise some product or lifestyle for financial gain.

We’re all making these conscious choices about how people view us, or what they know about our identity online. But offline a lot of that disappears. There is no platform, there is just us. And often the reality of us–our identities, our beliefs, our real concerns, and our real behavior–is a lot more nuanced, fractured, and complicated.

Exactly! There's something abstract about the way people talk about their identities online, almost completely divorced from the reality of “living in a society”.

I’m thinking now about Javi getting to college and learning the shortcut to get attention from white people is to lead with what happened to his father. This reminds me of something I’ve talked about, the trauma-ification of reality TV, this idea that on shows like The Bachelor, Housewives, and RuPaul’s Drag Race now expect contestants to have a traumatic backstory in order to help viewers relate to them. Did you see this coming when you started writing VICTIM?

That’s fascinating, but not surprising. For a long time I’ve been tapped into the strange allure of trauma or hardship. At Cornell, for example, I found it weird that there were guys from nice parts of the Bronx who attended private schools, but pretended to be from the hood to impress girls or seem cool. I wondered what that was about, psychologically.

As a fan of Hip-Hop, I also noticed this impulse. For years some rappers have tried to portray themselves as coming from the slums, and having lived through tough things as a way to establish their authenticity, even if none of it was really true (look at Drake, for example). But I can even trace this interest all the way back to when 50 Cent first hit the scene in middle school. In the Bronx, we were listening to “Wanksta”, which is a great song, but when we spoke about 50 nobody led with the song or lyrics, it was, “Yo, he got shot nine times.” Although 50 has never portrayed himself as a victim, his survival of that trauma embedded him with an interesting allure that other rappers have tried to replicate or fabricate, and that always interested me.

I think a lot of this stems from the fact that, like Javi, I grew up experiencing and witnessing some traumatic things, and around family who had it even worse than I did. As I got older, it was weird to see these things that I wouldn’t wish on anyone else become trendy commodities–whether that was in the form of people writing about their trauma in a personal essay or tweeting about it online for clout, or making it their identity.

I had some standing to do this myself–air out traumatic shit for sympathy or clicks or what have you–but the impulse felt so weird to me. I’d think: Why would I do that? Why are people doing this? What’s this all about?

It’s interesting because it seems like people are seeking to exalt themselves through this identification with trauma.

So much of discourse recently is occurring on this grand stage where people feel deeply wronged and seek this victim posture even for small interpersonal slights. Why do you think the American imagination is so captured by victimhood?

That’s a great question and I wish I had a clear-cut answer for you. But I do think part of it has to do with the proliferation of smartphones, and the rise of social media platforms built on our opinions and grievances and emotions; platforms that are designed to magnify the most sensational content that provoke reactions and lead to more engagement.

Before social media, if you had a bad day, or felt angry about something, or experienced something terrible, you wrote about it in your journal, or you called a friend, or you just sat with that shit.

Now you have this ready-made outlet you can vent to and in return receive likes and comments and followers. And that shit is addicting! Those little notifications are little hits of drugs, which is something I tried to explore in VICTIM by positioning Javi as an addict of sorts. There is this giant feedback loop that basically rewards you for leaning into your trauma, stewing in it, and framing yourself as a victim. And if that’s the case, then I think it’s no wonder more people hit that button over and over again instead of looking for healthier ways of dealing with the things they go through.

Elizabeth Hoover (top), the professor who pretended to be Indigenous, and “Una Gutierrez” (bottom), the TikToker who pretended to be Latina. We know what Rachel Dolezal looks like so I didn’t include her here!

That’s also a good point– there’s so much research around how our phones are addictive. The combination of social validation alongside literal dopamine machines in our pockets might be too powerful for people to resist.

I have a two pronged question: I want to think about recent stories where multiple people have gotten exposed for lying about their race. I’m thinking specifically about that Berkeley professor who was pretending to be Indigenous (after she profited off existing in Indigenous spaces for her entire career), a TikToker who lied about being Latina, and of course, Rachel Dolezal, the OG.

At the same time, I’m thinking about the election and the fury that the right feels about POC “taking jobs” and the end of affirmative action. For some Americans it seems like being a POC is seen as both this downtrodden, terrible experience used to get sympathy, but also a sort of cheat code for more attention and professional success. Can you talk about this dichotomy in your mind?

I think what angers me the most about this dichotomy is that on both ends of the spectrum, the individuality of people who actually happen to be Latino, or Black, or Native, or Asian are wiped away by stereotypes. That is what always bothered me the most about the identity and diversity craze we experienced. The progress we seemed to be making was great, but after a while it became clearer that a lot of this progress was often conditional on us fitting into specific versions of our identity that never really lined up with who we really were, who our families that raised us really are, and who our communities really are. So much so that people who pretended to be of a specific identity and played their role to a T, were rewarded for it.

A big goal of my book was to write about characters like a poor Puerto Rican kid from the Bronx, or a single mother, or an activist-inclined young girl, or a recently released felon, or even a drug dealer, in ways that were authentic to the vast possibilities that all of those identities contain, and far more nuanced than those that are often portrayed. That to me is the mark of true diversity, and that is the sort of diversity I strive for. As an artist, I just want to see more people getting the opportunity to tell their stories, and tell them in the complicated, nuanced ways that reflect their individual lives, not their [insert identity marker] lives. But politically and culturally, as a society, I think we still have a ways to go. Things have gotten better, but as you laid out so well, there is still clearly a lot of co-opting going on for personal and party gain.

Co-opting for personal gain is right. It’s that whole conversation about selling out, right? Getting into these spaces isn’t enough, you need to know how to act when you get there too.

I loved the depiction of Javi’s bosses once he gets into Media. Similar to the rise of victimhood online, we’ve seen this really rapid shift in priorities from companies who were pledging to fund Black and Brown stories and creators after 2020 and are now deciding it’s not worth it, especially in Hollywood.

Can you tell me about both your experience in journalism and how digital media has changed its stance on how it tells BIPOC stories?

I think about the hook from that Mike Jones song: “Back then they didn’t want me, now I’m hot they all on me.” It was sort of like that. Between 2009 and 2013 or so, when I was in and out of the New York Times building and trying to pitch my stories it was hard as fuck to get a story published about the Bronx or Hip-Hop, or any of the other cultural stuff I was interested in–especially if there was no ties to crime or poverty. I remember this one piece I wrote about Jean-Michel Basquiat and his connections to Hip-Hop in 2011. It took months of me annoying this one editor to let me write it, and then they chopped it all up anyway and pretended like they were doing me a favor by running it.

Up until that point, I had been mostly used to go to crime scenes, or write about incidents in the Bronx that other people in the newsroom didn’t want to bother visiting. I believe that in their eyes, they didn’t trust my instincts or my expertise (which, not to brag, they were dead-wrong if you look at how Basquiat’s legend has exploded). But if I had been a white writer trying to write about some underground hipster shit in Fort Greene…

My point is that the road was an uphill battle. But things changed around 2014, and by 2016 and beyond all of a sudden outlets were coming to me and asking me to write about my background and my cultural interests and things related to my identity and my hardships. Again, I was very happy about this. It felt like a needed change–particularly in the journalism industry which is just as white and elite as the publishing industry, if not more. I loved seeing writers of color turned into stars. It felt like an overdue correction.

I began to grow wary of it all, however, when I realized around 2020 and 2021 that a lot of this leeway we were given was often tied to specific “race” beats. Yeah we could go long on something and get paid for it, but it had to be tied to these specific topics. It was around this point that I realized the trend toward diverse voices was really just that, a trend. A lot of these outlets were riding the wave. It was all but confirmed when the backlash to wokeness took place, and all of a sudden the hot stories changed and people and companies and institutions who were doing all this performative shit around social justice started backtracking.

Today I don’t think we’re back to square one though. Things are still better than they were back in 2009 for example when it comes to diversity in newsrooms and what stories get greenlit. So in that sense some progress was made. But the difference now is that the entire industry is collapsing. Diversity goals have taken a backseat to outlets figuring out how to turn a profit or find a benevolent billionaire to stay afloat. It remains to be seen if the stove will heat up again.

In the meantime, it’s been a joy to see alternative spaces like Substack blossom. It’s dope, for example, to see someone like yourself gain a big audience and readership writing about things you’re authentically interested in and are knowledgeable about and that doesn’t have to be related to your background or your trauma unless you want it to be.

Thank you so much. It feels surreal because for my entire life, so much of these spaces have been subject to gatekeepers. At the same time, it feels very amorphous in a way. You can’t let the internet get to your head! I’m always saying this.

Finally, I’m torn when I ask this because where we come from, you’re taught to lock in, take everything and turn it inward and make it work. Therapy has been helpful for me but I do think I still grew up with an internal locus of control: I can do anything if I work hard enough, etc. It’s very Caribbean.

Online, we see the inverse, where a lot of people have an external locus of control and tie themselves into these demographic destinies, where they believe that because they’re X or Y or Z they’re unable to be happy or that life will be bad automatically because of their identity markers.

Do you think there is a lack of resilience among Gen Z?

Damn, my little cousins are gonna be tight. But yes, I do think with each successive generation we’ve grown a bit softer. And in particular, I’ve seen Gen Z really lean into the language of therapy and trauma to describe shit that’s like, come on man. It’s not traumatic to have to make a budget to pay your bills. It’s not oppressive if your boss asks you to take the holiday shift because you’re the new hire, that’s just how it is.

But I don’t think Millennials are all that better. Just compare us to my mom’s generation, which is Gen X. The resilience she’s shown in her life as a young single mother of three in the Bronx is astounding to me, and she rarely ever complains about anything she went through as a parent even though the stories she can tell are insane. She could go viral.

Meanwhile, I’m a Millennial with two kids, and my wife and I have good jobs and are involved parents, and we have help, and yet we’re out here struggling to survive, bro. Fighting for our lives. And most of the content fed to me on IG is about other Millennial parents in the same boat, and I identify with that shit so hard. All day my wife and I send each other parenting memes, and talk about how hard it is. And not to say it isn’t, but in the eyes of previous generations I’m sure they look at us, like, pshh, please. What’s so hard? Like my grandma’s generation? Wild. The stories about her life raising a bunch of kids in Loiza, Puerto Rico that she tells, I’m like abuelita, how the fuck are you not in therapy? But she shares them with a shrug, “that’s how it was.” She leans a lot on her faith in God.

Although it’s messed up to learn about what she went through and what my mom went through, to me there is something beautiful about their resilience. I keep people like them in mind whenever I’m going through something, sort of as a reminder, to put my problems into perspective. People like to complain about the conditions of our world these days, and I’m not saying we shouldn’t fight for better ones, because there is a lot of fucked up shit happening out there, but for most people, all you have to do is talk to your elders to realize that you probably have it a lot better than you think you do.

I think we could all stand to learn to be a bit more resilient. But Gen Z don’t worry! Whoever comes after you will likely be even less resilient, and you’ll have your time to make fun of them and do your own rendition of “the kids these days.”

Thank you so much for doing this.

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VICTIM is out on paperback on April 1. I do not receive commission from these links—doing this because I loved Andrew’s book, he’s also from the Bronx, and I think he’s brilliant.