Confessions of a professional victim

Andrew Boryga is a young freelance journalist growing up in the Bronx when he realises that all the newspapers he deals with, including the 'New York Times', want the same thing from him: that he should write stories related to his difficult past and upbringing. Anything else from him does not interest him. Even when he proposes different topics, he is asked to flesh out the narrative with elements of his own biography. That is how, for ten years, he sets to work on Victim.

The protagonist is Javier, a young boy who grew up in the Bronx with his friend Gio. Their very young mothers, both Puerto Rican, are friends, their fathers are absent. Javier's father reappears from time to time, tailed by the police, between furious fights with his ex-partner - who holds his ground, doesn't let him or life get in his way and even finds time to take his son to the library and cook for him. The father is an 'entrepreneur': drug dealer, extortionist, gangster. He changes cars as fast as he changes women. Until, having taken Javier to Puerto Rico hoping to make him a proper macho man, he is gunned down before his son's eyes by a man he had humiliated.

When it happens, Gio's mother is already gone, his grandmother is raising him in the corner of her one-room apartment. "You know, my mum didn't die from an accident, Javi" Gio manages to say one night, drunk: "She wanted to die". As teenagers, their lives diverge: Gio approaches a gang, attracted by the money, the sense of strength and at the same time protection it offers, he starts dealing and soon finds himself sentenced to ten years in prison; Javier, flattered by a literature teacher who thinks he has talent, relies on a tutor sent to his neighbourhood school to assist the most gifted students. And so he discovers a world that had eluded him: 'Listen, Javier. I'll be honest,' he tells him one day. I have never had a friend go to prison. Nor a family member. I am a privileged white man. But I am not blind. I know the truth. And the truth is: people from communities like yours get sent to prison all the time. No one wants to admit it, but the world is all a hoax designed for someone like you to end up dead or in prison. In so many ways, you are desperately trying to crawl your way out of a morbid obstacle course. Whereas for someone like me, it's a piece of cake. And this is not your fault. It is our fault'. It is he who first speaks to him of 'systemic oppression', 'privilege' and suggests that he use his story to get into the best universities, which, he says, need people like him.

Javier is in. But his life seems quite normal to him, at least among the people he associates with. "Your grandmother would die if you thought of her as a poor, defenceless creature. She is a warrior. She has never asked for charity from anyone. Write this down,' his mother glares at him. She then forces his hand a little, fleshes out his biography and turns it into a pathetic, tear-jerking story. And there he is, catapulted into a renowned university full of people to whom 'the Bronx conjured up images of burning buildings, shootings and car chases, rappers, and a zoo where it was rumoured that animals ran the show'. When he says he is from there he triggers in his interlocutors 'a curious kind of respect', which he begins to take a liking to, although he realises that this does not imply that they want to know him better, or even spend time with him. Not only that, he realises that his image as a 'refugee' can help him win over Anais, on whose Mac stickers are attached ordering: 'Fight the system!', 'Disrupt!', 'Pay your fair share'. He follows her to meetings at the Centre for Latin Excellence (CEL), where rich young people of Latin American descent gather in search of their roots and a battle to justify their privilege. Here they compete to find traces of racism in the smallest gestures, to dissect and dramatise the discomfort that ensues, achieving solidarity and brotherhood. 'I had never seen anyone take something so small and turn it into such drama. What mastery!" remarks Javier sarcastically. The only one from the Bronx, he is the most 'authentic' of them all and eventually wins Anais over. It will be she, along with the CEL meetings and compulsory university sociology lectures on Race and Ethnicity, who will provide him with the vocabulary that starts his career as a professional victim. She will also convince, accusing him of racism, the director of the campus newspaper to make Javier collaborate: the first Latino to write in those columns.

Boryga has now put his protagonist in the same situation as him: all they want from him are those kinds of stories - stories of poverty, despair and redemption. Stories that show the systemic oppression of whites on the Bipoc (Black, indigenous, and people of colour), uplifting stories to be supported and declaimed in order to forget and make people forget their privilege, to feel better. This is what the market has been demanding for some time. Javier panders to it. He becomes more and more unprejudiced and, at the same time, convinced that the simplified and falsified image of the world he propagates is real. His stories - rhetorical, coarse, decidedly caricatured, Boryga here verging on the grotesque, perhaps also to increase the contrast with the real story, Javier's confession -, make him an idol on social media, where he wields the accusation of racism as a weapon to silence dissent, beginning a fulminating career as a columnist and writer, whose catastrophic outcome is revealed to the reader from the very first pages.