“Please let me be a victim. Please.”

. . . those who consider it a matter of urgency to impress on you at a dinner party that they are, say, “one-sixteenth Cherokee Indian.”

--Christopher Caldwell, Financial Times

Caldwell, obviously unknowingly, captures me exactly. It’s part of his larger argument that the world's well-off—and not just whites, for remember Michelle Obama—are desperate to identify with victims. As Caldwell writes:

• Love and Consequences—the memoir of a half-American Indian girl adopted into a caring but star-crossed black family in gang-infested Los Angeles—was [written by] a 33-year-old, white, middle-class suburbanite named Margaret Seltzer [pictured], the product of private Episcopal schools and various creative writing programmes. She made the whole thing up. Scandals over made-up memoirs are becoming epidemic.

• Last week, Misha Defonseca admitted that Misha, her international bestseller about fleeing the Holocaust as a young Jewish girl in Belgium, was invented. So was her Jewish identity. Her book joins a list that includes a memoir of childhood in the Majdanek and Birkenau concentration camps by “Binjamin Wilkomirski” (a story made up by the Swiss Protestant clarinettist Bruno Dössekker); Norma Khouri’s account of honour killings in Jordan that did not actually happen; and James Frey’s alcoholism “memoir” Millions of Little Pieces. What is at the root of this rash of fabrications?

• Various anti-racisms and victimologies provide the only rock-solid consensus morality that society has. But there is a problem with a moral system based on the injustices wrought by one class of people on another—not all people can participate in it with equal moral authority [emphasis added].

• Seltzer. . . needed black gangstas to make her voice heard, not the other way around. People are intensely interested in the inner lives of American inner-city gang members. Rap music. . . has a large paying following in virtually every country in the world. The same cannot be said of the cultural products of white, middle-class creative-writing students from the San Fernando Valley. {As] Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times asked: “How many talk shows would have booked Seltzer if she had forthrightly admitted she was a white writer of imaginative fiction with a social conscience that impelled her to write about gang life in South Los Angeles?”

• [Seltzer] was doing the same thing that immigrants did a century ago when they changed their names . . . bartering away a bit of her identity in order to be taken more seriously. She was concealing, as best she could, her membership in a low-prestige ethnicity in order that she might participate on a more equal footing in the national conversation.