Blog/2025-07-07/Perpetual Victims

The last few decades have seen us move from a culture where being a winner is cool to one where being a suffering victim is how people express coolness. As a relatively older Millennial, I am typically horrified by what the succeeding generations are up to. And as a South Asian, I am fully aware of the ruthless efficiency by which my people (me included) optimize to prevailing norms.

The ideal combination of these two topics is Zohran Mamdani.

I sit in class not knowing whether to correct everyone’s mispronunciation of an Indian woman’s name. I usually do, but today I’m tired. I’m tired of being one of a few non-white students in a classroom, if not the only one.

— Zohran Mamdani, Bowdoin Orient, 2014

Now that's an 11 year old article and I have written some similarly entertaining stuff on the Internet in the last 10 to 20 years so I wouldn't be bringing it up if it weren't the kind of thing this guy espouses now. What I find confusing is why people tire of being one of the "few non-white students in a classroom". I get that we're all homesick and in fact it's quite pleasant for me to talk about some good old things from India here in America, but I have never tired of being a minority.

America has been a country that has been remarkably good to me. People have been respectful of me as an individual, people have stopped to help me when I've been in trouble, and while many call me Ro-SHAAN (RO-shen is correct), they also struggle with "Wojciech Szczęsny" (as do I) which is a pretty White name. The worst thing that anyone has said to me - not counting SF's homeless - is "oh, your English is perfect!" which is more amusing than insulting.

But at some point in the last few decades, we turned being a victim into some kind of badge of honour. I get this a little. When we were teenagers, being strange or weird was a cool thing. "Oh I have Disorder X" meant you weren't just Standard Project Human but some exotically tuned thing, one of Charles Xavier's mutants. But for most people this went away when we grew up. This is particularly notable when someone has problems on multiple independent axes. One problem is bad luck, two is coincidence, three is self-sabotage.

The astounding thing for me is to hear people describe themselves suffer discrimination here in the US as a result of being South Asian. There is no such thing. People always assume I am smart. The majority of these people are actually probably smarter than me. When I was an intern here in SF, I stayed with a bunch of other kids in a home in Berkeley. These Berkeley undergrads were wicked smart kids - sharper at that age than I was at mine. And they thought that I was smart because I went to IIT.

But if I know my people, I know that we're good at finding the current power structures and exploiting them to the maximum. I hope that America figures out its culture and starts rewarding winners rather than victims because, as a BIPOC, this nation is not ready for the degree to which grievance can be exploited.