It originates in the US, the same as terms like "people of colour" and so on. There was a
interesting article the other day by Shelby Steele, in which she said,
Whites need blacks they can save to prove their innocence of racism. Blacks must put themselves forward as victims the better to make their case for entitlements.
This is a corruption because it makes black suffering into a moral power to be wielded, rather than a condition to be overcome. This is the power that blacks discovered in the ’60s. It gained us a War on Poverty, affirmative action, school busing, public housing and so on. But it also seduced us into turning our identity into a virtual cult of victimization—as if our persecution was our eternal flame, the deepest truth of who we are, a tragic fate we trade on. After all, in an indifferent world, it may feel better to be the victim of a great historical injustice than a person left out of history when that injustice recedes.
Yet there is an elephant in the room. It is simply that we blacks aren’t much victimized any more. Today we are free to build a life that won’t be stunted by racial persecution. Today we are far more likely to encounter racial preferences than racial discrimination. Moreover, we live in a society that generally shows us goodwill—a society that has isolated racism as its most unforgivable sin.
This lack of victimization amounts to an “absence of malice” that profoundly threatens the victim-focused black identity. Who are we without the malice of racism? Can we be black without being victims?
Being in Australia and white, I can't speak to the assertion that blacks aren't victimised much any more. But whether they are or not, it's easy to see from America's cultural exports that being a victim is part of many blacks' identities, and blacks being victims is part of many whites' culture - so they can be saviours, even if all they do to "save" them is delete comments on Facebook or rpg.net.
So then you get comfortable middle class white kids who look at all that, and at some point shortly after adolescence realise that actually they are not that unique and special. "But perhaps if I were a victim then I could be special?" This led to that Rachel Dolezal pretending to be black, an act which even a decade later is considered insultingly - dare I say it? -
transgressive, even though it was once an act of white liberalism written up in a book and widely-praised -
Black Like Me.
Anyway, back to our angsty middle-class white kid. "Okay, so who are still victims? Well, gays are a bit, they get AIDS and people hate them... no, wait, it's not the 1980s anymore, and in fact they can even marry... which group can I become a member of who is at least
a bit shunned by society and victimised?"
That's also why we get a bunch of lost Westerners running off to join radical Islamic groups - and they're more likely to be the ones turning up as terrorists, joining ISIS, etc. They have to prove something to themselves. They don't actually give a damn about Allah, they just like that victim-identity thing the radical Islamists have going on. It's also why a rising number of people claim to have been sexually assaulted.
Taking this back to social media: it's easier to bullshit people online than in person, and it's also easier to find fruit loops. In the old days if 1 in 1,000 people thought like you, you could go your whole life without meeting another one. Nowadays if it's 1 in 1
million you can organise a convention of 300 of you just in the United States, and your internet forum or Lamebook group will have 8,000 people commenting on it, and they'll tell you they know
thousands of people like them, and before you know it there are 16,000 commenting. Then Oprah or Tucker mention you online and suddenly the fucking
Huffington Post or Fox News are doing stories about you, blah blah.
Before you know it there's a midwestern university with a Chair of Fruit Loop studies, and of course it spreads out from the US and across the world online and in media.