Victim Cred
Cory Clark writes at Quillette about the evolutionary advantages of playing the victim: how there are benefits to be accrued by casting oneself as wounded.

Victimhood is defined in negative terms: "the condition of having been hurt, damaged, or made to suffer." Yet humans have evolved to empathize with the suffering of others, and to provide assistance so as to eliminate or compensate for that suffering. Consequently, signaling suffering to others can be an effective strategy for attaining resources. Victims may receive attention, sympathy, and social status, as well as financial support and other benefits. And being a victim can generate certain kinds of power: It can justify the seeking of retribution, provide a sense of legitimacy or psychological standing to speak on certain issues, and may even confer moral impunity by minimizing blame for victims' own wrongdoings.

Presumably, most victims would eagerly forego such benefits if they were able to free themselves of their plight. But when victimhood yields benefits, it incentivizes people to signal their victimhood to others or to exaggerate or even fake victimhood entirely. This is especially true in contexts that involve alleged psychic harms, and where appeals are made to third-parties, with the claimed damage often being invisible, unverifiable, and based exclusively on self-reports. Such circumstances allow unscrupulous people to take advantage of the kindness and sympathy of others by co-opting victim status for personal gain. And so, people do.

Newly published research indicates that people who more frequently signal their victimhood (whether real, exaggerated, or false) are more likely to lie and cheat for material gain and denigrate others as a means to get ahead. Victimhood signaling is associated with numerous morally undesirable personality traits, such as narcissism, Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate and exploit others for self-benefit), a sense of entitlement, and lower honesty and humility.

Scholars from the Immorality Lab at the University of British Columbia created a victim-signaling scale that measures how frequently people tell others of the disadvantages, challenges, and misfortunes they suffer. Those who scored higher on this victim-signaling scale were found to be more likely to virtue-signal--to outwardly display signs of virtuous moral character--while simultaneously placing less importance on their own moral identity. In other words, victim signalers were more interested in looking morally good but less interested in being morally good than those who less frequently signal their victimhood.

...In general, people reward victimhood signaling. For example, one study found that participants reported greater willingness to donate to a GoFundMe page for a young woman in need of college tuition when she also mentioned her difficult upbringing, as compared to a control case in which no extra details of past suffering were provided. In many cases, such a result is morally desirable: We want people to help those who have suffered and who are in greater need. However, when it is known that people can attain benefits by projecting certain biographical information, opportunists may be incentivized to exaggerate or falsely signal their own troubles.

An example of this is the Chicano studies or black studies scholars who get found out to be, say, a girl who grew up in a privileged Jewish home: as in, not "Chicano" or black in the slighest!

When opportunity knocks based on skin color and origin, suddenly, well, Rachel Dolezal types get their nerd on.

Cory winds up with this:

Historically, our ancestors may have been better able to discern habitual or false victim signalers from those in true need. We lived in smaller communities where we tended to know what was happening, and to whom--and so those who deceived others were at higher risk of getting caught.

In modern, affluent societies, by contrast, people can signal their difficult-to-verify suffering to thousands or more strangers online. Although genuine victims may benefit in such environments (because they can spread awareness of their plight, and solicit support, on a large scale), manipulative individuals inevitably will use the same mass-broadcast tools to extract resources and possibly even initiate a cycle of competitive victimhood that infects everyone. Those who most vociferously declare their victimhood to others may often be villains instead.