Hey, who you calling a snowflake?!
By Nicole Nutting
Funny, isn’t it, how a perfectly ordinary word suddenly gets catapulted into the limelight as the latest slang term. The word “snowflake” achieved notoriety in 2016 during the presidential campaign as a pejorative to describe Liberals. The thrust was to demean the socially aware individuals who bristle at anything “politically incorrect”, implying that those people are just too sensitive and fragile. This is the view of our current “ruling class”, the ubiquitous White male.
We all likely remember CNN pundit Van Jones on election night, stunned and shaken at the outcome, proclaiming “This is White-lash”. Of course, there were many competing analyses to explain Trump’s win—economic anxiety, West Virginia coal miners, uneducated voters, whatever. No one else wanted to admit then that racism was a determining factor, but I believe Jones nailed it, bluntly and spontaneously.
There is a powerful quote, original author unknown, that describes what today’s Resistance is up against: WHEN YOU ARE ACCUSTOMED TO PRIVILEGE, EQUALITY FEELS LIKE OPPRESSION. Eight years of Obama was just too much for those old boys, a prolonged assault on their presumed superiority. Never mind that all Americans who are NOT straight, able-bodied, White Christian males have been oppressed their entire lives to some degree or another.
Perspective is everything, apparently, so here we are—the crux of our country’s divisiveness is White Male Privilege. They will do ANYTHING to keep it. They will lie, cheat, steal and kill to maintain the upper hand. Their racism is more deeply entrenched than their Christianity, so they even consider hypocrisy an acceptable path to continued dominance.
There is a historical reference to political use of the word “snowflake” discovered by Emily Brewster, associate editor at Merriam-Webster. In Missouri in the early 1860’s, on the brink of the Civil War, those who were opposed to the abolition of slavery were called snowflakes. The snowflake reference described their preference for Whites over Blacks. Today, almost 160 years later, Liberal snowflakes haven’t melted, but White Nationalists are painfully sensitive to their fragile position.
Awww, poor babies—so who’s the “snowflake” NOW?!
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