Following the charge of the ‘woke brigade’

In Hannah Jewell expertly demonstrates why the dismissal of young people as silly little cry-babies is a colossal arrogance. By

Although the differences between people with conservative views and those with liberal leanings have never in living memory been more pronounced than in the past few years, there seems to be one thing people on opposite ends of the political spectrum have in common: a deep and unshakable disdain for snowflakes.

“Snowflake” is a word used to refer to people who others think are easily offended or upset. It is noted as derogatory in at least one dictionary – which means that when someone calls someone else a snowflake, they mean to insult them.

In her book We Need Snowflakes, the proudly snowflakey Washington Post video reporter Hannah Jewell explains that snowflakes are seen as simultaneously fragile – “weak, coddled and mentally frail” – and very dangerous – to freedom of speech, to tradition, to the old-fashioned culture of suck-it-up-no-matter-how-bad-it-is.

“They make up a mob, but a mob of wussies,” she says.

Think of students protesting about statues and fees, and certain people are bound to tut. Snowflakes are usually young and educated (or trying to be), generally feel themselves to be powerless, but are indignant about wrongs so old that they’ve acquired a veneer of respectability.

A snowflake does not bow to the geriatric injustices and, although they can seldom undo ancient wrongdoing by talking about it, they refuse to keep quiet about it the way generations before them did. Snowflakes are breaking various codes of shut-up-and-put-up. For this, they are seen as non-resilient and whiny.

Jewell’s book has not received positive responses in traditional media but is very much liked in online consumer reviews.

This reflects what seems like an unshakable truth of current culture wars: those wanting snowflakes to toughen up are uninterested in what snowflakes have to say; but they are very interested in how snowflakes communicate inappropriately.

Snowflake haters, rather than deal with the thorny topics that underlie snowflake protests about anything at all, prefer to mock and ridicule or fulminate over how young people speak. It’s not about what snowflakes say, so much as how they say it, that riles their critics.

The same is true for the critics of Jewell’s book, who all take her to task for her lack of temperance in writing.

Jewell’s tone is biting and sarcastic and funny and even her title seems to warn snowflake haters away from her book.

Where she stands on the matter is not a secret, nor does she attempt to pull the wool over the reader’s eyes by pretending to present a balanced view on the matter of whether it’s okay to deride snowflakes for their many (often imagined) misdemeanours against the very fabric of society. It’s absolutely not okay, she says.

Wholesale dismissal of young people as silly little cry-babies is a colossal arrogance that indicates a firm refusal to engage with the reasons they might be crying, or shouting, or calling you out for your bad jokes.

If the book’s purpose was to convince snowflake haters to be a little more accommodating, she probably failed before she even sat down to write. And yet, I hope that people who worry about trigger warnings, safe spaces, wokeness and cancel culture will take a deep breath and dive into this accessible book to look at what – other than just fragile, spoiled young people – could be blamed for the generational and attitudinal rifts.

Does it really come down to free speech versus hurt feelings? Do students really make a big fuss over nothing, or could it be that traditional media make big fusses over nothing?

The reporting on several cases of what is seen as preposterous snowflakery – including the famous case of Oxford students “demanding” that audiences use jazz hands instead of clapping to spare sensitive types – indicate that if there is a dearth of anything at all, it is the journalistic tradition of fact checking.

In the Oxford clapping case, the Student Union’s vice-president for welfare and equal opportunities, Róisin McCallion, had been approached by the chair of the union’s disabilities campaign about seconding a motion to encourage the use of British Sign Language clapping. Some students with hearing aids couldn’t hear due to ringing after the applause at every motion’s passing at student meetings and had stopped going to

The Blinded City: Ten Years In Inner-City Johannesburg by Matthew Wilhelm-Solomon recounts the history of inner-city Joburg from 2010 to 2019, primarily from the perspectives of the unlawful occupiers of spaces known as hijacked buildings, bad buildings or dark buildings. Tens of thousands of residents, both South African and foreign national, live in these buildings in dire conditions. This book tells the story of these sites and the court cases about them, which strike at the centre of who has the right to occupy the city. R330 in the DM Shop.

My Land Obsession: A Memoir by Bulelwa Mabasa. Mabasa was born into a “matchbox” family home in Meadowlands, Soweto, at the height of apartheid. In this memoir, she shares her Christian upbringing, framed by the experiences of her grandparents, who endured land dispossession under the Group Areas Act and the migrant labour system. R330 in the DM Shop.

Hitler, Verwoerd, Mandela and Me: A Memoir of Sorts by Marianne Thamm. Thamm delves into her unconventional life story: her German father fought for Hitler and made munitions for Hendrik Verwoerd. He married her largely illiterate Portuguese mother, who had worked as a cleaner in England. Today, Thamm is the proud mother of two (black) teenagers… Hers is the story of the last century, of the defeat of bigotry and a new era ushered in by Nelson Mandela. Sad at times, deeply moving and, like Thamm, very entertaining. R250 in the DM Shop. meetings. Seeing this as a disability accessibility issue, McCallion agreed.

“My view was,” she told the author, “if some of our disabled students don’t feel that they can come to council, that’s bad. Disabled people are underrepresented in politics, and I want to make our political system at the university as accessible as possible.”

This action – which seems like a forward-thinking, rational course for making student politics accessible to all students – was hysterically reinterpreted by the press as wanting to ban clapping and enforce “jazz hands” at public events.

None of this was reported in mainstream media, which preferred to lament how delicate and pathetic students had become.

Jewell’s book provides an insightful antidote to headlines that play on the trope of the delicate, lazy and easily offended young person. Younger generations are far more resilient, creative and resourceful than they’re given credit for, Jewell demonstrates.

Simply writing people off as “snowflakes” in the “woke brigade”, is an assumption that says more about the speaker than about so-called snowflakes.