It always starts sideways. I’m talking about whatever else, and on two short steps, I find myself arguing about minorities and politics. I believe it is one of the risks of talking to me: having been a migrant pretty much all of my life, and in different countries at that, it is an issue that matters to me. I hope not to be monomaniacal about it, but I do admire the patience that my friends have with me. For better or for worse, then, after a life reading and talking about migration I’m kinda expert in the discussion. Yet it keep changing.
Snowflakes are the last group brought into it.
Snowflakes are people, apparently millenials, that in their entitlement they can’t bear any criticism, are oversensitive and need absurd spaces for personal expression. Or so my friends believe. Frequently my friends end up arguing that snowflakes should toughen up, or at least don’t complain that much, since they should just bear society as it is, instead of asking for unreal and extreme conditions to coddle their weird tastes and preferences. In the more political formulation of the same position, diversity policy is doomed to end up in identitarian politics, which, if I understand correctly, will tear appart the society, since it aims at create conditions for groups to isolated from each other, destroying the society as we know it.
I am always taken by surprise by this turn of arguments.
The thing is that minorities are, as far as I am aware, anything but snowflakes. I don’t believe that anybody will, in 2021, deny that discrimination exists. So anybody that is member of a minority is not oversensitive about exclusion, it has suffer it most of his or her life, in many aspects and forms. In a way this “thoughen up” message is what men have been telling women about sexists jokes, and pats in the ass, for the last two hundred years: don’t be so sensitive about it! Going back to the formal argument... by definition we are indeed a minority, we are not most of the people. So we are indeed asking for a change of the many to support the few. Because after all, that is what democracy is. Not simply the rule of the mayority. That is just another form of tyranny, as already Stuart John Mills argued in 1859. That is why any modern democracy has a bill of rights, precisely to protect minorities from the abuse of the many.
And this, for me, is the biggest joke. My friends that look at me with that knowing smile, and think of my politics of arguing and demanding for more space for minorities as a sort of snowflakedness and oversensitivity, tend to be at the right side of my politics, in the traditional liberal corner. But precisely the father of all liberals, J. Stuart Mills is the one that argued extensively about the danger of the rule of the mayority, the tyranny of the masses, and the need of preventing the many to oppress the few.
It turn out that my politics of diversity is as liberal as it can get.
The most liberal you can get is when you also see as part of your perspective this case: the minority of one, just one person. It dillutes identitary things... and I don't mean that any group of people may not have the right to assemble; on the contrary, individuals and groups of individuals have interests and they may pursue them as long as they don't break laws, legitimate and non-discriminatory laws.