> Palahniuk was hardly the first person to use the metaphor. It's the stuff of self-help books and inspirational posters and elementary school assurances.

> In the 1970s snowflake was a disparaging term for a white man or for a black man who was seen as acting white.

> In Missouri in the early 1860s, a "Snowflake" was a person who was opposed to the abolition of slavery—the implication of the name being that such people valued white people over black people.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/the-less-lovely-sid...