White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) is an informal term, sometimes derogatory or disparaging, for a closed group of high-status Americans of English Protestant ancestry. The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social and financial power. The term WASP does not describe every Protestant of English background, but rather a small restricted group whose family wealth and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few others. When the term appears in writing, it usually indicates the author's disapproval of the group's excessive power in society. The hostile tone can be seen in an alternative dictionary: "The WASP culture has been the most aggressive, powerful, and arrogant society in the world for the last thousand years, so it is natural that it should receive a certain amount of warranted criticism." People seldom call themselves WASPs, except humorously; the acronym is typically used by non-WASPs. Scholars agree that the group's influence has waned since the end of World War II, with the growing influence of Jews, Catholics, African Americans and other former outsiders. The term is also used in Canada and Australia for similar elites. The original WASP elite established the United States, its social structure and significant institutions, existing as the dominant social group beginning in the 17th century when the country's social hierarchy took shape, and lasting into the 1960s, when WASP society gradually began to relinquish national control and retreating amongst themselves, growing reminiscent of a cloistered aristocracy, in what has been termed the "leisure class". Many scholars, including researcher Anthony Smith, argue that nations tend to be formed on the basis of a pre-modern ethnic core that provides the myths, symbols, and memories for the modern nation and that WASPs were indeed that core.[16] WASPs are still considered prominent at prep schools (expensive private high schools, primarily in the Northeast), Ivy League universities, and prestigious liberal arts colleges, such as the Little Ivies or Seven Sisters.[17] Entry to these colleges is based on merit, but there is nonetheless a certain preference for "legacy" alumni. Students learned skills, habits, and attitudes and formed connections which carried over to the influential spheres of finance, culture, and politics.[18] WASP families are often seen as pursuing upscale diversions such as boating, golf, equestrianism, fencing, and yachting — expensive pursuits that need both leisure time and affluence to pursue, and which sociologists such as Thorstein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class) have pointed to as a marker of social standing.[19] Social registers and society pages listed the privileged, who mingled in the same private clubs, attended the same churches, and lived in neighborhoods—Dallas; Nashville; Philadelphia's Main Line and Chestnut Hill neighborhoods; New Jersey's Princeton; Florida's Palm Beach; Fairfield County, Connecticut; the coast of Maine, particularly Bar Harbor; Newport, Rhode Island; Manhattan's Upper East Side; Westchester County, New York; the Hamptons of Long Island; Boston's Beacon Hill; Northern Virginia and Georgetown all in the Washington metropolitan area; Cincinnati's Village of Indian Hill and City of Springboro; Cleveland's Shaker Heights and Village of Bratenahl; Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe, MI; and Chicago's Lake Forest are all examples.[20][21] A common practice of WASP families is presenting their daughters of high school and college age (traditionally at the age of 17 or 18 years old) at a debutante ball, such as The International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. In the Midwest, WASPs were attributed to University of Michigan, Northwestern University, and University of Chicago. In the Detroit area, WASPs dominated the wealth that came from the huge industrial capacity of the automotive industry. After the 1967 Detroit riot, they tended to congregate in the very affluent northern suburbs of Detroit in Oakland County. In Chicago, they are present in neighborhoods such as the North Shore (Chicago). David Brooks, who as a child attended an Episcopal school, writes that WASPs took pride in "good posture, genteel manners, personal hygiene, pointless discipline, the ability to sit still for long periods of time."[22] In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied prominent black singer Marian Anderson permission to sing in Constitution Hall. In the ensuing furor, the president's wife Eleanor Roosevelt publicly resigned from the DAR and arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial before a cheering crowd of 75,000. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant

• published: 26 Jun 2014
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