[ramesh31]

Go back a few generations for just about every wealthy family in the US, and it's nothing but slave (or highly exploitative) labor building on land and resources stolen from the indians. It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?". The whole "self-made" myth is nothing but a byproduct of white guilt all the way down.

[roarcher]

> It's the uncomfortable answer behind the question of "Why do WASPs own everything?"

The correct answer to that question is "they don't".

[ramesh31]

>The correct answer to that question is "they don't

Read the list and try to find a single non-WASP family: https://www.forbes.com/families/list/

[Isamu]

Hang on, from a quick scan I see Koch is German in origin, Lauder is Hungarian Jewish, Pritzker is Ukranian. [edit] and DuPont is French … etc. I think you meant white, not WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).

[rayiner]

The very first example on your list is the Walton family. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, grew up in nowhere Oklahoma as the child of farmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Walton.

Show me where it says his wealth was built on your “WASP slavery money?”

[cratermoon]

Do you know anything about how Oklahoma was colonized by white farmers?

[rayiner]

Do you know anything about it? Walton’s family wasn’t wealthy plantation owners. Whites who didn’t own slaves—which were the vast majority of them—were hurt by slavery.

[anon291]

Owning a lot of things and owning most of the things is a completely different thing . Obviously people who have more history in a place will be richer. This is hardly surprising.

[mc32]

Not all land was stolen. Much of it was bartered and sold. Tribes also vied for the pelt trade and would drive competing tribes out. The land we took from Mexico was only Spanish and Mexican on paper. Either one had as much control over the Apache/Comanche territory as Russia had over Alaska. Also the Apaches were driven out and nearly exterminated by the Comanche who remembered that they were nearly exterminated by the Apache when they got some stray horses and learned to ride them a century or so prior. The Mexican govt, wanting a buffer against Comanches, invited colonists from eastern states to colonize Texas in order prevent the raiding the Comanches were doing.

That is most of the territory was not under any tribe’s permanent control, nor was land in the west under control of Spain or Mexico before the Americans colonized it. Also lots of tribes were sworn enemies with each other and more than happy to collaborate with Europeans to drive out their enemy tribes with fewer losses to themselves.

[rayiner]

Native Americans were here for tens of thousands of years. If it was so easy to use Indians’ resources to build a civilization, why didn’t the Indians do it?

Your attitude is illogical cope. How could “WASPs” have gotten rich from stealing from a group of people they vastly outnumbered and who were primitive in comparison?

[amanaplanacanal]

They did build a civilization. Which was then ravaged by diseases brought from Europe by the early explorers. By the time Europeans started settling what became the United States the native population was living in what was essentially a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

[rimbo789]

Given all the raping, enslaving, pillaging, and general genociding europeans did upon arrival to North America I don’t think we can say it was the First Nations that were “primitive”

[mc32]

The local tribes were mostly one of two types, the nomadic (ex. Comanche) and the agricultural (Apache). The former would often raid the latter, killing many of the men and taking the women and children --often, but not always, they'd end up being their slaves. So the behavior of the Europeans you describe of the time was not out of the ordinary for the locals.

[pdonis]

If you think those things didn't happen before the Europeans arrived, you need to think again.

[watwut]

They had own civilization. They lost war and were genocided out. And for the record, they had wars against themselves too, just like Europeans had wars against other Europeans.

Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders. Both took quite a lot of time too. Both were quite barbaric from our point of view, but cruelty and violence can be wealth builder. After all, Putin is super wealthy too. Stalin ended up wealthy too. Hitler same deal. There is not much difference in there.

[rayiner]

> Both slavery and territorial expansion by force were wealth builders.

It’s mathematically impossible for American settlers as a group to have become wealthy by expropriating wealth from Indians. Individual Indians had almost nothing—they were hunter gatherers with a small number of subsistence farmers. Nor did they have much wealth in the aggregate—their population was quite small even pre-contact. The America population in the first census was almost 4 million, which is higher than most estimates of even the pre-contact north america population. A more populous society can’t become rich by expropriating wealth from a poor, less populous society. That’s just math.

What actually happened is that the American settlers built a civilization that utilized the resources of the continent vastly more productively than the Indians had. That’s entirely different.

[alex1138]

However, I think the Spanish can certainly be blamed

Some incredibly harrowing stories in Wade Davis's One River

There is also a chance some of the disease giving unto the native americans was by accident, not intentional

[lazide]

Wait, I thought it was the Jews that owned everything?

Or was it the Freemasons?

I can’t even keep track anymore.

I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though - maybe that’s the mind control at work?

[quesera]

> I can’t think of a single WASP billionaire though

Gates, Buffett, Musk ... all spring to mind.

White certainly. Anglo-Saxon doesn't mean much more than "of western/northern european ancestry" any more. Protestant as much as any other non-Catholic Christian sect.

But WASP doesn't mean literally what it means any more, so maybe I'm missing the reason you overlooked the most famous modern American-citizen billionaires?

[rayiner]

OP meant “WASP” in the conventional sense, otherwise his point about slavery wealth doesn’t make sense. There weren’t a lot of German or Italian immigrant slave plantation owners.

[lazide]

So the only thing out of it they actually are is… white?

Hahahaha

[quesera]

I guess it depends on the original poster's intention.

If your point is that people have colloquialized "WASP", and that I fell into your trap, then OK you got me. :)

[lazide]

My point is that the only actual applicability I can see in its usage is just racism.

[quesera]

Your point is kind of boring though.

If OP had asked "why do white people hold most of the wealth in the US", the answer would be the same:

Because they arrived (first) with superior technology and made slaves or serfs (or corpses) out of the indigenous population, and seized the indigenous de facto "ownership" (or at least possession, as de jure is contextually meaningless) of vast natural resources which had previously not been exploited fully due to lack of will or ability.

That plus generational wealth and the miracle of compound interest. (And, critically, the socio-econonomic-political skills for organizing large populations!)

"WASP" was always a pejorative, meaning basically "person from one of the usual countries/cultures". It's a distinctly (originally) American label, and it has always represented the massively-entrenched established power structure.

It has evolved to mean less and less over the years. It now basically means "white, with English-speaking or adjacent ancestry".

It's also less true that true WASPs, or even white people, are the American aristocracy today than it was then. But the echoes are long and deep and hard to miss. I stand by Gates, Buffett, and Musk as modern WASPs, to the extent that the label means anything at all.

[astrange]

Surely Musk isn't a WASP. I think he's from Northern England (don't know why I know this.) You might as well call Paul McCartney a WASP billionaire.

[lazide]

Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad) and Canadian model+dietician (Mom), and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements. His whole family seems not particularly religious.

The extended musk family is from all over, however, including Canada, England, American, etc. but he seems pretty clearly a mongrel.

[quesera]

That's as WASPy as WASPy gets.

It's not important that the specimen is an active Protestant. The point is that their ancestry (with some decent adjacency to: white, anglo-saxon, protestant) landed them in a place of general privilege.

Musk is a WASP by any definition.

But it's always been a pejorative, and always used as a cudgel. Musk is not responsible for his ancestry. But he certainly benefited from it.

[lazide]

Bwahaha. So not Anglo-Saxon. Not Protestant. But somehow he is. But white.

How is this not just blatant racism again?

[astrange]

> Musk was born in South Africa to a wealthy diamond mine owner (Dad)

This is something like ~4 steps away from what happened, to the point it's not true at all. (He was a part owner in an emerald mining operation in another country, it wasn't his main business, and they were middle class.)

Btw when I say from Northern England, I mean by descent, not where he grew up.

Not that I want to get into defending him since he's killed 600k people this year.

> and is a ‘confirmed non believer’ per his own public statements.

That's as Anglican as it gets. It's like a version of Protestantism you're not supposed to believe in.

[lazide]

Cite? I’m just going off publicly available info. If Wikipedia and everything else I’ve read is that far off, I’d love to hear it!