> 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?
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.
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.
My white grandparents were poor Norwegian farmers that immigrated to North Dakota.
They benefitted about as much from what you’re describing as a modern day Nigerian immigrant was punished by it.
This is why racism is stupid and boring, because it tells you nothing useful. It’s a pointlessly broad brush to vilify or prop up someone.
Which is exactly why racism is stupid and bad. And why WASP as it is being used in this thread is self-contradictory and doesn’t even mean anything concrete except ‘white’, as has been demonstated with the various replies.
All this does is just prop up the Nazi types who can point to this kind of stupidity and go ‘see, this is why it’s good we fight back - white power’.
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.
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.
WASP was always a pejorative way of saying "established white European-ancestry American aristocracy".
It never applied to poor white people. It is just a label for the most common and most established phenotype in early America, up to and including the mid-20th century.
The label has lost salience over the intervening decades, but it has not faded down to be lost in the ambient level of population wealth and power.
> 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.
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?