[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.

[lazide]

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’.

[quesera]

You appear to be on some kind of crusade here. I don't understand it, or your goals or intentions.

We can agree that racism is stupid and boring. But it's still real, and has had a great deal of influence.

If you think I'm propping up Nazis by acknowledging that "WASP" and general white privilege exist, then well, all I can say is that we live on different comprehensive planets.

[lazide]

So let me recap.

Your plan here is to lump a bunch of people together by skin color (but with labels theoretically only tangentially related to skin color), and blame them for a bunch of stuff most don’t really benefit from - near as I can tell, for instance, Musk made his fortune by having rich parents and being a manipulative asshole, and being white only helped a little bit - and you don’t expect a portion of them to lose their minds and fight back.

And those people, by your assertion, have most of the guns, power, and money.

How do you think that is going to work out? Do you think it is helping to calm anything down, or result in a more reasonable outcome?

And do you think that regardless of the size or quantity of bodies fed into the resulting meat grinder that Musk would suffer one bit for it, for example?

Or is this not actually helping him? By turning idiots to his side?

[quesera]

I have no plan. I didn't create the label. And it's not a robustly defined sociological group anyway. It's just a popular label that got applied to real and very visible thing.

Musk was born in South Africa under apartheid. Do you think his life would not be very different if he was born with different skin?

Historically, yes, white males of (select) Euro descent have wielded disproportionate power in America. Do you disagree?!?

Your plan, then, is to hide from that obvious truth because some Nazi nitwits will be so stupid as to either a) use that historical fact as a basis for their belief of how things should be now, or b) use the fact that some people are still living the effects of that history, and their lack of enthusiasm for that fact, as reason to "fight back"?

Honestly I think either of those reactions would be to coddle the Nazis. No one is served by lying about history.

Some nitwits will always interpret history in a way that serves their purposes. But their purposes are more demanding than the facts that they use to support them, and they don't care. There will always be Nazis (or adherents to some similarly absurd and evil system with a different name). Their justification for their beliefs is the only thing that will change.

[lazide]

Sounds like you should start working on a plan, since the same folks you seem insistent on antagonizing are the same people whose protection you are probably dependent on.

There is such a thing as being ‘dead right’, eh?

So, what is your plan?

[quesera]

Seriously, what the hell are you talking about?

I'm not antagonizing anyone, except possibly you (and in ways I have not been able to figure out -- What's your damage, Heather?).

If "white people have done bad things" is enough to start a race war (or whatever you are obliquely suggesting), than it's not I who will be the trigger.

I get the sense that you are hyper hyper sensitive to the word WASP. It never meant much, and isn't worth your time.