Talk:White Anglo-Saxon Protestants

message: I have started a new section for the comment below, which is on a different topic than the discussion above on "term or concept?". --Macrakis (talk) 14:36, 29 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I have a problem with the suggestion that opens this section: "White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs are white American Protestants, generally upper-class and usually of British descent."  There are two groups --by far the most common usage deals with a small powerful white Protestant elite. The term is also used less often to cover 100 million plus Protestants of British descent. Rjensen (talk) 23:43, 28 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Two groups

message: The statement that Andrew Hacker used "WASP" in 1957 with the "w" meaning "wealthy" is entirely false. The Hacker usage clearly used "w" to mean "white."  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:192:80:99D0:708C:7B9C:AF86:4166 (talk) 15:08, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The quote from Hacker is right there in the article:  —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 18:58, 11 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Hacker, 1957

message: I recall a conversation about religion I once had with a native of North Jersey, someone who grew up in the metro region of NY City. He told me that he had no idea what a "Protestant" was until he was an adult, and at one point remarked, "I was over the age of 30 when I realized the majority of Americans aren't Catholic." This has something to do with the fact that New Jersey is one of at least 4 US states where Catholics outnumber Protestants (even as a collective), but also highlights the flaws in the "national culture" mythology: the US does not, in fact, have a "national culture," and certainly no national culture that has much to do with religion. In states like NY, NJ, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the dominant religion is Catholicism; in Utah Mormonism is mainstream while in the Bible Belt it is Evangelical Christianity. At the same time, the prevailing trend in the US as a whole has been secularization, and we are now at a point where nearly 1 in 3 Americans claim no religion at all. So what is the phrase "white dominant culture" supposed to mean in an article where religion is supposed to be a significant ethnic factor?
Another flaw in this piece is that it shifts back and forth from discussing "history" and contemporary society, and it is hard to tell if this subject has retained any relevance in this day and age. It also doesn't help that virtually all the sources used to support the notion of "continued WASP dominance" are rather dated -even the 'younger' sources from the 90s are ~30 years old, or at least published before the country elected its first black president and second Roman Catholic (Biden). I'll grant that during the Bush/Cheney administration it may have seemed that "WASPs" still mattered, but does it really seem like that in 2024?   
Read the Kaufmann source cited in the lead. Kaufmann claims that one-time ethnic minorities matched or surpassed "WASPs" on key socioeconomic factors by 1980, and also cites sociologists who argue for a new "white ethnie" based on pan-European genealogical and cultural traits. He writes that only a minority of white Americans can claim a single European ancestry, and that there was a spike in inter-religious marriages in the postwar decades. And even this source was published 20 years ago. Jonathan f1 (talk) 21:31, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  The "white dominant culture"?