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.
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).
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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”
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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’.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
AFAICT, you intentionally goaded this thread into a dissection of WASP-vs-white, which serves zero purpose except to give you a chance to espouse something which you still haven't done, but strikes me as likely to be pretty boring after all of this.
> 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.
