Definition of "WASP"
WASP
noun
plural WASPs
(US) Initialism of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, a member of the supposed ruling class of America.
Quotations
Joseph Alsop, the acerbic columnist she married in 1961, called his crowd “the ever-diminishing group of survivors of the WASP ascendancy.” It was a world of perfect manners and closely held power, not hugs and meaningful exchanges.
1993 October 31, Maureen Dowd, quoting Joseph Alsop, “The WASP Descendancy”, in The New York Times
We once had a coherent ruling class, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs), who more or less owned and ran the United States from its founding through the 1970s. Based largely in the Northeast, with offshoots in the Upper Midwest, WASPs went to the same elite schools and colleges, belonged to the same clubs, married out of the same pool, and vacationed in the same favorite rural retreats. There were Southern WASPs, descendants of the slave-owning gentry, but they never had the social weight of their northern relatives—although they did rule their region and enjoy an outsized role in Congress for decades.
2021, Doug Henwood, “Take Me to Your Leader: The Rot of the American Ruling Class”, in Jacobin