What does the acronym W.A.S.P stand for?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Quiz Show
Howlin Wolf — 21 years ago(February 18, 2005 03:30 AM)
Forgive me for asking such a potentially dumb question; but almost every review I've seen of the film mentions it in relation to Charles Van Doren, and I literally have
no
idea
W
hite
A
merican _
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rofessional??
There's definitely something rustling behind your curtain -
Mister_Anderson — 19 years ago(January 23, 2007 01:17 AM)
It is White Anglo Saxon Protestant, as the one poster stated.
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MrAleisterCrowley — 12 years ago(November 04, 2013 03:39 PM)
Yes, as the earlier poster noted, it DEFINITELY stands for "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant." The "Protestant" part differentiated persons of English heritage vs. say Irish heritage (Catholic). This has been around for some time in the U.S., and there are usually class and geographic implications the stereotype is that "wasps" are upper middle class, often educated at Ivy League institutions, and they (stereotypically) live in New England. Of course the term is applied more loosely in pop culture but that is the traditional understanding of the term.
There is actually a Wikipedia entry on "white Anglo Saxon Protestant" that is helpful.
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MJC4861 — 14 years ago(November 25, 2011 03:59 PM)
For what it's worth, the Walton family of Bentonville, Arkansas are America's richest family and they are White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestants. For the most part, WASPS still run things in this country, Jews are the smartest and richest minority, and we finally have an African-American President living in the White House. We are just a freer and less restrictive society fifty-odd years after the Quiz Show scandal.
When Charles van Doren was on television, it was illegal in most states for blacks to marry whites, and the only hispanics in the country worked for the most part in migrant fields in California.
By the way, van Doren was already married at the time he was nationally exposed as a fraud, to Geraldine Bernstein, the niece of the Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein. Talk about an irony. And his mother Dorothy van Doren was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, the nation's most vocal advocate of Jewish causes. But it does not seem surprising that Herbert Stempel would have so much animosity towards him, especially when Jewish executives at NBC relished putting van Doren on a pedestal.