General Discussions

[DJC]

Apart from the SEN listener’s stereotyping of Jewish folk, there’s also his notion that Jewish football followers should change their allegiance  for ethnoreligious reasons.  How offensive is that to families like the Pratts, Smorgons, and Gutnicks, as well my former Jewish battler colleague who would walk from Albert Park to VFL Park to watch his beloved Navy Blues?

Stereotyping, positive or negative is based on false premises and reinforces the wrong belief that ethnoreligious affiliations determines behaviour, characteristics, capacity, morals, intelligence, etc.

And that brings me to WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; a label applied to an ethnoreligious group who are the white, male, upper-class, American Protestant historical elite.  The Anglo-Saxon part (and there isn’t and never has been an Anglo-Saxon ethic group) should really be northwestern European.  It doesn’t include political elites like the Kennedy clan because of their religion and it doesn’t include the vast majority of Americans of northwestern European descent who have little political and financial clout.

Our historical political elite was originally of British descent, reflecting the make up of invaders/colonisers but Catholicism wasn’t the barrier to influence that it was in Britain.  Migration, diverse religions, the union movement and the absence of a strict class system has eroded elitism to more of a gender qualification.

Referring to white Australians of northwestern European descent as WASPs is incorrect, stereotypical and bigotry.