White Anglo-Saxon Protestant

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) is an informal, sometimes disparaging term for a closed social group of high-status and influential white Americans of English Protestant ancestry. It is also sometimes applied to those of Scottish Protestant, and Irish Protestant ancestry. The term applies to a group who control disproportionate financial, political and social power in the United States.

Scholars agree that the group's influence has waned since the end of World War II in 1945, with the growing influence of other ethnic groups. The term is also used in Australia and Canada for similar elites. The term is occasionally used by sociologists to include all Americans of Northern European ancestry regardless of their class or power. People rarely call themselves WASPs, except humorously. The acronym is typically used by non-WASPs.

Historically, "Anglo-Saxon" referred to the language of indigenous inhabitants of England before about 1150, especially in contrast to French influence after 1066. Since the 19th century it has been in common use in the English-speaking world, but not in Britain itself, to refer to Protestants of English descent. The "W" and "P" were added in the 1950s to form a witty epithet with an undertone of "" (which means a person who is easily irritated and quick to take offense).

The first published mention of the term WASP was provided by political scientist Andrew Hacker in 1957, indicating WASP was already used as common terminology among American sociologists, though the "W" stands for "wealthy" rather than "white":

They are 'WASPs'—in the cocktail party jargon of the sociologists. That is, they are wealthy, they are Anglo-Saxon in origin, and they are Protestants (and disproportionately Episcopalian). To their Waspishness should be added the tendency to be located on the eastern seaboard or around San Francisco, to be prep school and Ivy League educated, and to be possessed of inherited wealth.

The term was popularized by sociologist and University of Pennsylvania professor E. Digby Baltzell, himself a WASP, in his 1964 book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. Baltzell stressed the closed or caste-like characteristic of the group, arguing, "There is a crisis in American leadership in the middle of the twentieth century that is partly due, I think, to the declining authority of an establishment which is now based on an increasingly castelike White-Anglo Saxon-Protestant (WASP) upper class."

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