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主题:美国WASP统治的衰落? -- 晨枫

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  • 家园 美国WASP统治的衰落?

    新加坡《联合早报》上我最喜欢看的专栏作家于时雨新近写了一篇美国盎格鲁·萨克逊族群统治的衰落,提出一些有意思的观点。他的主要论据是:

    1、最高法院法官第一次全部是非WASP,九名大法官中,六位是天主教徒,三名是犹太人(包括新人卡根)。

    2、黑人总统奥巴马以下,美国宪法规定总统死亡或者无法履行责任时的替补序列:先是副总统“扶正”,现任副总统拜登是罗马天主教徒;再后是众议院议长,现任议长佩洛西也是罗马天主教徒;再下是参议院临时主席(President pro tempore),目前是夏威夷州日裔参议员井上建(Daniel Inouye);一直要到第四名,才轮到可以算是WASP的国务卿希拉里·克林顿。

    3、美国参议院多数党领袖哈里·里德是摩门教徒,众议院少数党领袖博纳(John Boehner)是罗马天主教徒,都不属于WASP族群。

    4、《华尔街日报》月前引用调查,囊括WASP的美国基督教新教徒人口中,只有21%家庭年收入超过10万美元,同一比例在犹太族群中是46%,在代表性的亚裔中也超过了40%。在金权主义的美利坚,这一经济现实的含义不言而喻。

    他认同哈佛法学院的犹太裔教授费尔德曼(Noah Feldman)的看法,认为这“乾坤倒转”开始于是二次大战前后开始主导美国“上层建筑”的“精英统治”(meritocracy,或译“能人统治”)原则。常春藤名校对非WASP开放,开放了天主教徒、犹太人的upward social mobility的通道。这倒是事实。电影《烈火战车》讲的是英国,但牛津、剑桥和常春藤差不多,也曾经是WASP的老窝,而且是男人WASP的地盘。现在看这电影,觉得有时光倒转的感觉。

    美国WASP的衰落对美国国运有什么影响,是很有意思的一个话题。

    通宝推:我们的田野,
    • 家园 天主教的reproductivity终于再一次改写了历史

      什么影响?想想为什么美国七十年代流行性解放,带来的又是个什么结果,现在世界上哪些国家的三级影视业最发达。

      政治归根结底是数量的游戏,数量才能带来多样性,带来对封闭式系统的冲击,带来系统自身的进化压力,所谓高教育理念下的质量只是一个次要补充,长期看根本不拥有决定意义。

      美国的国运倒还在其次,美国的变化对世界的意义在于这是一面未来的影子,就当美国是小白鼠了,不过到现在为止世界大多数地区还是很熱心与美国比较的,这已经很说明问题了。

    • 家园 于时语就是个大美分,真的拿美分的

      我曾经头天看他发文说中国应该在南海保持克制,隔几天他就写篇文建议中国加入阿富汗战场。同样是海外军事行动,反差却这么大。

    • 家园 刚读了《纽约时报》上的一篇很有意思的文章同这个主题有关

      The Roots of White Anxiety

      By ROSS DOUTHAT

      Published: July 18, 2010

      In March of 2000, Pat Buchanan came to speak at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Harvard being Harvard, the audience hissed and sneered and made wisecracks. Buchanan being Buchanan, he gave as good as he got. While the assembled Ivy Leaguers accused him of homophobia and racism and anti-Semitism, he accused Harvard — and by extension, the entire American elite — of discriminating against white Christians.

      A decade later, the note of white grievance that Buchanan struck that night is part of the conservative melody. You can hear it when Glenn Beck accuses Barack Obama of racism, or when Rush Limbaugh casts liberal policies as an exercise in “reparations.” It was sounded last year during the backlash against Sonia Sotomayor’s suggestion that a “wise Latina” jurist might have advantages over a white male judge, and again last week when conservatives attacked the Justice Department for supposedly going easy on members of the New Black Panther Party accused of voter intimidation.

      To liberals, these grievances seem at once noxious and ridiculous. (Is there any group with less to complain about, they often wonder, than white Christian Americans?) But to understand the country’s present polarization, it’s worth recognizing what Pat Buchanan got right.

      Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class.

      This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.

      This may be a money-saving tactic. In a footnote, Espenshade and Radford suggest that these institutions, conscious of their mandate to be multiethnic, may reserve their financial aid dollars “for students who will help them look good on their numbers of minority students,” leaving little room to admit financially strapped whites.

      But cultural biases seem to be at work as well. Nieli highlights one of the study’s more remarkable findings: while most extracurricular activities increase your odds of admission to an elite school, holding a leadership role or winning awards in organizations like high school R.O.T.C., 4-H clubs and Future Farmers of America actually works against your chances. Consciously or unconsciously, the gatekeepers of elite education seem to incline against candidates who seem too stereotypically rural or right-wing or “Red America.”

      This provides statistical confirmation for what alumni of highly selective universities already know. The most underrepresented groups on elite campuses often aren’t racial minorities; they’re working-class whites (and white Christians in particular) from conservative states and regions. Inevitably, the same underrepresentation persists in the elite professional ranks these campuses feed into: in law and philanthropy, finance and academia, the media and the arts.

      This breeds paranoia, among elite and non-elites alike. Among the white working class, increasingly the most reliable Republican constituency, alienation from the American meritocracy fuels the kind of racially tinged conspiracy theories that Beck and others have exploited — that Barack Obama is a foreign-born Marxist hand-picked by a shadowy liberal cabal, that a Wall Street-Washington axis wants to flood the country with third world immigrants, and so forth.

      Among the highly educated and liberal, meanwhile, the lack of contact with rural, working-class America generates all sorts of wild anxieties about what’s being plotted in the heartland. In the Bush years, liberals fretted about a looming evangelical theocracy. In the age of the Tea Parties, they see crypto-Klansmen and budding Timothy McVeighs everywhere they look.

      This cultural divide has been widening for years, and bridging it is beyond any institution’s power. But it’s a problem admissions officers at top-tier colleges might want to keep in mind when they’re assembling their freshman classes.

      If such universities are trying to create an elite as diverse as the nation it inhabits, they should remember that there’s more to diversity than skin color — and that both their school and their country might be better off if they admitted a few more R.O.T.C. cadets, and a few more aspiring farmers.

      • 家园 多谢,正在拜读
        • 家园 这是NYT网站上一些读者对这篇文章的回复

          纽约时报的读者以自由派为主,因此可以算是另一面的看法。对这个问题,我没有什么自己的观点。不过从这些评论里,我觉得美国现在自由派与保守派之间的鸿沟确实越来越深。双方都视对方为怪物,不可理喻。如果这种情况长久持续下去,不是美国之福。

          评论1

          Having taught at a state university, a private college, and a community college over the past 15 years, and having raised four children through the public school system in four different states, I can affirm what many others are saying in their responses to this column: the lack of white, middle class Christian students in many of our universities is due to their parents' preference for quiet, Christian colleges where their children will only be exposed to points of views similar to their own. There is not enough space in the comment section for me to tell all about students who refuse to watch certain films, read certain books, or participate in certain activities where I've taught because it's against their Christian upbringing. If the word evolution comes up in any context, I've seen adult students cover their ears, close their eyes, and shake their heads in denial. So, let's not blame the so-called elite colleges for not admitting more white, rural, Christian students into their institutions. Let's place the blame where it belongs: on the students and their parents who would never consider these schools for fear that it might interrupt or - God forbid - change their way of thinking.

          评论2

          Universities genuinely strive to create diverse classes and campuses because we recognize that what a student contributes to his or her community is greater than what is reflected by SAT scores. I work as a faculty member at a selective state school and I participate in admissions. I certainly can't speak for all schools, but I know that we assiduously consider a huge range of factors. We look at everything that puts a student's scores in context. I personally divide these into two categories: factors that show the student's individuality, and factors that suggest the student may have had to work harder for the same marks as someone else - meaning that those scores actually mean more about the student's aptitude and potential. I look at factors like parental education and income, whether the student had to work full time during high school, whether he or she had to support a parent or sibling, or had to overcome addiction within the family. When I see that a student had to work full time to help contribute to a single-parent family, and that he or she still maintained a strong GPA, that GPA score means much more to me than the same score achieved by a student who had nothing else to do (nothing else obligatory, at least) other than school work. In my own experience, I find this "favors" - although that misuses the term - many students from immigrant families. This is not because of a racial preference. It is because an intensely hard-working young person simply is the better candidate and the better bet for future success than the not-so-hardworking young person.

          I doubt your analysis of the numbers, and I doubt that the blame for perceived exclusion has as much to do with admission to higher education as with the hysteria that frequently accompanies shifts in privilege.

          What I don't doubt is that many lower to middle-income white Christians that used to have an automatic preference over racial minorities (if not over affluent white Christians) feel that the world has changed significantly now that access to privilege is more closely aligned with merit. That's right: It has changed. For everyone.

          评论3

          As a secular liberal homeschooling mom in Indiana, where most of the homeschoolers (and therefore most of my friends) are much, much more conservative, rural, and religious than I am, I think of myself as a liberal who knows enough about conservatives not to be afraid on a new Timothy McVeigh every time I see a farmer. Let me hasten to reassure Mr. Brooks that even should Harvard fling her doors wide to rural whites, few rural whites will care to step inside. Most of the moms I know, homeschoolers or otherwise, want their kids to go to state universities for two reasons - it is always considerably cheaper to be an in-state student, and it keeps kids close to home so they will be more likely to settle down nearby & keep up the all-important family ties. You don't understand 'working class conservatives' at ALL if you don't recognize the primary importance of family in these decisions.

    • 家园 此文为何不宝推。管中窥豹,水滴石穿

      管中窥豹,水滴石穿,这才是中华文明千年不倒的真谛!

      另补一句:小弟也是于时语的同好,关注于时语的评论很多年了 附于时语的专栏

      http://www.zaobao.com/special/forum/forum_zp.shtml

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    • 家园 BillGates、SteveJobs等是否是WASP?

      我很想知道这些人是不是WASP:

      Bill Gates

      Steve Jobs

      Henry Ford

      John Rockefeller

      、、、、、、

      另外,Warren Buffett应该不是WASP?

      • 家园 check a few things

        1. family name

        2. family history

        3. parents socioeconomic status

        4. one's high-school name

        5. one's university name

        6. one's own political/social/economic achievement

        7. previous working experience/positions

        8. current association/club membership

        9. status of opinion leader in his or her industry cycle.

        Sometimes you can even judge by how they dress. They dress differently, very differnt from Frenchpeople, Canadians and mid-land Americans.

        • 家园 About the Canadians

          The anglophone Canadians are different from WASP? Not sure about their origins, though.

          • 家园 not expert, just two cents

            Canadian parliamentary system makes the country less republic (such as US) and more democratic ( in terms of representation). There was a political revolution in 1960s, which further enhance the power of average Joes and weaken the power of traditional English elites.

            Another problem is that Canada is a conferation of very powerful provinces and provincial politics in two provinces: Ontario and Quebec, has key impact on the national stage. It is difficult to say "the whole Canada is like..."

            My impression of Quebec is that its Scottish WASPs have been kicked out and French politicians are all from humble family background, such as Trudeau or Parizeau. Political influence also does not live beyond many generations and you do not see "Kennedy" family in Quebec.

            It seems that rich family in Quebec/Canada does not want to touch politics. Political career is something chosen by people from so-so families. Many politicans are career-long politicians with NO private sector experience and NO solid professional degree (most are political science majors): comments from local Quebecois friends.

            The anglophone in Ontario are scottish immigrants+ former American loyalists who fled America + European and Asian immigrants. When I interact with some of the banking elites there, I do sense an exclusive club mainly dominated by Anglo-elites, but that's not true in the Ontario politics.

            Alberta is dominated by Eastern European immigrants. There are many Canadians whose ancesters moved from Eastern Europe (such as Ukraine). Thus even harder to see true WASPs there.

            British Columbia might have more WASPs because that's the retirement home choice for many former British empire officers. Therefore, it has high concentration of the military elites there.

        • 家园 如能举例则更加感谢
      • 家园 我想都是

        衰落离消失还差的很远很远,WASP在美国政治里或许永远不会消失,但主导地位或许会下降。要是没有记错的话,犹太人当美国内阁重臣是罗斯福时代的摩根财长开始的。这之后,犹太人身居高位的可就太多了,就差没有当总统了。黑人开始多了,亚裔也开始多了,Hispanic也是。权利核心就那么大,从这个角度来说,这是一个零和游戏。

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