Word: wasps
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...friend of a friend of a friend. When a well-spoken young black man bursts into a Manhattan millionaire couple's home, bleeding from an apparent mugging and claiming to be both a Harvard chum of their children and the son of Sidney Poitier, the startled Wasp hosts believe him. They accept even his screwiest assertion, that he can get them bit parts in a film of Cats to be directed by his father, because they, like most victims of confidence tricks, are blinded by vanity...
Responding to cracks about the Brahmin bluebloods, Weld told the crowd, "It's no picnic being a Yankee WASP. Every other ethnic group is allowed to get drunk and eat interesting food and raise hell. I've got to sit around with all my cousins in dim lit musty rooms... reading the Harvard Alumni Bulletin and talking about my ancestors...
...Victorian costumes are even more wonderfully fanciful, with huge leg-o'-mutton sleeves and artificial wasp waists. Starr's character is initially decked out in a purple and hot-pink number with a flattering chignon wig and a huge hat complete with pink bird and huge ostrich feathers. Kaiser has feathers and flowers literally stemming from his hair, or possibly from his Eyrehead...
...second justification is even more flimsy. President Derek C. Bok says that legacy admissions foster a sense of "continuity" among alumni. That goal might be appropriate if Harvard were a WASP country club. But Harvard is a liberal university, whose admissions office ought to concern itself with recognizing merit and tapping potential, not doling out hereditary privileges...
Common Ground by J. Anthony Lukas (1985). Focusing on three families from different backgrounds -- one black, one Irish Catholic, one liberal Wasp -- Lukas achieved a thorough and balanced social history of Boston's school- desegregation ordeal that won him his second Pulitzer Prize and became a landmark study of the impact of public policy on private citizens...