Is the use of WASP in this case wholly inappropriate and clearly intended to be derogatory? Why is it tolerated and not considered a form of hate speech?
I think, as Wikipedia says [1], "The term applies to a group believed to control disproportionate social, political, and financial power in the United States. It describes a group whose family wealth, education, status, and elite connections allow them a degree of privilege held by few others. [...] When the term appears in writing, it usually indicates the author's disapproval of the group's excessive power in society."
It seems like a legitimate label here. Our notion of what a "proper" name looks like comes out of that cultural tradition. And as one of our own notes, that notion is often painfully wrong. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Anglo-Saxon_Protestant
[2] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...
> Facebook likes to think of names as a one-to-one mapping. You have one name, and that name is how people refer to you at all times. It’s a very WASP notion of how names work, and the reality is far more complex.
Facebook, as an American company, inherited its ideas about names from mainstream American (i.e., WASP) culture. This was a poor choice, because those ideas do not also cover how some other cultures treat names. That's all this is saying. Your interpretation of this as "inflammatory" and "mischaracterizing history" is frankly baffling.
Characterizing the issue as one caused (and the inference is only protestant Anglo culture would cause) this kind of names requirement is disconnected from reality. Companies in non Anglo and non protestant places have similar and even more restrictive policies. And also this idea of names is not an Anglo concept, as it was characterized.
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/good-men-project/why-its-so-ha...
What is being said is that our particular notion of names comes out of that WASP tradition. (Which, if you'll take 30 seconds to read Wikipedia, has important class and wealth connotations.) And therefore it doesn't apply perfectly to an extremely diverse society of immigrants, one with a long history of cultural, religious, and social experimentation.
It's an accident of history that a dominant strain in our culture is "protestants from the British isles". But it's still a pretty important accident. It leaves a mark. We still call that part of the country "New England", for example.
Nope. Not inappropriate. Not derogatory. Not hate speech. Different cultures treat names different ways. Here, "WASP" is a reference to the dominant American culture. I didn't bat an eye when I read it.
In fact, ironically, one of the characteristically WASPy things that comes to mind immediately is the prevalence of unusual names -- "Leslie" as a man's name; "Van" as a legit first name; people with three or four middle names; whole lines of firstborn men with the same formal name leading to ubiquitous uses of nicknames, etc.
And given that the term originated among sociologists, some of them WASPs themselves, I think calling it "unquestionably slang" is strong. Ditto "offensive". If you're offended, you can just say, "I'm offended" without trying to cast it as some sort of false objectivity.
One can go over to nominally catholic and gaellic France and find much more state control over accepted personal names[1] A name new to France has to be proven to exist, if its not an indigenous name in France. The are other countries with similar control over names some of which require names to be gender specific and unambiguous, in that respect.
White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are not the inventors of names nor does it seem like that group in particular is radically defensive of how naming works.
I'm not sure it is hate speech, but it was meant to cast negativity on one group.